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76 | denis beckett<br />
media caterwauling – these kids were bold and genuine and<br />
bright and good.<br />
Of course, this moment wasn’t the moment that the<br />
disaffected were rampaging through laboratories and<br />
upturning desks and rubbish-bins, when one tended to see<br />
things differently. But when they were debating whether to go<br />
forth and get their heads bust for freedom, they tended to be<br />
impressively reflective.<br />
Their head-bust strategy was terrible, though. In my day, the<br />
rule had been: sit down. I think we got it from america, like<br />
“We Shall Overcome.” My first arrest (of two; neither dramatic)<br />
was that way. It was the first full-scale illegal march, in 1970,<br />
and we were in sight of John Vorster Square before the police<br />
got into gear. When they charged, we sat, on the sound grounds<br />
that they’d find it harder to break our skulls.<br />
By the eighties the police got you at the Wits gate, and then<br />
students ran. Why? I dunno. The police on the whole ran faster<br />
than the students, and perceived catching a fleeing dissident as<br />
automatic head-break licence.<br />
The Wits gate was the most visible site of Jorissen Street<br />
dissidence but the most influential was three blocks east; the<br />
council of churches’ Diakonia House, the fiercest (unbanned)<br />
thorn in the government’s side. Opposite Diakonia, forty or<br />
more liberal/lefty outstations hung out in Dunwell and its<br />
neighbours, Portland Place and Geldenhuys. One block south, in<br />
De Korte Street, was the Institute of race relations, flagship of<br />
traditional liberalism. a block east of that was the Mineworkers<br />
union, the unchallenged bastion of the extreme right.<br />
MWu, SaIrr and Sacc made an isosceles triangle; they<br />
were close enough that they could have shouted to each other,<br />
or more likely at each other, had there been no buildings<br />
between.<br />
It would be nice to say that Braamfontein was a microcosm<br />
of the nation, but that’s not true, insofar as most of the nation<br />
was more interested in watching Dallas or collecting firewood<br />
or drinking beer than in all three of these hotbeds of thought
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