RaDical MiDDle - ColdType

20 | denis beckett
and didn’t exist for long after I left. The theory was that the
research department would alert the advertising industry
to the existence of a large and growing black market. Often,
this was a ball. Sometimes it was sickening, when groups of
unsuspecting blacks were gathered in front of one-way mirrors
to discuss what colour toothpaste they preferred and how
they felt on skin-lighteners and hair-straighteners. earnest
housewives would put on their best make-up and best english
to nervously sip tea and proffer words of wisdom while unseen
marketing executives quaffed whisky and guffawed at their
mispronunciations and their accents. Many times I wanted to
tell my clients they were odious arseholes. a few times, I did.
Nonetheless, this demeaning procedure did introduce a long
lasting line of thought: Hey, these people aren’t that different.
I had come to World from Whiteland, which saw “the blacks”
as a common entity, underlain by a common view and common
attitude. Not least, I assumed, “the blacks” was a political
entity, burning with suppressed rage. Guiltily eavesdropping
on World’s panel discussions, the overwhelming impact was:
No, wrong, their thinking is quite as variegated as ours, and
quite as mundane.
That message came up a lot. With it came a denting of the
certainty that my gang knows best. That had been self-evident:
we have the nicest houses, the most degrees, the classiest jobs
and we’re, you know, anglo-Saxon. What is more we were the
jam in the sandwich. The Boers and the Bantu were miles from
each other but we in the middle understood them both. Who
else could possibly know best?
Well, yeah, I owe World, it helped me out. One evening we’re
at dinner, among lawyers. When the host asks what I’m up to
I tell him we have a project about black people who buy cars,
we’ve been doing counts. I say that this very morning I was
rigging up a survey in Soweto, way before rush-hour; why, we
got started at four o’clock. “Oh really”, he said, interested, “do
they open the gates as early as that?”
This was a fine sign of our times. If you asked this guy, “are