Dealing with Censorship

According to the law, every book that we intended to use in our school had to be inspected and approved by a committee of our students. The students had to go through a book and use a black marker to cover up any inappropriate words, such as “girlfriend” or “whisky” or “beer”. They also had to check the illustrations to make sure that any women shown were fully covered from the neck to their wrists and ankles. So, for example, if a picture showed a woman wearing a short sleeved top, the students had to black out her arms down to the wrist.

If the book was then approved by the committee, every single copy had to be censored in the same way.

This whole process was clearly unworkable and so I streamlined it as far as our school’s books were concerned. I created a student committee that had only one member, Ali, our office assistant. He would go through and mark up one copy of every new book that we bought. I kept the marked-up books in my office to show any inspector who might turn up at the school – and I just hoped that no inspector would ever be bothered to check the copies of the books actually being used in our classes. Luckily, I never saw an inspector during the 4 years I was there.

No Whisky

Censorship also applied to any visual aids that teachers used in class. One teacher, David, got around this in a way that amused all of us.

“White Horse Whisky” ran a series of glossy ads in the color supplements of the UK Sunday papers. Each double-page ad showed a group of people – and a white horse - at a party. Each ad also included a large photo of a bottle of “White Horse Whisky”.

David would carefully cut out the picture of the bottle and then take the rest of the ad to class and stick it on the whiteboard. The students would see the white horse and the bottle-shaped hole in the picture, and they would shout, “Whisky. Whisky.”

David would look shocked and, pointing to the hole, he would say, “No whisky.”

The students loved it!   

At the Movies

The same censorship laws that applied to school books applied to movies. So before any movie could be shown in a theater, it had to be cleaned up - frame by frame. Can you imagine how much work it must have taken to go through every frame of a movie such as "Bikini Beach Party" and to ink out the offending flesh? The mind boggles.