RaDical MiDDle - ColdType

Radical Middle | 223
Johnny never said a word to me after that. (Not that he’d
said one before, beyond that “mmf”). But I have heard it said
that the case ruined the remaining 17 years of his life.
for me, my two appellate Division appearances are stains.
My name lives in South african law, once as “loser” and once
as “winner”, in two perverse cases that should never happened
at all. One of them shows that the law can reach legally correct
conclusions that the layman rightly brands absurd. The other,
even stranger, shows that suing for the light-hearted use of a
rough word can bring the rough use of the rough word into
play. (Ten years later Stephen told me he’d had a flashback: “I
never meant to say ‘depraved’, the word I was looking for was
‘deranged’ ”.) and both cases show that there’s no winner in a
libel suit.
I didn’t meet Buthelezi again, to talk to, until 2008, when
he treated me like a lost son. and he was 80 now, I couldn’t
prolong any war. Overall, though, while not many of the million
cock-ups I have made leave me with a truly sour taste, these
two court cases, which weren’t strictly my cock-ups, would be
welcome to evacuate the mind.
finally – and now? We’re still in South africa. We’re going no
place else. Our kids haven’t left, even. I love the place, I love the
people – quite literally, that phrase means much to me, now.
Once it was just the standard cliché; what one said. Now I know
better, I know how much boost I get out of day-to-day dealings
with the ordinary people of africa. The best way I can describe
it is by that song “a stranger’s just a friend you do not know.”
In my world, my culture, that’s a thing a songwriter wrote, it’s
a thing preachers preach about. But africa lives it. In ordinary
relationship with ordinary real-africans, you acquire friends all
the time. That’s real to me. Of course, there are times it sours;
times the guy wants to use you, but mostly it’s lovely and it’s
often made doubly lovely by the breathtaking quantities of
effort and energy and expertise that your new friend volunteers
on your behalf. I become more at home with africanness, more
interested in human beings and very uninterested in caste