RaDical MiDDle - ColdType

9
Missing link
Radical Middle | 101
In the middle of 1984 I began to systematically
murder Frontline. So Pieter le roux said, and many agreed. I
took offence until reality mugged me. I had a bee in my bonnet,
was the trouble. Bees in bonnets are bad news for small and
already offbeat magazines, but while the bee is buzzing you
can’t see that.
In my March editorial I had re-nailed my colours to the mast
of universal franchise. This wasn’t new – since schooldays I had
objected to categories of South africanness and later, in banned
World and a banned edition of Frontline, for instance, I had
maintained that no sense could be made of the place as long as
we were fighting about who was what level of citizen.
But the March editorial used the trigger words “one man one
vote” rather than the softer synonyms like “equal citizenship”
and the trigger detonated a few mental grenades. Looking back,
that editorial is as fizzy as mud, dripping with anxious evenhandedness,
but in the ideological lunatic-asylum of 1984 those