The political front also had its controversies. However, the trend was that ‘most of the publications concerned were proscribed during the UDI period (19651980) and were subsequently unbanned in the years immediately after independence’.16 The political censorship net caught a wide range of what was considered unpalatable content such as ‘appeals to humanism and liberalism’, ‘nationalist writings of varying political persuasions’ such as The Struggle Continues, Handbook of Revolutionary Warfare and Class Struggle in Africa written by Kwame Nkrumah, ‘works of radical theorists, historians and commentators’, and ‘those works of imaginative literature which were possibly more successful in their criticism of the status quo by deploying the insidious device of interweaving political fact with social fiction’. The last category was more linked to music, art and theatre. In the aftermath of independence and to this day, it appears ‘the substantive and procedural rules of censorship have not been significantly altered since 1967 – nor has the constitutional definition of the freedom of expression’.17 The only change has been in the political environment in which the exercise of executive power is carried out. The incumbent political administration have their own views on morality and political fears thereby casting censorship of all manner of material into unending controversy due to the subjectivity of the criteria used to censor it. 1.3 National laws regulating artistic expression This section deals with highlighting and evaluating legal and policy provisions that have a bearing on freedom of artistic expression. In some parts of the world, this freedom is protected as the right to ‘artistic creation’ or ‘artistic creativity’. Others protect the right to ‘artistic/creative expression’, ‘freedom of creation’, ‘artistic endeavour’ or of ‘cultural creativity’, or make reference to ‘freedom of the arts.18 The primary focus will be to demonstrate how such provisions protect or violate the freedom of artistic expression, and an Patel, p63. Patel, p64. 18 Farida Shaheed, Report of the Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights: The right to freedom of artistic expression and creativity (2013) para. 24 [Herein Shaheed Report]. 16 17 17 | P a g e