You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles
YUMPU automatically turns print PDFs into web optimized ePapers that Google loves.
Radical Middle | 217<br />
Frontline was close to breathing its last. Here, now, in dying<br />
days, it shattered every response criterion it had known. If an<br />
article brought in five meaningful written responses, you’d<br />
feel privileged; ten you’d be astonished – the New Yorker,<br />
the Spectator, too, not just little Frontline. You didn’t get fanmail<br />
like in pop magazines. until the car story. There were<br />
about a hundred letters in first flush, perhaps the same again<br />
afterward …<br />
That would have been a nice sign-off. Poetically, I should<br />
have left it there. But I cocked it up. I did a “political” next<br />
edition where my politics went monty-python even by my own<br />
standards. There were grounds for it: I was anxious that the<br />
government would not stand on the white-preference stuff,<br />
pushing us back into more attrition. It looked as if they would.<br />
So I did an outlandish cover: “What if They Vote for De Klerk?”<br />
arguing a residue of rich democracy: If the democracy about to<br />
be introduced gave people lots of choice, not just one restatemy-identity<br />
vote, plenty of black people would vote for forces<br />
that made drains run and taps flow.<br />
actually, the argument was/is sane enough if you read it<br />
properly, but who was going to do that? That cover on its own<br />
simply screamed: craziness.<br />
I think also that cover was influenced by meeting Gerrit<br />
Viljoen, the Minister of constitutional Development.<br />
To him, I put my case that “one man one vote” was<br />
the starting-point. He said I was out of order; I was asking<br />
the government to give in. “Give in” was a big phrase; the<br />
unthinkable alternative to “compromise”. I argued that fullscale<br />
democracy was not giving in; when you’d gone beyond<br />
“giving in” you got the ingredients for stability.<br />
This was at a discussion group called Synthesis, at the house<br />
of Kate and Neil Jowell in Oranjezicht. Viljoen dumped on me<br />
a few more times, but muted. Some of my fellow members<br />
muttered “stick to the real world” and other familiar phrases.<br />
as Viljoen was about to leave he made his way over to me, to<br />
the surprise of some of the mutterers, and said, very openly:
Change language