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170 | denis beckett<br />
By the late ‘80s, Frontline’s office was a port of call for a<br />
stream of Questing afrikaners, people who wanted to break<br />
out of the tribe, or anyway out of the tribe’s mental prison, and<br />
didn’t know how. I’d do my best but it was never much good.<br />
They needed a movement; pamphlets to distribute or cakes to<br />
bake, a flag to rally under. I gave them a totally unknown theory<br />
of a better democracy. I wished I had something else to give.<br />
at a free the children rally at central Methodist, I was on<br />
the podium. free the children was one of the aNc fronts that<br />
mushroomed from ’83. Perhaps they weren’t quite “fronts”, but<br />
diagonals: they were all in tune with the cause, but were not all<br />
taking instructions. I was a guest, my reward for having written<br />
something compatible. In the audience was a sore-thumb<br />
character in a green suit. Green suit meant Boer for a start, and<br />
this guy had Boer written all over anyway. He could have been<br />
Special Branch, but my gut said Questing afrikaner.<br />
Parents came on to talk poignantly about their children and<br />
jail; black parents, naturally. It was very moving. I watched<br />
Green-suit. He was rapt. after the parents came the usual<br />
blame-the-Boere analysis, from english whites anxious to say<br />
“not us”. Green-suit wriggled.<br />
Then the white lady chairman said: “We shall now sing the<br />
national anthem”. Green-suit sprang to his feet. The strains of<br />
Nkosi Sikelele afrika started up. Green-suit looked as if he’d<br />
been hit with a cosh. after a while he slipped out (fortifying my<br />
feeling that he was a Quester and not a cop).<br />
as I imagined it, here was someone struggling with soul<br />
and conscience, willing to move if he saw somewhere to move<br />
to. He’d never heard any whisper of any national anthem but<br />
Die Stem. Hearing this strange song in a strange language, the<br />
message he gets is, “So long, boeta, the new world is come and<br />
you are out of it.” I imagined him thinking them-or-us and<br />
jumping into the “us”, spurned in his candidature for the side<br />
of the angels.<br />
I was upset on his account and upset on mine; there was<br />
now an enemy where there could have been a friend. I wrote a
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