RaDical MiDDle - ColdType

Radical Middle | 153
Beckett – that – agent – of – the – system”, and the receiver was
replaced.
I rang Winnie’s lawyer, Ismail ayob, to drop a friendly but less
than truthful hint that an interesting dossier was in safe hands
pending any mishap. Ismail told me to drop the melodrama
and that it would all blow over.
everyone else was telling NomaV she was in danger and she
succumbed to the psychosis, preparing to move out. But her
neighbours wouldn’t hear of it and put their sons onto 24-hour
patrol. Whether or not this would have held the fort, it was a
touching gesture and nothing happened anyway.
Winnie was making a public speech at Wits shortly afterwards
and one of NomaV’s moles told her we would be mentioned.
I went to listen but police invaded the campus and Winnie’s
speech was replaced by arrests and tear-smoke. She had written
it out, though, and her entourage cheerfully gave me a copy.
I had metamorphed, I was intrigued to see, from an agent of
the system into an okay guy who had been duped by an agent
of the system carefully planted to spread confusion, this being
“Mphephu’s carol Mathiane”.
Winnie’s speech returned to that phrase over and again,
Mphephu’s carol Mathiane.
NomaV was mainly known in Soweto as carol, which was
her first name and the one she had used most of her life, until
she decided there were carols enough and that not for nothing
had her late father given her a unique second name.
By ancestry she is solid Zulu. Her father was a missionary
in Venda. NomaVenda denotes a girl coming from Venda. That
was a bold thing for her parents to hang on her, the Vendas
being at that time well down the ethnic status stakes. It was
also bold for NomaV, in her 40s, to make it her main name; the
ethnic status stakes having not changed as much as we were
supposed to think they had.
for instance: a year earlier the Sowetan printed an amazingly
generous compliment to NomaV’s Frontline work – courageous,
enterprising, inspirational … wow, they went big. But it was