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214 | denis beckett<br />
looked like Nat King cole as depicted by Time magazine. Here<br />
was the symbol of change. Mandela walking.<br />
We were at a fuzzy TV at the peri-urban home of Lin Menge,<br />
who had been the best journalist in the game and for a while<br />
my boss at the Rand Daily Mail. Lin was known as “Machine-<br />
Gun Menge” for her habit of making her point without smalltalk.<br />
as a junior reporter I gave her a piece of work of which she<br />
did not think highly. She had on her desk a plastic bucket with<br />
flowers in water. Disdaining wastage of words, she slammed<br />
the bucket upside down on my head. for her, I laboured like<br />
I laboured for no polite editor who passed the passable and<br />
complained only about grammar and spelling.<br />
When Lin left journalism the profession shrank. She went<br />
neither to australia nor to the better pay and lesser stress of Pr,<br />
but to a one-woman ultra-small-business-development agency,<br />
where she lent her own money to hawkers and mealie-braaiers<br />
and backyard mechanics. Lin called her activity “Get up”,<br />
swallowed no excuses, bought no hard-luck stories, and did<br />
more to put more people into stable business than any number<br />
of big-budget showpiece ventures.<br />
To the sounds of our children gamboling in Lin’s duckpond,<br />
we watched Mandela enter the wide world and felt emotional.<br />
everyone felt emotional. allan Boesak called it the Second<br />
coming; andries Treurnicht called it the final Betrayal. Most<br />
people fitted on a spectrum between massive excitement<br />
tinged with trepidation and massive trepidation tinged with<br />
excitement. for me it was 99% hooray, but I had a little onepercent<br />
Tsk, all of my own Why? for an excellent reason, that<br />
I’ll come to it in a moment.<br />
first, I dispel a lousy reason why I might have felt regret. I<br />
was being proven wrong, again.<br />
I don’t mind being proven wrong, I get lots of practice. I’d just<br />
been proven wrong in the white election of 1989. I’d predicted<br />
another conservative rise, through fear of a government unable<br />
to specify where its reforms were heading. Wrong. afrikaans<br />
voters were less fearful and more trusting than I had credited.
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