RaDical MiDDle - ColdType

Radical Middle | 125
He sent me a short and aggrieved letter saying he was
disappointed I had turned into another Citizen, so I went to
speak to him. He was then Bishop of Johannesburg, in a quaint
strange churchlet, St albans, nestling between the back end of
the financial sector and the minedumps.
I tried to talk him into structural ways of peace, but he was
clear that his business was not theorising, it was upholding
decent values and promoting reconciliation. I had the same
problem with that as I have with white liberalism, it was decent
but it was also hollow. Nice intentions don’t do that much for
the penury of the penurious or the exclusion of the excluded.
But I think when you’ve just been anointed the world’s chief
peacemaker there is only so much listening you can do to some
quibbling nobody talking in riddles. I gave up my mission for
the occasion. We had tea and small-talk and he held my hand
and prayed for me and said I wasn’t a Citizen after all, even if he
wasn’t sure what I was. Spring was in my step when I left him.
With Lucas Mangope, President of Bophuthatswana, I
had an appointment – set up by phone, confirmed by letter,
reconfirmed by phone the day before. I spent eight hours in his
waiting room, went home unseen, and wrote a snotty article
about the wait. His press secretary, Kevin Kent, later engagingly
told of the follow-up.
Kevin spent days honing a blistering letter which was going
to put me firmly in my place, under a stone with the insects. He
proudly gave it to Mangope for signature. Mangope glanced at
it for half a moment and said, “Kevin, dear boy, you must learn
when firmness is required” – he turned to lightly drop the letter
in his wastebin – “and when it is not.”
Then I succumbed to a short (rare) dose of celebritism and
published an item hinting at an affair between Bantu Holomisa,
then the military dictator of the Transkei, and Zindzi Mandela.
Some days later the phone rang. “This is General Holomisa in
Transkei. Your article is not correct. The facts are as follows…”
He spent maybe three businesslike minutes spelling it out.
Then he said, “I have now given you correct information. What