Denis Beckett, the founder of Frontline, maverick commentator, TV traveller and author, looks back in Radical Middle: Confessions of an Accidental Revolutionary (Tafelberg). This is an extract.
We’re still South African. We’re going nowhere. Our kids haven’t left, even. I love the place, I love the people.
Let me repeat that: I love the people. Is that phrase a hollow cliché to you? It was to me, once, back in some aeon of lesser evolution. Now I know better, it’s real.
Never mind the stupendous richness of finding new ways, tracing new paths, many tributaries merging into one stream, there’s something more than that. There’s a person who I am committed to.
This is the person who calls out as I walk the roads of Africa, “Uyaphi? Uphumaphi? Iphi Imoto?” [Where are you going? Where have you come from? Where is your car?] or the equivalent in any of many languages.
This is the person who falls in step to chat and shake hands and laugh a bit and be humans together.
This is the person who stops to help when my car breaks down, and goes to embarrassing quantities of trouble to save me from the consequences of my own imprudence.
This is the person who lives life by the principle that a stranger is a friend you do not know. This person is the ordinary citizen around me.
In my life that means especially the ordinary citizen of Africa, but I doubt that the ordinary citizen of Siberia, Sumatra, Slovenia, anywhere, is much different.
This person doubtless adheres to one or more beliefs that I abhor.
This person is probably capable of being a liar, a cheat, a thug, a cretin, a thief or a bully.
But in the right circumstances this person is walking evidence of a depth of decency that is often suffocated by poverty or insecurity or disarray. In right circumstances, this person and I would share a town or country or continent or planet, easily and respectfully. But we are corks in a heaving sea of fears or jealousies created by social forces that risk making us antagonists or enemies.
This person is a constant inspiration to seek the era of calm and justice that lies ahead, just behind the point where we arrange for right circumstances to apply all the time.