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Radical Middle | 163<br />
of a Sunday Times leader page to say that the book would<br />
change the world. a guy in New Nation – an unfamiliar black<br />
byline which I suspected was a pseudonym for one of the<br />
white lefties who write much of the paper – said that it was<br />
unmitigated rubbish which denied the People’s Movement the<br />
rights which everybody else would acquire by democracy. This<br />
was an intriguing perspective, and I could only put it down<br />
to the assumption that since democracy would be marked by<br />
the People’s Movement taking control, to want the People’s<br />
Movement to submit to the ratification of the masses was<br />
undemocratic.<br />
If I’d had a brain in my head I would have taken John<br />
allen’s offer and smiled through the author interviews. But on<br />
the strength of early responses I cheerfully believed that the<br />
argument was finally about to take hold. Hm. at one stage I’d<br />
been in the odd position of holding aggrey back. I was saying<br />
that serialising the whole book in a daily newspaper might be<br />
excessive, and he was saying he knew better. a month later<br />
aggrey had gone on an anti-politics drive under the name<br />
“Nation Building” and didn’t want to sully this with anything<br />
that smelled of political causes. anyhow, he said, there must<br />
be something wrong or why weren’t other papers serialising,<br />
debating, pounding? everywhere else was much the same – the<br />
argument couldn’t be real because someone else didn’t swallow<br />
it. Whites said blacks wouldn’t swallow it, blacks said whites<br />
wouldn’t swallow it, english said afrikaners wouldn’t swallow<br />
it, verligtes said verkramptes wouldn’t swallow it. Permanent<br />
circuit.<br />
The long and the short is that fallacy, too, dropped an<br />
imperceptible ripple in the pond and sank to oblivion. By now<br />
the famous drawing board was becoming an albatross. uh, oh,<br />
was I condemned to write another bloody book, saying the<br />
same thing a third time?<br />
Obviously I’d committed some sin. I couldn’t see what.<br />
I looked up Karl Marx for inspiration (methodology, not<br />
ideology). Light dawned. I had made things too simple.
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