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Radical Middle | 197<br />
The enemy’s enemy was no longer such a friend, and could you<br />
take offence? If I support Jim only because he’s fighting my<br />
enemy Jack, and Jack knocks him out and says “now pay me<br />
for doing that”, I wouldn’t be keen.<br />
for a foreign free-speech foundation that I was referred to, it<br />
was even simpler: “If you were black and he was white we could<br />
help”. I was desperate. and then … and then … in stepped the<br />
guardian angel named raymond Louw.<br />
ray did a whiparound in circles where he has clout, and<br />
while I ended up paying Buthelezi’s r12,000 award, it was<br />
deeper pockets who paid his legal team’s fees, tenfold more. If<br />
food was taken from my children’s mouths, it was only secondhelpings.<br />
While it’s clear that I lost, I doubt that there was a winner. at an<br />
Inkatha function at the carlton months later, Buthelezi was reciting<br />
his virtues until Nigel Bruce, editor of the Financial Mail, stood up<br />
and said, “in that case please explain why you sued Beckett.” While<br />
a hundred journalists watched, Buthelezi squirmed and mumbled<br />
and looked as red faced as a black man can.<br />
Patrick Laurence, most scrupulous of columnists, thereupon<br />
rose and in his measured manner raised a raft of points in<br />
light of which he asked if Buthelezi remained confident of the<br />
“wisdom and integrity” of suing me. Buthelezi wanted the roof<br />
to fall in, but mustered an unctuous hope, addressed to me,<br />
that there were no hard feelings.<br />
There weren’t, I said, as one does. It was a lie, as I suppose it<br />
always is. I cursed myself for being too chicken, or confused, or<br />
inarticulate, to say anything real.<br />
real things did get said, though, most notably by James<br />
Mcclurg, the argus group’s media columnist.<br />
Whatever the term is for the exact opposite of a hatchet man,<br />
Mcclurg is it. By his standards the rapier is a blunt instrument.<br />
He employs the laser, you don’t feel the blood spill until you<br />
look at the floor. He dissected the issue and with infinite<br />
mildness showed it up as a crock, from writ to verdict.<br />
Much feedback came to me, all of it indignant. Letters
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