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Radical Middle | 137<br />
a creche and see if that reduced their grudge. Your standard<br />
white liberal audience would gasp and rend garments and<br />
expect lightning to strike, but among blacks I’d say, “Wouldn’t<br />
you like some place that you never need talk in english about<br />
cricket and non-racialism?” That line never failed.<br />
everything else failed wholesale. You could see the thoughtbubbles,<br />
“What is this? It’s not aNc, it’s not Pac, it doesn’t<br />
even sound Prog. Must be bogus”. Worst, it didn’t hold out neat<br />
turnabout, and to a lot of black people neat turnabout was the<br />
name of the liberation game.<br />
Nomavenda had been much in the turnabout category, bred<br />
to know that the whites had stolen the land, one day the blacks<br />
would take it back, then things would be rosy. To me this had<br />
the same value in practice as saying return Manhattan to the<br />
Indians, and in principle as saying the land belonged to the<br />
bushmen. NomaV and I fought these things, sometimes taking<br />
diametrically opposite lines from the same platform. People<br />
rubbed their eyes when we got into the same car and went off<br />
amicably.<br />
In the office one day NomaV talked of living in a lightless<br />
Soweto. This was during a rent boycott, when officialdom was<br />
trying to jog payment along by cutting off water and electricity<br />
at unexpected times for uncertain intervals. She graphically<br />
described driving at dusk along the ruts which pass for roads,<br />
blinded by oncoming headlights, pedestrians weaving across<br />
your path.<br />
I was reminded that our own street light was out. It didn’t<br />
matter much, as there was a light a little way down the road<br />
and another one a little way up the road. NomaV was fairly<br />
distraught and I had a wicked thought. as she was talking I<br />
reached for the phone book and dialled the city council.<br />
NomaV fell silent. I reported the light and the guy said it’d<br />
be fixed within 24 hours. She only heard my side, of course, but<br />
she got the gist. When I put the phone down I gave her an asyou-were-saying<br />
gesture. She got up and walked out.<br />
a little later she barged back in tears. “Why do you rub my
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