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84 | denis beckett<br />
remained a blunt instrument especially when humans varied<br />
creed and culture. Was there not a key, like tungsten had been<br />
the key to lighting and silicon to computers?<br />
My first published article, in Durban’s Sunday Tribune<br />
in 1969, was from a youth symposium and was headlined,<br />
“Thanks, mom and dad, for the woeful world you’re handing<br />
us.” When I read the headline I wondered if my children would<br />
one day write that sort of article under that headline. Would<br />
their children? Wasn’t there a way to de-woe the woes?<br />
for Frontline the cause was clear: de-woe. The method was<br />
clear: end apartheid. Only the route was a little bit off track –<br />
listen to the righties instead of yelling at them from afar.<br />
The trouble was that when you spend enough time listening<br />
to a guy it becomes hard to see him as all wrong. at first,<br />
Frontline had just a couple of mild heresies at the edges. Bit by<br />
bit the heresies became less mild and the edges more central.<br />
also the costs more painful: the only time, I think, that I burst<br />
out crying real wet tears on a business-type issue was when Tutu<br />
summarily called up his previously patient r10 000. I walked<br />
out of his office as a zombie. In the corridor a colleague of his,<br />
Bernard Spong, looked at me in alarm and said “are you alright?”<br />
and the floodgates opened. I bawled like a baby while Bernard<br />
comforted me and staff walked past in embarrassment.<br />
The turning point on this route was when The Star sent my<br />
friend Langa Skosana to cover a meeting of the Mineworkers’<br />
union. The miners turned him away and there was a hue and<br />
cry about racism. I wrote a piece saying it was the miners’ party,<br />
if they didn’t want him at it they didn’t have to have him.<br />
This introduced me to the phenomenon of protest by<br />
subscription cancellation. It was one thing to humour the<br />
racists by letting them have their shout but now I was backing<br />
them up; irresponsible.<br />
I didn’t apologise. The world was full of people being burned,<br />
maimed, assaulted, brutalised, belittled, ruined, for being<br />
the wrong colour in the wrong place at the wrong time. That<br />
was the ill, not Langa forfeiting tea and biscuits. could it be
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