RaDical MiDDle - ColdType

38 | denis beckett
leaders aimed at deterring violence by counteracting the causes
of violence, which is to say: make the revolution unnecessary
by getting the government to change policy.
This was a sensitive arena at a sensitive time, and I guess my
point didn’t always come across 100% the way I wanted it to.
Try as I might, Percy faced flak from his pals, especially when I
touched on recognising why whites were frightened. Now Vorster
and Kruger attacked the weekend paper disproportionately, and
particularly its recurring observation that violence wouldn’t
end until the blacks and the whites were the same citizens of
the same country.
On a Sunday morning in September, Patrick Laurence of
the Rand Daily Mail phoned early and suggested Gael and I
meet him and his then-wife Vita, now in australia, at the trimpark
in empire road. We sat under a fantastic spring sky while
Patrick played a tape of a speech Jimmy Kruger had made in
Bloemfontein the night before. It included a sustained attack
on last week’s Weekend World leader. I’d been trying to get a
message to the stone-throwers and the panga-wielders that
while their anger etc was understandable, nonetheless they
weren’t helping by spreading chaos. Kruger, fury dripping off the
tape, quoted phrases while the audience screamed “Skande!”,
“Vat Hulle!” (Shame! Get them!) and the like.
In my belief Kruger was quoting worse than selectively. He
was quoting backwards. He latched on to the understandableanger
bits with which I’d tried to get entry into the mind of
whatever putative klipgooier (stone-thrower) was reading the
leaders of Weekend World, and he ignored the but-nonetheless
bits. It came out sounding like I was calling for killing, looting,
burning, rape, the lot. I hardly blamed his audience for howling
for blood, but I got a hell of a fright that he could have read it
that way.
I smelled trouble, and trouble came closer. On September 13
Percy burst into the Weekend’s Tuesday morning get-together,
shaking, in tears, he could hardly speak. He got it out: “they’ve
killed Steve.”