RaDical MiDDle - ColdType

36 | denis beckett
distress when city-statelets were floated as a way of avoiding
South african citizenship for South african people.
as the Ten kept consuming headlines like grassfire, wild
rumours ran. This was a communist and/or Black consciousness
plot to spearhead the revolution; World was transmitting the
committee’s revolutionary instructions in code to guerillas
around the country.
at a dinner one night I listened to an earnest account, “direct
from the Special Branch”, of the mechanisms by which we had
done this. The secret was vertical reading, said the Special
Branch’s confidant: you read downward, third letter of each
line. There you’d find sentences like “plant a limpet mine in
Braamfontein Wimpy today”. He knew; he’d checked.
I contemplated with hilarity the thought of getting this code
past (a) the right-wing english-immigrant sub-editors, and
(b) the typesetting department. The Special Branch’s alleged
confidant got sour when I raised this, but it won his audience
over. One round to me. I had the suspicion that more rounds
were coming.
Then Manie Mulder, chairman of the Soweto authority, the
West rand Board, archly announced that the committee was
really a “committee of Ten Plus One”. conspiracy theories shot
into the stratosphere.
The world, with a small w, took it that Mulder meant Percy,
who got touchy about this, having had nil personal part and
being highly ambivalent about Weekend World’s role and more
particularly aggrey’s.
a few people at World thought Mulder meant me,
acknowledging the Nat faith that it took whitey stirrers to
make darkeys grumpy. So did at least one person not at World.
One day my secretary Nomavenda Mathiane did acrobatics at
her phone, gesticulating to get my attention and mouthing
“recorder! recorder!” with her hand over the mouthpiece. I
took a while to decipher; it would take a big while to round up
a tape recorder. In school afrikaans with english vowels she
said to the phone, “Nee, wag, hier is hy nou.” (No, wait, here