Fred de Vries reviews Radical Middle in Rapport
Denis Beckett is a cross between a pitbull and an evangelist: ready to fire up, never-say-die, and indefatigably convinced that he is right.
Even if he must take on every windmill in the country, he will fling his ideas on mega-democracy far and wide in the hope that someone, somewhere, will pick them up and they will spread like a virus to the point that we eventually acquire a genuinely democratic South Africa, a democracy where government is not just grounded on "one man, one vote" but where everyone has a say at every level. In his words: "small people's power means extreme stability".
The concept of a deeply and widely rooted mega-democracy runs like a red thread through Beckett's memoire, Radical Middle. This book is the narrative of an inspired journalist who originally worked for The World and Voice and later as editor of his own Frontline provided South Africa with the kind of independent journalism of which, alas, all too little remains.
Those who have met Beckett or heard him talk know the stentorian tones in which he will readily debate, with anyone. In Radical Middle you'll also be reminded of his almost pathological belief in argumentation. Which has led to several fallouts and court cases. Beckett is no easy person. As he writes, he is: "unequivocal about not caring what people say about me." But he is also an avid humanist, with an aversion to anything that smells either of racism or of political correctness. As the title of his book suggests, he occupies the radical middle-way, between left, right, and liberal, and between "the Boers and the Bantu". Radical because his standpoints, in the lenient middle, have always been thoroughly extreme.
In the 1980s he fiercely denounced the idea, then popular in white liberal, circles, of a phased transfer to more political power for black people, and equally resisted the simplistic demand for "one man, one vote" without mechanisms to deepen and strengthen democracy.
In Radical Middle, Beckett recounts anecdotally how he came by his ideas of stronger democracy and how he tried over years to bring these ideas into action.
After a short introduction the book comes but tardily into life. His years at The World and Voice will only interest those who experienced that time and those newspapers close up. Too many names are thrown around and the tale of fall and rise in the press world is humdrum. There is too little story-line, too much "we-know-us". It seems as if Beckett is aware of the lack of movement and tries to decorate it by harking back to a baroque writing style with sentences that even after three readings remain unclear. Like "Now here came Paul Hofmeyr like a man possessed, hammering the numbers as hard as he hammered the line that in a whole three years the government had not raised a squeak and Rembrandt had not missed a cover."
It gets more exciting when Beckett establishes his Frontline in 1979. His story-telling style seems to change, too. It gets more fluent, more gripping. Beckett comes up with all sorts of pointed observations, like on the white Lefties who stood with their balled fists in the air as if at a stroke they had switched into Black Panthers. And he wipes the floor with the cliché of Afrikaners as racist louts.
More important still: he takes the mickey out of himself, over writings of his own ("pompous and boring"), and over his evangelistic attempts to win over people like Harry Oppenheimer to his ideas about democracy. Especially riveting is his account of the protracted libel suit by an aggrieved Mangosuthu Buthelezi over this sentence in a Frontline article: "The Zulu leader is not everybody's cup of tea. He is nauseatingly pompous and his well drilled impi regiments are among the most thuggish operators in South Africa". Buthelezi saw red at the word "thuggish" and the court case was a confrontation between two headstrong men who in fact nurtured much respect for each other, though neither would back off.
Frontline met its end in December 1990. It was a good moment. Mandela was free and South Africa was en route to a democratic dispensation. Naturally, though, in Beckett's eyes it was still far from the ideal. If you would like to see more of his thinking on ultra-, mega-, maximum-democracy, visit the website www.democracyversiontwo.com.
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