RaDical MiDDle - ColdType

Radical Middle | 93
brought in, and the agencies he had been working on. No-one
would give a client a schedule with an unpatriotic name on it.
at worst, heightened jeopardy faced the few bold execs who
supported Frontline – anton roodt at federale Volksbeleggings,
Deon erasmus at Breweries, John Gaunt at Standard Bank,
others who would not welcome a mention.
I was a long time on the phone with Kobus, reading him the
article and the committee’s report as dictated to us. He didn’t
say (as I said to the newspapers), “this ban is stunningly stupid”,
but his line of thought flowed that way. The act allowed him to
suspend a ban pending an appeal. This section had never been
used, by him or any predecessor. Today was its day. This was at
six in the evening. Technically, the ban came into operation at
midnight. Here is a nice piece of trivial history. What was the
only South african publication ever to be unbanned six hours
before it was banned? Frontline Vol 3 No 8, of June 1983.
This was a victory of sorts and I could have hugged Kobus,
but as an air-sanitiser it flopped, or boomeranged. Half the
weekend newspapers had “frontline Banned” and the other
half had “frontline Ban Suspended”. One paper had both, on
different pages. We were twice as public as we might have been,
and mystifying.
On Monday, Kobus produced written reasons, meaning
another burst of reports. Then the appeal Board’s Mrs Van
der Walt did a bit of obliging queue-jumping to sneak in the
appeal on Tuesday morning, so that was round 4 of publicity
surges. Judgment was delivered late on Tuesday afternoon,
in our favour, by which time anybody reading or hearing the
news would notice a small item about a Frontline ban being
made or suspended or unmade, and all anyone knew was
that “frontline” and “ban” went together like Dagwood and
Blondie.
Three and a half years of paranoid propriety was blown
asunder by six words; Inkatha words. We’d run every kind of
dissension you can mention – believing that dissent is a thing
better raised than hidden – and we were banned for a story