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44 | denis beckett<br />
masterful oratory, but then so was Hitler’s. He went into paeons<br />
on the suffering to be endured for liberation and how it would<br />
never let up “even if it takes a full five years”. I wonder what<br />
became of him. I know that some people abroad acquired big<br />
paunches and bigger chips retelling their former glories. I get<br />
angry for them. They were entitled to be here, sharing modest<br />
struggle and small victories with all of us, who let them down.<br />
The visits themselves, officially to aggrey though once you<br />
were there you could sneak in a swop with someone visiting<br />
someone else, were a bust. Maybe the detainees appreciated<br />
it, I don’t know. Maybe their hearts sank when some visiting<br />
“employer” was announced to break into their reading and<br />
snoozing and chatting. You were on two sides of a thick<br />
window with an intercom contraption that rasped and rattled<br />
and distorted. all I remember is someone complaining bitterly<br />
about the person in the next bed not changing his socks.<br />
I also remember picking up three men hitching from the<br />
prison gate. I suppose I wanted to express symbolic solidarity<br />
with my friends who were yet to exit that gate. I assumed these<br />
three were lesser-level politicos. No, they had just been released<br />
after braggably long sentences for assault and robbery. They<br />
thanked me profusely and called God’s blessings on my head<br />
and asked why I was at Modderbee. I said I had visited aggrey<br />
and Percy and they got alarmed, “Hau, no, baas! Politicals?!<br />
They get you in trouble!”<br />
October 26, I was sacked. Me and my secretary Nomavenda.<br />
“retrenched” was the word, euphemistic when a company<br />
employing 3,000 disposes of two. John Marquard dealt the axe,<br />
at the behest of the chairman, Layton Slater, and harsh words<br />
were spoken, plus written, mainly by me in respect of argus<br />
ethics. I’d been willing to be scapegoat but I expected a little<br />
grace about it, not to mention a tangible tideover. What I got<br />
was Here’s November’s salary now kindly clear your desk.<br />
This was on Wednesday. Tuesday, Slater had seen Kruger in<br />
Pretoria to outline the folly of winding up 200 innocent jobs<br />
and a taxpaying enterprise. Thursday, Kruger authorised the
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