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152 | denis beckett<br />
One Saturday morning I took my 8-year-old to a schoolmate’s<br />
birthday in Orlando east, Winnie territory. This was new stuff,<br />
schoolmates across colour bars, whitey kids socialising in<br />
Soweto. Obviously, the child factor would mean a multiplying<br />
of the huge welcome that white visitors to townships received<br />
anyway. I was braced for a storm of effusion.<br />
No. There was politeness, courtesy, but something was<br />
wrong. It turned out The Press was villain. The Press was leaving<br />
people in the lurch, to face a reign of terror.<br />
I thought they meant the army. They meant Winnie. I<br />
dropped my blocking of Nomavenda’s intentions.<br />
NomaV wrote her story on the football club. It also touched<br />
on Winnie’s new mansion, so far unknown. “The Press” latched<br />
on to the mansion and made a giant meal of it, but ducked<br />
the football club. The mansion was there to be seen, brick and<br />
mortar. The football club … well, there were pictures of them,<br />
too, smiling sweetly in their team uniforms. But “The Press”<br />
was not, in public, buying NomaV’s testimony that they kicked<br />
more than just footballs.<br />
While NomaV also had a flood of thank-you calls, what we<br />
both got from the anti-apartheid priesthood was that it was not<br />
wise to jeopardise the confidence of The People. We heard that<br />
over and again. I’d ask what was untrue; that never mattered.<br />
“It is not wise” was what mattered. an old friend, a classical<br />
gentle lefty prof, avant garde in everything from his haircut to<br />
his bookshelves, shrieked at me till he damaged his throat: I<br />
was a fascist and I employed a fascist.<br />
I phoned Winnie, eager to discuss the inadvisability of<br />
any accident happening to befall NomaV. a man answered<br />
the phone; many voices behind him. He said audibly, to his<br />
companions, that the caller was me. The voices fell silent. He<br />
put his hand over the mouthpiece and I waited a long time until<br />
he came back to say Mrs Mandela was not available. I asked him<br />
to try to make her available and there was another long silence.<br />
Then the hand was removed. Winnie’s voice shouted from the<br />
distance, very sibilant: “I – will – not – speak – to – Denis –
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