Gauteng province encompasses Johannesburg. It is South Africa's heartland, the source of the country's wealth, the centre of business and its most important province. It also contains the great cauldrons of Soweto and Alexandria, the townships that figure most prominently in the mythology of the struggle.
And Gauteng has its own education department. A functionary there has decided that Nadine Gordimer's book, July's People, published in 1981, is not suitable for study in the area's schools because "the subject matter is questionable. . . the language that is used is not acceptable, as it does not encourage good grammatical practices. . . the reader is bombarded with nuances that do not achieve much. . . any condemnation of racism is difficult to discover - so the story comes across as being deeply racist, superior and patronising". There is plenty more.
This is the same Nadine Gordimer who for 40 years fought tirelessly for freedom in South Africa, who has chronicled the fluctuating and self-deluding progress of white South Africa's folly and cruelty and been an obedient servant of the ANC. Gordimer has made no secret of her belief that the writer must make "the essential gesture", in other words that a writer cannot sit on the sidelines. And in recognition of her literary and political achievements, she was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1991. While other white writers showed their growing scepticism about the new dispensation, Gordimer stuck to her guns.
When I spoke to her on the phone, I wondered how seriously she was taking this rather naive attack. She is clearly outraged. She told me that nobodies have made this decision. But little things like this, she says, have far-reaching implications, particularly for those who fought so long for freedom. She says that while Hamlet and King Lear are proscribed for being introspective, The Merchant of Venice is acceptable. "So it's apparently all right to be anti-Semitic," is her conclusion. In that widening of the attack, I detect a certain despair.
Gordimer once described South African society to me as being deformed by its history. It has been one of her most persistent themes. She also knows a great deal about the complex relationship of master and servant, or "madam and maid", as it was ironically termed in South Africa.
July's People is set in a time when revolution is in the air, and the Smales have to take refuge with their servant, July. The consequences, as might be imagined, are deep and revealing. July proves to have unexpected qualities, some of them rather dictatorial. He appropriates their pick-up truck and their gun. The point Gordimer is making is one that all whites at that time had to consider - how they could participate in their country's future. More recently, her book The House Gun has dealt with some of these post-apartheid issues. And JM Coetzee, with Disgrace, has probably delivered the definitive pronouncement: whites don't have a choice, they must go along with what they find or get out. But Gordimer's whole career has been built on her sharp understanding of white hypocrisy and blindness. Her reputation as a fearless campaigner for the ANC - she carried out some clandestine but, she says, not too dangerous work for the ANC at various times - has contributed to her huge international reputation. She has become a necessary figure.
At the time of Nelson Mandela's release, the ANC displayed an alarming desire to control art. Culture, the activists said, was a weapon of the struggle. In a long, drawn-out process, the ANC extremists were defeated and funding for the arts was dealt with through arts councils, although provincial ministers still had some power. In central government, Winnie Mandela was, at one stage, deputy arts minister - a bizarre appointment.
Gordimer was closely involved in the earliest debates about how the arts were to be run. I had the impression then that she was for some degree of central direction. Her close friend, Wally Serote, was described to me as a cultural commissar. But when we discussed this, Gordimer denied any interest in central control, although she assumed some sort of responsible limits to debate. Racial incitement, for instance, would not be tolerated. All the while, she was encouraging and funding the now defunct Congress of South African Writers.
So it is both ironic and painful that Gordimer should have been criticised by a "nobody", presumably a black nobody, for "not distancing herself from the racism", and told that "the whole plot is not feasible" and that "learners will not relate to this story, as it is an anachronism" (presumably because "learners are interested in the future"). Kafka springs to mind.
For some years now I have wondered how Gordimer would react to the new realities of South Africa. Two or three times I have questioned whether her allegiance to the ANC is at odds with her role as a writer. Her answer has always been that her artistic life and her political commitment are quite separate. Her novels, she says, contain the real truth: "Nothing is as true as my fiction." A few years ago I spoke to her about the rising violence in Johannesburg, her home. She said that it was the "revenge of the repressed", suggesting a sort of psychic wound that was being aired.
As she has rightly pointed out, South Africa is a deformed society. In her earlier writings, she tended to look at the effects on the whites, and she was particularly scathing about white ignorance of the black world in which they lived. But for all that, I have always wondered if she would not, one day, be disillusioned. After all, it follows that if the leadership were hounded and imprisoned and that ordinary people were denied an education and treated as inferior, in other words if South Africa was a deformed society, there would be long-term consequences - and that the liberal and the right-minded would not be immune.
IT may be that the ban on Gordimer's novel is one such consequence. An open letter has been sent to the government of Gauteng by academics and writers warning of the outcome of "crude and highly questionable forms of evaluation". But the danger is that literature will be seen as another minority interest the country cannot afford.
Van Zijl Slabbert, the former leader of the opposition and one of the instigators of the settlement between the Afrikaans government and the ANC, told me that you can invent new constitutions, but you can't invent new people.
South Africa is desperately short of educated and cultured people. Men like Desmond Tutu and women like Nadine Gordimer are more than ever needed. But perhaps more important still is the need for the ANC leadership to understand that it is in its attention to small things like this, small things which may be of no interest whatever to the vast majority of its constituents, that South Africa's future rests. It is simply not enough to cite the horror of the past as a defence, or to see these issues as pandering to white sensibilities, as Thabo Mbeki is inclined to do.
I often think of Gordimer in her large house in Johannesburg, 78 years old, tiny, brave and beautiful. I have a picture of her on the mantelpiece of my study. Her side, the side of reason and clear-thinking, had won. Now she finds herself, a brave and committed liberal intellectual, Nobel laureate and friend of Nelson Mandela, being dragged down from the commanding heights she occupied into the trenches where the nasty little battles are fought. She is a remarkable woman with a fierce intelligence and powerful friends. I don't rate the chances of the educational authorities very highly in this confrontation, but it is none the less a battle that must be won.
And it may prove to be a watershed in Gordimer's own philosophical progress, which has closely followed the history of her country over the past 70 years.
July's People by Nadine Gordimer is published by Penguin (£6.99 in UK).