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102 | denis beckett<br />
four short words spelt “communist/rapist/eats-white-babies”.<br />
I wondered about the world and life and everything when<br />
I read in the Natal Mercury that I was a “vitriolic ultra-leftist”.<br />
There was a bout of the familiar tokens of protest, cancelled<br />
subs. and Newman robinson in estcourt, a former assistant<br />
editor of The Star, wrote to say I should can it. “One man one<br />
vote” frightened literate people of every complexion. I should<br />
rather plug the qualified franchise.<br />
Newman was the world’s nicest guy, but the qualified<br />
franchise was the world’s lousiest politics. I started writing a<br />
single sentence to tack on in italics below his letter.<br />
I wanted to say, No, one man one vote is good for you, too.<br />
This was a little difficult to establish.<br />
The pile of discarded drafts ascended. The calendar kept<br />
turning. I finally had to let the april edition go, holding Newman<br />
out of it. Next thing, I was delaying May. I had a word-count to<br />
beat the Old Testament and was pounding out more. Then a<br />
similar letter arrived from Somerset West, with an opening to<br />
the effect of “I wouldn’t dream of calling you insane, but…”<br />
The new guy re-split my focus, so off went May with a reply<br />
saying “reply coming”, and after another fervid month the<br />
supposed one-sentence reply was a nine-page epic which, if it<br />
had nothing else, at least had an end.<br />
It featured in June, my case that the heat and hysteria about<br />
“one man one vote” was a mistake. It was only heated because<br />
the whites assumed that the end result would be a hollow<br />
non-democracy. That could be counteracted by establishing a<br />
deeper democracy than ever, which wasn’t hard to do. We just<br />
needed a fuller pyramid of powers, so that all political leaders<br />
constantly had to renew their mandate from constituents who,<br />
however rich, poor, learned, ignorant or whatever, had one<br />
central feature in common: they’d rather compromise than<br />
vote themselves into war. universal franchise was going to<br />
be a most undramatic thing. Made an effective franchise, the<br />
outcome would be a pile of stability.<br />
I sweated blood on those nine pages. It took a month to churn
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