RaDical MiDDle - ColdType

126 | denis beckett
you do with it is up to you. Good day.” That would be good
behaviour if it came from a town councillor. from the head of a
genuine card-carrying junta it must be a world record.
In the first session of the Buthelezi case a person who would
fulfill a casting director’s every wish for a British public schoolboy
had come up to introduce himself: Stephen robinson.
Begob, the slightly purloined writer who had caused all
the trouble. I had heard by now that he was real, and not the
pseudonym I first expected, but he’d been long out of Sa. Now
he was back, as the Telegraph’s correspondent.
Stephen promptly wrote an article on the trial. His article
that caused the trial had been good. His article about the trial
was stunning – laughter and info and seeds of thought in one
tumbling exuberant tangle. In one way, this was painful – once
again, the outrageously best coverage of a South african issue
is done by a Brit writer in a London newspaper. Tch! But then,
perhaps it might at least appear before a local audience, too…
This time I did it by the book, nearly, procuring proper
permission albeit short-circuiting the proper channels via
Stephen. I regretfully elided some hilariously backhanded, but
basically complimentary, references to myself. I half expected
another summons from ulundi but it never came. Then I
commissioned Stephen to write something directly for Frontline:
lift the lid on the foreign correspondents’ circus.
Stephen delivered with a vengeance, taking cracks at
everybody and everything including the gap between the
interpretations that the correspondents wrote in their reports
and the interpretations that they spoke in the bars.
The article appeared anonymously and caused a rumpus.
The correspondents fingered Stephen soon enough, most with
a wink but some with glowers. I anticipated any number of
possible consequences, from every conceivable source other
than the one I got.
Johnny Johnson, editor of the Citizen, sued for r50 000.