RaDical MiDDle - ColdType

218 | denis beckett
“I’ve never seen things this way before”.
That was encouraging, mildly put. I sent him a fallacy, of
course, though I’d already given copies to all three of his fulltime
think-tankers. I heard no more, which did not surprise me.
“Surprise” and “disappoint” are different things.
Meantime white society was catharting itself into an orgy of
anti-racism. chris the barber at albert Moller’s shop summed it
up. “You know”, he said casually while his cut-throat tidied my
neck, “I’ve never been a racist”.
That was news. It was chris who’d wanted to stop stocking
cigarettes because they brought blacks into the shop. But now
nobody had ever been a racist. Better this way than the opposite,
never mind the overswing, and backpatting.
Frontline’s next step towards demise – a lot of journals have
died with much bigger thuds, but none with more stages – was
the closing of the office. By now it was only me and NomaV,
again. We went to The Star, and for a while a rump Frontline
appeared as a quarterly supplement to the Sunday Star.
That that happened was terrific testimony to the capacity of
business to have souls. I’d been unbelievably privileged all the
way through this Frontline thing, 11 years exactly when it finally
expired. The people who worked with it, round it, for it had
been fantastic; not just the journos for whom it was a good
place to be published, but the many others who’d helped it last
a whole decade.
Its death had no fanfare, no bugles. It did have a murderer.
I’d killed it, like Pieter said. I’d been killing it since I shifted from
enlivening to proselytising, and what a failed proselytisation,
too.
Still, at bottom the target had been met. Frontline’s raison
d’etre was anti-apartheid. That fight was won. Too bad that it
might have been better won; it was a good time to go.
December 1990 the last Frontline appeared, a skinny little
thing at 32 pages. Nice material, yes, but not lifting my skirt
any longer. I didn’t even know, with Tony again displaced,