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Radical Middle | 39<br />
Steve Biko’s death was a very wrong thing. as an attempt<br />
to dampen the revolution by getting a big-league cheeky<br />
Bantu out of the way, it boomeranged championly. The anger!<br />
That day in our Tuesday conference I could imagine my own<br />
colleagues saying, “well they got one of ours, here’s Beckett<br />
standing before us…” There was no nice rationalising about<br />
individual responsibilities now. I was white and it was my<br />
police that rubbed out their man. The national temperature<br />
went several degrees up.<br />
But life went on, for the living. We had papers to produce.<br />
One of these was a half-baked Saturday edition which went to<br />
press at 4 on friday afternoon. This had been a running sore.<br />
I wanted to push our deadline up to compete better with the<br />
Saturday Rand Daily Mail, the black edition of which had seven<br />
hours news time over us. (The white editions had a few hours<br />
after that). The matter was lined up for overhaul, which had<br />
not yet happened.<br />
The fourth week after Biko’s death, about 5.30 on friday<br />
afternoon, the Saturday edition was finished and gone, trucks<br />
rolling out the gates and halfway to distribution depots across<br />
the Transvaal. I was packing up when Percy, ashen, burst into<br />
my office: “What’s in tomorrow’s edition?”<br />
I gave him a copy. He flipped through, groaning and covering<br />
his face. He got to the leader page and groaned double hard.<br />
The leader was about Gary Player, the golfer, appealing for calm<br />
and patience from black people. Its thrust was: yes, everyone<br />
wants calm, so therefore people like him should urgently<br />
tell their government they want a common country of equal<br />
citizens. It was hardly a combative leader and was definitely<br />
polite to Gary, whose apologism for the government had made<br />
him a punchbag to some media. But it was re-raising the thing<br />
the Ministers had got so heated about: that they caused the<br />
violence, by denying black citizenship. Writing it, I had thought<br />
that Jimmy Kruger might mutter, or so might Gary, but Percy<br />
wouldn’t complain of pussyfooting.<br />
Percy finished reading. He looked up with the slow drawled
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