RaDical MiDDle - ColdType

104 | denis beckett
rise as one to embrace it. Black and white alike would see the
antidote to the “route of africa” with its decline and poverty,
and peace would flow.
unfortunately, the grand plan eluded the general public, so I
thought, well, I’d better say it again.
During 1985 Frontline became what I had sworn it would
never be: a tract. I sneaked in propaganda for ultra-democracy
at every turn. I believed I saw an answer and I was bound to
inflict it upon my audience, who cancelled their subscriptions.
Then it struck me that I needed a champion, and I nagged
the prominent and the powerful until I was persona non grata
everywhere.
among the Nats, Stoffel van der Merwe, Leon Wessels and
Wynand Malan paid polite attention. Wynand, already an
uncomfortable Nat, became several notches more uncomfortable
on the day we had a very long lunch at the White Horse Inn in
randburg. The State of emergency had just been declared and
Wynand was randburg’s MP. The european immigrant hotelier
was overjoyed to have such a dignitary grace his dining room.
We sat next to a window in the west sun and talked for hours,
interrupted every ten minutes by the proprietor bragging about
his special guest from our strong no-nonsense government that
keeps the blacks down. Next day the right side of my face was
scarlet.
Wynand said that he bought half my argument – you need
to start with full-scale universal franchise, rather than to move
to it in stages. He baulked at the other half. I was saying that
majority rule needn’t mean the wiping-out of the whites. He
seemed to me to be saying: yes, that’s what it ought to mean.
This was my first taste of a phenomenon that became
big after the Boere-Somersault of 1990. I was in an old-style
liberal and Wynand was a member of an authoritarian white
government. I had always opposed his lot from the Left; that
was clear as day. Now he was whacking me for recognising his
party’s “group” concerns.
Half a decade later all the Nats caught up with him – which