RaDical MiDDle - ColdType

Radical Middle | 79
I looked for advertisers and I learned a thesaurus of synonyms
for “No”. Was this to be a political publication, everybody wanted
to know? Well, er, yes. I saw shutters drop, leaving a tiny crack
at the edge: what politics? reform politics, was the answer to
widen the crack. But it wasn’t an answer I could give. reform
was going nowhere. reform was the huge wrangle about by
which of the 5,000 available ways should blacks advance from
non-citizen status to half-citizen status.
I’d explain, so-o politely, so-o earnestly. We had to start
with full-citizen status, or we just had endless sabotage and
illegitimising until we got there; and to start there we had to
bypass black-man-wins-means-white-man-loses. I explained
until I was hoarse. all that sank in was: this treacherous person
is against reform. I’d hear, “But, Mr Beckett, is this pro-black or
pro-white?” I’d explain again, backward, from the door.
The last week of November, Vol.1 No.1 was ready for the
printers but with a single advertisement and that one phony,
for my beloved vintage-lookalike Jaguar. I’d tried every known
Opposition company.
I hadn’t tried rembrandt, the liquor and tobacco empire.
Stood to reason; they were Nat. But … three years back, the
time of People’s college, rembrandt had come in on that.
More, one of their guys came to visit. I’d walked him through
works, through editorial, through our proud new troublemaker
canteen with no european and Non-european signs or even
subtle hedgerow room-dividers, and he hadn’t blanched at
all. That time, I was selling education. This time, a polemical
magazine directly critical of Nat policy. for this time I could
only see a big No looming. But Panic Season had arrived. Pages
1 – 39 were ready to go. I was proud of them (not least the page
with a Nat defending the Nat case: Stoffel van der Merwe, later
to be Minister of Nearly everything.) But page 40 was a glaring
blank, and advertising income was the roundest figure - 0.
On Saturday, December 1, our sixth wedding anniversary, I
was to give Joe Podbrey the complete material. On the Thursday
I gritted my teeth and paged through three-years-back’s diary.