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Radical Middle | 151<br />
I had known a time of believing that everything was so<br />
terrible it all had to turn upside down; a mighty force would<br />
come to penalise the privileged and uplift the oppressed and<br />
forcibly integrate the nation in mind and heart, school and<br />
neighbourhood. Now that this was on the cards I didn’t want<br />
it any longer. I wanted people’s power, genuine and true, not<br />
the cosy mantra that justified the Movement doing anything<br />
it wanted, but the extreme people-power that meant extreme<br />
stability; the radical middle.<br />
That was a tad optimistic. The binary view of mankind<br />
prevails, the aNc was the embodiment of The People and when<br />
Frontline demurred we were called fascists. The yells went into<br />
the stratosphere when Nomavenda fingered Winnie Mandela’s<br />
football club in l987.<br />
for some time NomaV had been muttering about Winnie’s<br />
gang flinging weight. I was unimpressed. for one thing NomaV<br />
was deep-died africanist, Pac/Bc, with never a good word for<br />
the charterists, aNc. for another, not long before, I had done<br />
a story on Winnie’s daughter Zindzi. I’d shown them the draft,<br />
and Winnie, soul of sweet reason, had cordially asked me to<br />
delete a passage that would set back her peace-making role in<br />
the Warara versus Zim-zim wars, a below-radar conflict in which<br />
aNc youth and Black consciousness youth carved each other<br />
into slabs of ideologically errant meat. I had obliged, honoured<br />
to meet a queen and spellbound by Winnie’s charm.<br />
Now my ears were resistant to discordant notes. I told NomaV<br />
we should beware disinformation being sown by undercover<br />
forces. NomaV said her info was first-hand. I said that Winnie’s<br />
commitment was to township peace. NomaV said Winnie’s<br />
gang was the Warara’s Panzer Division.<br />
There was a smell of rotting and it grew stronger. My<br />
columnist Nthato Motlana told me of “disciplinary proceedings”<br />
at Winnie’s house. He’d thought: great, community justice<br />
emerging. But now he worried it was going awry. Nomavenda<br />
knew one of Winnie’s neighbours, who told of screams behind<br />
the walls.
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