Create successful ePaper yourself
Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.
92 | denis beckett<br />
and for most, there was no worst at all. In fact, you could throw<br />
a Banning Party.<br />
Here’s the set-up. You had two kinds of banning, Sexy<br />
banning and Lefty banning. a Sexy banning was plain outright<br />
excellent publicity, better than you could pay for. You wake<br />
up friday, august 4, and find the little friday bannings list at<br />
the bottom of Page 1 of the Rand Daily Mail. and there you<br />
feature: “Scope”, say, “Vol 37, No 6”. You whoop for joy and<br />
have champagne breakfast. Scope is going to sell marvellously<br />
today, to people thinking that if they get in quick they’ll find a<br />
special Scope – bigger and barer breasts than normal, or riskier<br />
writhings – before it’s rounded up. actually, the Scope they’re<br />
buying might be Vol 38, No 2. The banned edition has been off<br />
sale since april 15.<br />
My neighbour Dave Theron’s brother was a sleaze publisher<br />
who claimed to plan his bannings. every Xth edition he’d<br />
provoke one. I asked if his advertisers didn’t get frightened off.<br />
He laughed: “Do you think I’m advertising church fetes?” He<br />
wasn’t. His advertisers lost nothing from featuring in a banned<br />
edition, they lost nil repute, nil income, nil cost-effectiveness.<br />
No-one looked askance at them.<br />
Lefty publishers were different. They had no ads. Their<br />
money, from anti-apartheid agencies abroad, was mainly<br />
allocated by Beyers Naude. a banning was a feather in the cap.<br />
You’d be on the phone in a trice, first to Beyers and then to<br />
europe: “Look, the fascist regime is scared of us!”<br />
I think I was the only publisher for whom a one-edition<br />
banning was bad news. If there were others, my apologies. But I<br />
can’t imagine who. for Frontline, survival was advertisements. If<br />
an edition had, say fifteen paid pages, its nostrils were probably<br />
above water. If less, gasping took place.<br />
and this was political banning, not light laughable sex.<br />
eyelids got lowered. all of my advertisers were susceptible, with<br />
the paradoxical exception of rembrandt.<br />
at minimum, my banning order for Matthews Sibanda’s six<br />
words was goodbye to the commercial advertisers that Paul had
Change language