#012 Denis Beckett | On being an ordinary South African

Denis Beckett, guest · [06:24]And then everything ended then, Percy was in jail, and my deputy, Agri Claster was in jail. I was actually in Umtata on the day that they closed all those papers, October the 19th, 1977. I was in Umtata. Ironically, kind of incongruously, I was at Puck Buerta opening Kaiser Matanzem with the president of the Transkei's new palace, new state house. And when I heard that all these arrests had taken place and bannings and so forth, I said to Puck's guys, listen, you better give me a lift back home in your plane, because I think I better be there. I don't know why, but I thought I better be there. But at this stage, suddenly on that day, I'd now become the enemy, as far as they were concerned. The day before, they'd been all pally nice, like we'd been in happy conversation. Now suddenly they think, well, geez, this guy's toxic, you know, we can't go near. So that fell away. What is the point I was making? The point I was making is after the collapse of all those papers, there was a short period during which there was a funny little maverick black, black, black magazine. It was so black it was unbelievable. It bragged about being, we are the real black newspaper, newspaper I should have said. They bragged about that and taking a whack at World, which was after all owned by the big status Velargas company. And this funny little black magazine then asked me if I wanted to be their manager. So I was a kind of umlungu behind the scenes and that became weird. The end result is I wanted to create something that was not interested in all the race crap that we were living through at that stage. I'm not, I wasn't interested in being the black press or the white press. I wanted something that was just for people. That was the beginning of Frontline and there we are. That created Frontline 1979, lasted for twelve years more or less.

Denis Beckett, guest · [11:30]About a week before, this spoiled ballot thing became a big issue. Of course, every guy immediately looks at it and says, well, that's stupid, you know. That's for stupid people. Stupid people don't know how to vote. We were saying, you create your own place. Some people got it, and some people didn't. One person who absolutely didn't get it was Franzel Slabert, who was head of the, PFP, the opposition at the time. He was very unamused, I have to say. And, various people, big shots, Privately agreed with us, but then couldn't part. A lot of progs, a lot of the top progs also said, you know, we're in a trap here and we're doing the wrong thing, we've got to get out. But they couldn't actually publicly break away, they were all scared and so forth. And finally, the biggest fish of the whole lot, aforementioned Harry Oppenheimer, invited my wife Gail and I to supper one night. This was now shortly before the election, the referendum. And he had a bunch of his advisors around there and we had sat through this incredible supper. And then the ladies go out, powder their noses, and the men gather in the smoking, in the cigar room, and he says, right, explain to us this thing. By the time I'd finished explaining, all of his advisors who were there went On, they were wildly enthusiastic. Harry, you must do this. Harry, you must say this. If Harry had got up the next morning and said, I hereby declare that I think that the right thing to do is to spoil your vote, that was going to radically change. I'm not saying it was going to win, Dan. It was going to radically change the proportions. And Harry got to the edge. And then as he walked us out, and I remember I had this funny little old broken Audi that made a hell of a noise when you started it. And as he walked us out to the car, he said, you know, I'm sorry. He said, I've been too involved with the progs for too long, and I can't turn on my back on them now at this time. So to me, that was like a little tense period, a fascinating little period, where in principle, that was the right difference. It was the right thing to do. Well, it failed, but it was doing the right thing. I've had a long history of doing the right thing that fails.

Denis Beckett, guest · [24:07]I'm really interested in your response. I don't particularly read newspapers for the news. In fact, news is newspaper's enemy. Newspapers were about news in, you know, 1805, and they had to tell the Battle of Trafalgar, et cetera, and it took, ten days getting there, and then they told the world. Now, everybody knows the news anyway before the newspaper publishes. Newspapers aren't about news. Newspapers are about the, the set of views, values, expressions being, presented around you, and about background to what's happening. International news, actual news is rarely small in relation to, to me. I mean, you know the news and bam, it hits you, but the really interesting bits are why, what was behind this, what was going on. That stuff is where I'm saying there will be some people, not you, You've declared, but there will be some people who want to read, okay, what was the background to what happened in Syria yesterday? What's the background to what's going on in Nigeria today? And that's somebody, you want somebody who knows having edited somebody who also knows.

Denis Beckett, guest · [34:39]Yeah, okay, my big mission, I was going to tell you. I for years been maintaining you can make politics work in the way that we've made like technology work. It's gone, it's transcended the limits that they used to be. It's gone into a new realm. We can make politics work. We can make politics work quite easily. And in due course, sooner or later, whether it's my hand or not, but in sooner or later, that's the route towards doing that is going to come out. And briefly put, cause I can really bog you down on this. Briefly put, the route to do that is you want to utilize the inbuilt stability of ordinary people. Ordinary people's role in politics is ain't like nicks, nothing. The only thing that ordinary people can do is they can say, oh, well, this party's better than that party, I'll go for this party or that party. Most people have no interest in parties. Most people, most people in our country and most others don't vote. In countries where you have guns to your head and you're going to be in trouble, it's different. But in most reasonably free countries, most people don't vote. They don't even vote in presidential elections, never mind midterms and or municipals that we have. They aren't interested enough to vote. They avoid it fairly drastically because there's dangers and risks, and it can be dangerous. It's not dangerous on this side of town. It's dangerous in the places where the Scottish acts are dire and the gang lords are heavy. And Most people don't want to vote. Give people a sensible structure in which to achieve things that they want out of politics, rather than this blind, doof thing of simply voting for what turns out to be the party you were born into. More than most people who vote, about three quarters vote for the party they were born to. So to create a politics that enables the ordinary, humble, apolitical citizen to exercise a sensible role. You design a sensible role for them, which does not mean forcing people to the polls, nothing like that. It means allow people to see things that they can vote for, to see how to vote for those things, and to get things that they do vote for. E Y simple.

Denis Beckett, guest · [39:36]There's several strands in what you said there. Just let me take up one. Almost everything that we talk of as being public opinion or what people want or people's rule and so forth is not, is not that thing. It's something different. Every time, for instance, here's a little classic. You see on your screen that there's in some dorpy somewhere, a hundred guys are burning, shacks and they are stewing rubbish and they've got tires in paraffin and they're lighting it and they, they're waging chaos. They've got some service delivery problem. People think, oh my god, that's the people. Look at the people. Look how the people are behaving. That's not the frigging people. The people are the guys who are avoiding their press gang, the press gang of these hundred, and they're avoiding the TV cameras, and they're ducking out to their behind the scenes, trying to make their way through their reasonable, ordinary day. That's the people. The people, if you're going to talk about real representativity, the people, finally, are humble, ordinary, reasonable people, looking for a reasonable way to get through, make their way through this earthly coil. And it hardly ever has, okay, when you see marches, you'll see a huge march somewhere, and you'll think, oh, you know, this is intimidating. Particularly, you'll see a march that's in favor of some side that you're a little bit scared of. You think, oh my god, the people, you know, keep the people boxed in, they're dangerous. That's not the people. The people are the people who aren't in the march. They were bragging like hell about those Egyptian, rallies that mustered up to a, a million people in Egypt at the time of that Arab Spring. You know how Egypt works is that some 80 million people are within 20 kilometers of Cairo. Now I'm exaggerating. Some 80 million people are within a splitting distance of Cairo. Look at the people who didn't go. That's always a much more important thing than looking at the people who were involved. Most people aren't involved. You give them a role as just require, like if you like, ratification. You're going to end up with so much stability, so much like normalness, and so much good behavior. You'll wish you'd done it before.

Denis Beckett, guest · [45:10]right, if you'd like a particular message, I'm going to say this. Never mind establishing the sound political foundation, there's one really simple way that any one of us in ourselves can make a better world around us, which is drop race. Just forget the stuff. Everybody gets so fanatical about whether you're black, white, Indian, or colored. And when I say everybody, I mean everybody. Some while ago I was at a thing of the Institute of Race Relations. They had their whole long story, their presentation, this is the so many blacks, there's so many Indians, that so many colors. I said, listen, it's just wrong now to be going on and on about race relations at all. In fact, you should change your name. But you should certainly just drop the stuff about who's black and who's white. It doesn't matter. There's nowhere where it matters what complexion anybody is. If there's X many, many people that get this kind of income, there you are, you do something about them. You don't need to know what complexion they are. And this applies everywhere. There's never any reason you need to worry about anybody's race. So why do we all make it the biggest thing in our agenda? Drop it. Just drop it. The government doesn't know what non-racial means, literally, literally. That the government literally does not know what non-racial means. Non-racial means that you aren't interested in race. The government is fanatically interested in race. Did you, by the way, know that we have a, we, I think we're the only country in the world that has, this is my column a few days ago, that permits races in this constitution. We do, section nine two, go and look it up. And it's just really weird. Not only do we permit that, but we also, it's a worship, we worship at the totem of race. And it's ordinary people everywhere talking about everybody by the, I'm not saying ignore, and just be normal. You don't ignore the fact, I know perfectly well you're a woman. I know perfectly well that you're young. And I, you know, that's, I'm allowed to recognize these differences. You're allowed to recognize differences about race too. You just don't make them your religion. They not, they don't matter.