RaDical MiDDle - ColdType

Radical Middle | 113
biggest political rally Soweto ever saw. Nobody said that the
stadium was less crushed than at Saturday soccer.
In the ‘81 election I covered two meetings at the Vereeniging
town hall. for moderate Pik Botha the hall was half full and for
extremist Jaap Marais it overflowed. If this had been a black
meeting there would have been learned pronouncements about
groundswell support for Jaap’s ultra-right HNP. But it wasn’t.
Vereeniging went to the polls and the HNP lost its deposit as
usual.
You want stability; get the polling booth to rule. That was not
a proposition to cause heart attacks among the constitutional
Planners. But what booth to go to? The planners contemplated
homeland polls, partitioned polls, meritocratic polls … anything
except one-person-one-vote polls. They believed that when they
found the “right” reform the blacks would roll up to ratify some
power-sharing structure. The middle classes would lead the
way, having moderated their politics because they had “more
to lose”. This was alice-in-Wonderland logic to me; an illiterate
70-year-old could vote in these half-citizenship schemes, but
for a preacher or teacher voting was a social disgrace not far
from pederasty. No-one rejects second-class citizenship more
than the guy with first-class comforts.
at dinner at the flat of anna Starcke, the doyen of socio-pol
forecasters, I watched chris Heunis plugging the line to fanyana
Mazibuko and four other Soweto gurus:
“Gentlemen, we have opened negotiating channels, please
come and negotiate”.
“Mr Minister, we do not recognise your negotiating
channels.”
“Gentlemen, please come to my negotiating channels and
negotiate that”.
“Mr Minister, to negotiate in your negotiating channels
would mean recognising your negotiating channels”.
“Gentlemen, we have opened channels to our negotiating
channels …’
That was Part I of why you needed universal franchise in