RaDical MiDDle - ColdType

Radical Middle | 115
No apartheid!” – combined with great relief that the school is
too expensive to have more.)
I got to know a lot about cold shoulders, but one particular
shoulder was far from cold, though never getting either tangibly
or publicly involved. The first time I met Harry Oppenheimer
was at Otto Krause’s flat, with Ton Vosloo, then editor of
Beeld. When the Oppenheimers left, Ton said, “Now that the
constitutional monarch has gone we can take off our jackets”.
Harry had maintained interest, and his subscription, after
the time he didn’t bite at the Spoilt Vote in ‘83. from time to
time the royal command followed and I’d explain myself in his
dramatically muralled dining room at 44 Main Street, seat of De
Beers and anglo-american.
Harry’s bulls-eye rate was wonderful. at every stretch of logic,
every unsubstantiated assumption, I’d be nailed – courteously
nailed, but unmistakably. He was the first to show me one big
problem. He understood me as trying to divide South africa
into thousands of bits, which was precisely not the plan; indeed
the reverse.
I’d thought Harry was on top of what I was arguing. On
the big stuff, like the unplumbed anchor effect of the humble
person’s vote, he was uncannily in tune. He could hear half
a sentence and register things that I could have to argue half
a night elsewhere. I was stunned to lose him for dreary old
devolution. To me, chaining politicians to the people was
a higher, nobler, better founded, business altogether. The
multiplication of powers strengthened the chains, and made
the federal-vs-unitary wrangling obsolete.
But if Harry wasn’t getting it, who the hell was? Not a lot of
people, I was to learn. I went back to the drawing-board, with
the marginal solace of having been tutored from the top.