RaDical MiDDle - ColdType

94 | denis beckett
from Inkatha. The cosmos had a sense of humour. Inkatha were
supposed to be the white man’s favourite blacks. Various of the
white man’s unfavourite blacks couldn’t believe it. I kept hearing
that the ban was part of a conspiracy to “give credibility” to
Frontline or Inkatha or both.
Matthews later hit trouble related to the button of violence,
and I thought again of atrocities being not committed by
abnormal people so much as by normal people in abnormal
circumstances. Here was a guy of whom Deirdre once said,
“People like that give you faith in humanity”, this after he sat
in our office with his helmet in his lap talking of his urgency
for beauty in the world. The same could be said of activists
in aNc, Pac, azapo, the lot, and even righties. The righties
often spoiled it, of course, with vicious anti-blackness, but the
viciousness, too, was fear talking. South africa was one large
abnormal circumstance.
But was “normalising” the answer? The anti-apartheid
industry talked of “normality” all the time, with a tang of
strawberries and cream, as if “normal” was self-evidently
“better”. I didn’t think normal was wonderful. If you wanted the
smiling earnest faces of the justice-seekers to smile earnestly
under pressure, too, you wanted better than normal; more
insurance that my meat would not be your poison.
a month after the Sibanda banning the dust was settling,
leaving three cancelled contracts and unknowable never-made
contracts. Then we were banned again.
I, like everyone, had addressed Pretoria’s church Street
bombing, the most dramatic act of revolution South africa
had seen. I had naturally denounced, decried and deprecated
car-bombers with a heavy-duty trowel. That was scarcely news.
I had also gone a step further on the blindfold search for the
centre of my mind, and here was the first time I articulated
the proposition that we had to have complete black liberation,
not partial, and the whites had to see it as definitely better, not
maybe better.