RaDical MiDDle - ColdType

Radical Middle | 117
to mulling whether good years could properly be good years if
you had to know that after seven of them you came short again.
I needn’t have bothered because Nel was wrong and he started
being proved wrong then and there. a deputy sheriff was
waiting with a defamation summons from the chief Minister of
Kwazulu, Mangosuthu Buthelezi.
I heard the sounds of diverging opinions from down the
passage. One opinion was that of Nomavenda Mathiane, my
one-time secretary from World, who was now the other half of
Frontline. The other was an afrikaans male voice. Both were
raised.
The deputy sheriff had to serve his summons on me
personally, so Nomavenda had invited him to wait. He was a
branch leader of the afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging, believing
that the blacks should have no political rights at all. She was an
africanist, believing that the whites should have no political
rights at all. By the time I got there they had been through
shock and mutual revulsion and were on their third cup of tea
and deep into the fiercest argument either would ever enjoy.
He stayed for another hour, enlightening us, between
aWB propaganda, to numerous off-the-record glimpses of the
perspectives his job provided and the astronomical income it
secured – making NomaV and me wonder all over again how
we’d got into what we’d got into. When he left it was by stages,
like an actor who overdoes the curtain calls. He bade farewell
and a moment later he was back to fire off an overlooked last
arrow in his bow – “and another thing …”
His re-appearances grew steadily more distant until we
figured he had gone for good and turned to the summons.
an element of farce was thus at the opening of the case of
Buthelezi vs Beckett and this was prophetic.
In the mid-eighties the thing about “black spokesmen” was
a gigantic issue. “Spokesmen” were pretty much anointed by
the foreign press, who were only interested in known names
like Winnie Mandela, Desmond Tutu, and Frontline’s prize
columnist Nthato Motlana … These three were endlessly quoted