RaDical MiDDle - ColdType

150 | denis beckett
shock, horror and lawsuits. Say it of afrikaners, who more than
most of the world’s peoples agonise over role and meaning, and
not an eyelid bats.
Our former neighbour Koos le roux thought it should be a
capital offence to advocate one-man-one-vote. But when a hitand-run
left an old black labourer lying in the street it was Koos
who brought tourniquet and brandy and got blood on his clothes.
He’d be called no-account, no doubt, if you heard him speak.
Beyers de Klerk, the rightie mayor of Boksburg, had a
lunch for twelve card-carrying righties and two others, being
myself and an ex-Mr South africa who had to flex his biceps
for all to feel. Beyers introduced me as a madman who wanted
to give the blacks the vote, so all the righties had to correct
me, all afternoon. When I left it hit me that only one of them
was disparaging of blacks. The rest were no more obnoxious
than your professedly anti-apartheid english-speaker; indeed;
perhaps more respectful. But they, saying “if you start reform you
cannot stop”, were dismissed as troglodytes and no-accounts.
Mr anti-apartheid Voter, saying “have some reform but not too
much”, was treated as morally superior.
I was not arguing that righties were misunderstood saints,
but that if their fears were addressed they may be no worse than
anyone else. Of course, that smacked of asking for promises
from the aNc; dreary and lame. What I meant was building a
structure that made promises unnecessary, but spelling it out
was Yawn city.
It didn’t help that every day saw more sense of the aNc as
The Movement that would express The People’s will. It became
smart to talk of the aNc as “the africans’ parliament”, spreading
the notion that non-aNc views were legitimately ignored or
even criminalised.
The strange effect was that while we all knew that power
corrupts, South africa got to learn of pre-power corrupting. as
we sensed once-omnipotent afrikaner nationalism crumbling
before about-to-be-omnipotent african Nationalism, equilibrium
crumbled too.