RaDical MiDDle - ColdType

194 | denis beckett
moral guilt and heightened Buthelezi’s award. Not that our plea
was going to change, but I felt I’d been in a bubble through half
the case. Which may explain how I had succumbed to edwin’s
idea that I stay out of the witness box, letting the judge think
“must be villainous, this one, can’t face cross-examination”
But what was done was done. We appealed to the highest court,
the appellate Division in Bloemfontein. It took an eternity to come
up, during which Inkatha’s belligerent ways became daily news.
On the plane to Bloem I read The Star and the Transvaler. Both
editorialised on Inkatha. Both used the term “thugs”, “boewe”
in Die Transvaler. It was as if the cosmos wished to reassure me.
I’d been thumped because Stephen robinson employed the term
shortly before it became a cliché. We couldn’t lose.
Next day I sat in the beautiful 19th century mahogany of the
appellate Division and watched us lose.
We had the chief Justice, no less, with four appeal judges.
They painstakingly dissected each word of the offending
phrase: “The Zulu leader is not everybody’s cup of tea. He is
nauseatingly pompous and his well-drilled impi regiments are
among the most thuggish operators in South africa”. When I
say “each word”, what I mean is: each word. The word “and”
occupied several thousand rands worth of attention. Then we
got to “his”. Did “his” mean that he drilled the regiments? That
they answered to him? What of “regiments”? Didn’t “regiments”
imply polished boots and brass buttons like Grenadier Guards?
There were two good things about this ludicrous day. One
was the courtroom. It was the first time I’d seen the inside
of the appellate Division and I couldn’t help but bask in its
venerability. The other: I was again inexpressibly relieved not to
be a lawyer. I nearly had been, after all, and indeed technically
I am. a yellowing document in an archive in Pretoria records
that D.P.Beckett was admitted as an advocate of the Supreme
court of South africa in May, 1974.
Sensible people ask how I could forsake this golden profession
for journalism, even lower on status than it is on lucre. The big
answer is that I could look for truth where I thought I might