RaDical MiDDle - ColdType

140 | denis beckett
Orlando bus, as represented by Gogo Lindiwe the office cleaner.
Gogo had her fingers on the Struggle triggers, it seemed.
When one of her neighbours became a Soweto councillor, a
corrablator, she denounced him as loud as anyone (though she
sent her sons with buckets when his house was set on fire.)
Her phobia was africans speaking to each other in english. I
once saw Muntu Myeza – big hefty in-charge main-man Black
consciousnik, later to die in a suspicious car-crash – sheepishly
submit to a respect Your Language lecture from chest-level Mrs
Mop with Standard four.
But Gogo’s view of the siyayinyovas, the comrades who
threw stones through bus windows on stayaway days, made
successive Ministers of Police look pansy, and her attitude to
public administration was brutal. every new problem to report
– phone out of order, trains running late, glitch in furniture
payments – she had the same explanation, “They must have
put an african in charge”. Once at a seminar a very verbal
character was waxing heavy on the changes to come, like 80%
of all offices being held by blacks. NomaV whispered, “he can’t
have met Gogo”.
I wondered. I wasn’t confident of Gogo getting much lookin.
I certainly wasn’t able to get my story across to the Gogos.
In fact, I was getting my story across less and less, to anyone.
Where there’d been a certain glamour to a young independent
maverick editor addressing your annual awards Night, there
was no glamour in monomaniacs with missions.
I had sought to get message across, and had acquired a
wardrobe full of institutional ties. eventually I was paying my
own petrol schlepping to speak to people who wondered who
let this guy in. It would be nice to say that I phased myself out
of the speakers’ circuit and it’s part true. The bigger part is that
the circuit did some phasing-out of its own.
I had tried getting big-shot champions. I had tried for a rise
from the grassroots. I had the ties and the petrol bills. That
damn drawing-board again.