RaDical MiDDle - ColdType

4 | denis beckett
afrikaans, and communist as well, so you could see that he had
big equilibrium problems.
My peers, my generation, grew into being anti-apartheid.
That was the english’s job, like saying “chap”. It meant you
regretted afrikaners. except when they were protecting you
from the blacks. Or from dangerous maniacs who wanted to
give the blacks too much too soon.
So we rebelled, my generation of church-school-and-artsfaculty.
It wasn’t just that we had to rebel – I mean, look how
they were rebelling in america in the second half of the 60s. It
was also justice. We didn’t have a distant Vietnam but we had a
gulf in our kitchen. We were citizens and Sophie was not. That
was the symbol of wrong. Indignity and insult and inspiration
meshed in our heads and we leapt into The cause: Sophie had
to be the same citizen as us. We declared undying fealty to
justice. We did it with passion; it ate at us, being isolated by our
pigment. We did it with pain, sacrificing cousins and colleagues
who said “of course we’re against apartheid, but not one man
one vote, man. There are five of them to one of us.” We did
it with pride. We squabbled ferociously over “Left”, “Liberal”
and crucial ideological distinctions that anyone else needed a
microscope to detect. We insulted each other over routes and
paces, but there was a binding core. We knew that the myriad
problems – education and health and self-respect and water
supply and neighbourliness and all – would go on until the
new foundation was laid. and that new foundation, the basis
for progressing into better fights than citizenship fights, was a
whole vote, all at once.
That was our sole common position, but it was a commonality
and it made us a band. It gave us purpose; it gave us commitment.
The flaw was, it was a shrinking band. every year, the christmas
card list was showing more foreign addresses and fewer local
ones. The sense of betrayal was part of the equation.
But John? This was new. John was for real. John had weight.
Plus, all that influence. Plus, all that name. The Marquards had
been playing centre-forward since before the Trek was thought