RaDical MiDDle - ColdType

Radical Middle | 111
much to let go were sinking down the pile on my desk while I
perused trade magazines in advertising agency lobbies, waiting
for a teenybopper media planner to see me half an hour late
and hear me with half an ear, between painting her fingernails
and taking her calls. Once per blue moon a booking resulted;
most times I got the shrug-off.
Frontline was little known, it was odd, it lacked a neat
segmented readership. It was Political, a word falling between
Offensive and Queer in the media placement lexicon, and
worse still it was presumed to be “pro-black”. “Frontline!?” said
one media luminary, “We can’t advertise in Frontline! We have
government contracts!”
at least he laid it on the line; most people saw me off
politely and disinfected the office afterwards. I religiously
sent fact-sheets to advertisers. Once in a while one would be
anonymously returned with a kaffirboetie-type comment
scrawled on it – and once in a while a recipient rang to offer
encouragement – but most simply hit file 13 along with the
rest of the junk mail. Meanwhile father Time was treading his
course. The people I’d been writing about would inconsiderately
go on with their lives, changing the context or outdating the
content of my yellowing drafts. I now have enough drawers
and boxes of unpublished three-quarter articles to float a paper
recycling plant, the unfinished unravelling of the real world of
Kangwane and enos Mabuza among them.
Nor did Mabuza ever finally bite on the hook I dangled before
him, at least, not to the point of standing up and proclaiming
to the world, “Hey, here’s the missing link”. He was all ears
during our late lunch, and later, but he thinks I’m getting at a
complicated social engineering and it doesn’t gel.
It didn’t gel in Walker Street either. Walker Street in Pretoria is
the government’s brains trust, headquarters of the Department
of constitutional Development (whose large ugly building is
built on the site of the house where my mother was brought
up).
after much nagging I got to state my case to the planning