RaDical MiDDle - ColdType

Radical Middle | 83
heartiest of guffaws and say, “You’re uniting South africans, all
right. We unitedly think you’re a jerk. Try putting your Beeld
column in the Sowetan and your Sowetan column in Beeld.”
I eventually did a column for City Press too, but not for
long and it ended unhappily. This column, like the others, was
meant to be free and unchained. With the others, that worked.
Suspicious anti-Nats couldn’t believe that Beeld allowed me to
say whatever anti-Nat things I liked, but allow me they did. Ton
Vosloo, the editor, jibbed once, when I’d called the homelands
“joke states”, and he jibbed in a very upright fashion. He phoned
to argue that however much I disapproved of the homelands,
I didn’t need to insult the people who were battling to succeed
with schooling and water supply, and I agreed to a softening.
at City Press, Percy gritted his teeth and swallowed diverse
heresies. But the uDf, de facto the aNc’s new internal wing,
was supposed to be holy, and when I wrote a piece on the
treatment of a musician named ray Phiri at the hands of its
not-yet-notorious cultural Desk or thought-police, lo, my piece
vanished. Nobody said “Sorry, we won’t run this.” first I knew
was when City Press came out on Sunday with an unexplained
filler in my slot. Naturally I gave them the same piece for next
week, and it was the same story, and then again. I raised it with
Percy and he got curt and I got curt and the air got cold and one
of my abiding regrets is that it stayed that way even until Percy
died on his 50th birthday.
If my columns came across combative – “veglustig”,
belligerent, was how Beeld described them – that was a far
sight from the truth. fight was the last thing I lusted for and
I was only combative in the cause of peace. There was a flaw
at the core, a missing link somewhere. People who wanted
peace weren’t finding it. Let alone Sa, Turks were dondered in
Kurdistan and Kurds were dondered in Turkey. Tibetans were
suppressed in Tibet and fijians were suppressed in fiji. Half the
world was a dancefloor for the Tyrants’ Tango and half the rest
was a frying-pan on simmer.
Technology had advanced light years but human relations