RaDical MiDDle - ColdType

108 | denis beckett
I tried enos Mabuza, one of the great unrecogniseds of our
nation. enos was wrongly relegated to second-rung status,
partly because of his gentle demeanour and partly because the
homeland he headed – Kangwane – is small and untroubled
and low in headlines. He wasn’t the biggest catch imaginable,
but he was a fabulous listener. One day in Johannesburg I ferried
him from Wilgespruit in the deep, deep, west, to the airport in
the deep, deep, east, snowing his ear all the way. at the airport
he said “I’d like to hear more of this”. What?! Nobody said
that! I decided he was the most gentlemanly gentleman in the
hemisphere.
He was due to open his parliament a few days later. He said
I should come along and when the pomp and ceremony was
over we’d take the Great Theory further.
The commissioner General, Punt Jansen, was guest of
honour and made a sweet speech about good neighbours and
good fences, the standard soft-apartheid line. enos stood up to
reply and I watched in awe. It was a masterly performance in
three languages. enos came from an illiterate background and
only began picking up readin’ and ritin’ at an age where your
private-school kid was ditching Biggles for James Bond. He still
has unusual mispronunciations which show that he garnered
his english via written word more than spoken, and have the
odd effect of heightening his command of the language. Like
Bernard Shaw’s hairy hound from Budapest, his english is too
good to be an englishman’s, and it’s still pale in relation to his
afrikaans. You seldom hear excellent afrikaans any longer, it’s
all slang and anglicism, until up comes an enos who learned it
by the book.
enos first made Punt feel good about the world, detailing
with lavish imagery what a superstar commissioner he was,
and then proceeded to establish in terms as blunt as they were
polite that the government was immoral, illegitimate, and
wrong from a to Z.
at tea afterwards the seconded white officials were oohing
and aahing and singing enos’ praises, in contrast to the usual