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Radical Middle | 95<br />
except I don’t know that “articulated” is the right word. I<br />
look back at that article and it is pompous and boring. Then<br />
again, everything I ever wrote looks pompous and boring<br />
later. Perhaps, if it didn’t, the mind would have jammed. Some<br />
people read it anyway, and I had a dose of new hah-hah-ism.<br />
“Gee, Denis, we look forward to hearing how to arrange this<br />
total liberation that the right-wingers will also like. Hah hah.”<br />
But some were less amused and among the unamused was the<br />
Publications committee.<br />
The phrase that stuck in their gullet was: “When one man<br />
is fighting to acquire citizenship in his country and another is<br />
fighting to prohibit him from acquiring it, then the first man’s<br />
cause is fundamentally just and the second man’s is not.”<br />
Here was a re-run of Jimmy Kruger and World seven years<br />
earlier. Once again I was saying there’d be no peace until<br />
liberation; once again I was saying there’d be no liberation<br />
until the whites saw the other side. Once again I was getting<br />
the chop.<br />
My thinking had moved seven years on, and I could have<br />
sworn these had been seven fertile years. But the thumpable<br />
sentence was a paraphrase of the Weekend World sentence that<br />
Kruger had thumped seven years ago in Bloemfontein.<br />
as with the Sibanda case I presented the appeal in person;<br />
this time I lost. This time there was no Inkatha complication.<br />
It was me personally being the bad guy. Skim-readers of the<br />
court reports gathered that I had defended bombers. Barely a<br />
month after “frontline” and “Ban” had become inextricable,<br />
“Bombers” created an unholy triangle around my desperately<br />
well-intentioned little magazine.<br />
Thanks to Prime Minister PW Botha, Bans and Bombs didn’t<br />
last long as Frontline’s stamp of identity. They were displaced<br />
by an image that wise and discerning persons, who listened<br />
closely, voiced in words like “lateral” and “inventive”. The more<br />
widespread public judgment involved terms such as “harebrained”.<br />
Whichever; I was happier to be hare-brained than to<br />
be presumed to defend killing and maiming (which, perversely,
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