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28 | denis beckett<br />
a turning toward liberation; no gainsaying that. But liberation<br />
hadn’t had to mean collapse and decline, and maiming and<br />
corpses and broken hearts.<br />
What might have happened if charles had prevailed? If other<br />
editors had said, “World reckons it’s no big deal, and they ought<br />
to know, let’s tone down”? Would there have been as much<br />
burning the next day, leading to bigger headlines inflaming<br />
more burning day after day? Would June 16 have passed into<br />
history as another warning that things had to change? Would<br />
anybody have listened?<br />
Dunno, which is one up on where I was at on that cold<br />
Thursday morning. Doubt, said De la rochefoucauld, may not<br />
be a very agreeable state but certainty is a ridiculous one.<br />
On the 17th, nobody was giving any benefit of doubt to<br />
charles Still; everybody jumped down his throat. So on the<br />
friday, World was as deep into Third World War mode as all the<br />
rest, and within days World was the epicentre. We had more<br />
Soweto journalists than anybody else; we got more information<br />
than anybody else. World’s journalists became heroes of the<br />
struggle and World became the toast of the cocktail parties of<br />
the elegant north. Suddenly, the very height of fashion.<br />
Sam Nzima’s picture first saw the light of day in the eastern<br />
cape, in Weekend World’s two small slip editions for that region.<br />
It went on to become one of the most famous photographs on<br />
earth. Sam got not much for it – a letter of commendation a<br />
month later. He quit not long after, and went to run a bottlestore<br />
in Gazankulu, where he became a member of parliament in the<br />
homeland system that his photograph helped to destroy.<br />
The new mood and World’s new fame combined to wash<br />
away my sponsorship-selling problems. People’s college got<br />
started and proceeded with a good deal of (mainly amiable)<br />
tension between the partners. faced with a government no less<br />
authoritarian than ever and a good deal more jumpy, we at<br />
World were more alive to the risk factor than before. risk was<br />
less high in Sached’s mind, and they were strong on the view<br />
that you had to bring learning to life by relating it to people’s
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