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Radical Middle | 195<br />
find it, not where my client told me to find it. The Buthelezi case<br />
showed another answer sharply: as a journalist, one needn’t,<br />
normally, thrust yourself into combat. You might criticise, yes,<br />
but your success was not dependent on someone else’s loss.<br />
Through years in writing I’ve hardly felt my bowels twisting<br />
in personal animosity. Mere days in court made me malignant<br />
towards several people on the other side, and in particular<br />
Gatsha’s senior counsel, David Gordon. I have no real reason to<br />
suppose that Gordon is any more frail and flawed than the rest<br />
of us. If he’d been my father-in-law I might quite like him. But<br />
doing his job to pull out all the stops and nail me, I saw him as<br />
eliza Doolittle saw Higgins. If I’d found him yelling, “Help I’m<br />
going to drown”, I’d get dressed and go to town.<br />
Lunch in the Bloemfontein club was very lawyerly: knots<br />
of opposing teams avoiding each other or turning their backs,<br />
huddling together in hostile cliques where rival advocates<br />
badmouthed each other with a vehemence that relegates<br />
journalists to the little league. That’s too much price for the<br />
income that goes with it, and the income itself is not a one-way<br />
blessing. I’d love to see the entries on my bank statement but<br />
I’d feel ill sending out the invoices.<br />
a year or more after the case I bumped into David Gordon<br />
in Johannesburg. I’d mellowed a bit and gave him a moderate<br />
hullo. He looked away and I thought that was telling; he’d done<br />
all the giving of offence and I hadn’t had a chance to give any<br />
back, and he’s the one who couldn’t look in my eyes. Perverse<br />
ol’ world, or perverse profession at least.<br />
Bloem was not a nice time. apart from the sense of the case<br />
slipping out of our grasp, we’d attracted an entourage of anti-<br />
Butheleziites who did not make me comfortable.<br />
another “political” appeal was being heard, one of the last<br />
apartheid eviction orders. This case had a fan-club of potential<br />
evictees demonstrating outside, and police were present, 30 men<br />
or so, in peacetime uniform. This seemed an okay precaution for<br />
police to take when hundreds of heated people gather in protest,<br />
but to the anti-Buthelezi gang it was apartheid Brutality. They
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