You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles
YUMPU automatically turns print PDFs into web optimized ePapers that Google loves.
Radical Middle | 105<br />
brought them, I felt, to where we liberals had been a decade<br />
earlier.<br />
With Stoffel van der Merwe I had breakfast at the<br />
Johannesburg country club. Stoffel was PW Botha’s righthand,<br />
Minister of umpty things and acting Minister of more. I<br />
had rehearsed my case like never before. It was a fine Saturday<br />
morning. We were on the stoep. The head waiter hovered forth<br />
with an arm held horizontal, several ties draped over it. He<br />
advised in silky headwaiterly tones that Dress code required<br />
ties on the stoep.<br />
I was ready to do injury but Stoffel chuckled and picked a<br />
tie. at least he had a collar. I was in a T-shirt, and spent four<br />
hours with improbable tie fastened to barren neck, feeling like<br />
a cartoon character.<br />
Stoffel was in early stages of thinking around an adjustment<br />
of the “group” approach, letting people select their groups<br />
instead of being undilutedly colour-coded.<br />
I couldn’t see much future in giving a guy the right to go and<br />
sign a form in front of a magistrate saying he now wished to<br />
transfer from the Xhosa group to the Indian group, or whatever.<br />
I wanted it to be natural for anybody to go to any polling booth<br />
and vote for anybody who he thought would do him some<br />
good, just as I could vote for an afrikaner or an english-speaker<br />
regardless. Stoffel said that was out of the question, it meant the<br />
elimination of the whites – look at Zimbabwe. I said Zimbabwe<br />
was hardly an example; the whites had dealt themselves out.<br />
Zimbabwe showed not the route to follow but the route not<br />
to follow – a simplistic introduction of a simplistic franchise<br />
where the whole election is about a handful of personalities.<br />
We needed the opposite: to make the political structure so<br />
comprehensive that practicalities came to the fore and symbols<br />
faded to the background. Stoffel wasn’t buying it.<br />
Nor was anyone else. I spent six weeks putting the argument<br />
into a nutshell for chris Heunis, the Minister of constitutional<br />
Development. I did it in officialese – point form with numbered<br />
paragraphs. I got a short and courteous note of thanks. I
Change language