A Famous Grouse: April 9

Latest Weekend Argus column. Except for the footnote about the Spartist tendency, it is reproduced here as submitted. -- AD


HERE at the Mahogany Ridge we were a little surprised at Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe’s admission that the ANC won’t be winning back control of the Cape Town Metro in next month’s local elections.

Such candour is refreshing, and signals, as it does, that one at least is awake and smelling the coffee even if what I may refer to as that old Dunkirk spirit has all but rolled over and died.

Sad as it may seem, but Motlanthe has not done our old friend Tony Ehrenreich any favours with his careless talk.

The Cosatu provincial secretary -- notwithstanding his mumblings of humility at the honour of being called to serve a higher office as a loyal and doughty member of the ANC, etc -- had expressed a frightfully keen interest in being our next mayor.

He had plans for us, he certainly did. Grand, towering ones. Brimful with resentment and spite. But now, alas, Ehrenreich’s dreams of upheaval in Trevor Manuel’s leafy suburbs must be put on hold.

Where was the support of the party leadership when our faithful Spartist* trade union leader really needed it?

Earlier this week, he had threatened to force the city’s wealthier residents to integrate with the working classes by building low-cost housing in Constantia.

Readers will recall that this is familiar territory with Ehrenreich. Last year, for example, he drew great attention to himself by offering his struggle chums -- “shop stewards and comrades” -- the use of his holiday home in Kleinmond for the nominal charge of R100 for two days to cover service costs.

Explaining his offer in a FaceBook posting, he wrote: “There is something immoral about having a watch that costs R200 000 or a car that costs half a million or a house that costs R2-million when the majority of our people live in poverty.”

Some people praised him for his altruism, but here at the Ridge, we were, like, Kleinmond? Second prize is another two days there?

But back to the point. Ehrenreich clearly has a jones for bashing the rich. So what? Many people do. But it is his language that concerns me. “The days of the elites are over once I’m mayor,” was how he put it. “The super-rich, selfish buggers won’t have it their way any more.”

The etymology of “bugger” refers. The term, though now mildly offensive to some, was originally used to describe anal intercourse by a man with a man or woman, or sexual intercourse by a man or woman with an animal.

It is derived from Boulgrerie, the French for “of Bulgaria”, and referred to the Bogomils, a Bulgarian clerical sect considered heretics back in the Middle Ages. Apparently, it was widely believed that the heretics would, like most things they did, adopt an “inverse” approach to matters in the pants department and hence the sort of thing that frightens the horses.

The word has also, if I may, jumped into other European languages; Buger in German, buggero in Italian, and bujarrón in Spanish, for example.

Are there many Bogomils in Constantia? Or even, for that matter, ordinary Bulgarians? I am not sure. Perhaps there are. If so, it would appear they are safe and won’t be bothered by Ehrenreich for some time.

Meanwhile, I wonder if there is an African word for “bugger”.

The university graduates of the future should be able to enlighten us on that score, if the Minister of Higher Education and Training, Blade Nzimande, has his way. He told educators in Pretoria this week that he wanted every university student in the country to learn one African language and that this should be a condition for graduating.

It is, naturally, a jolly clever idea. French, for example, would be very useful. That’s a language that is spoken by millions of Africans. So is English, the country’s lingua franca.

But I don’t think that is what Nzimande had in mind. As he put it, “We can’t be expected to learn English and Afrikaans, yet they don’t learn our languages.”

Ignore, if you can, the tired “us” and “them” rhetoric here, and consider that learning an African language would go some way towards creating a more cohesive society. In fact, they should probably teach these languages to school kids.

Which, forgive me if I’m wrong here, is what they do, surely? So matriculants should enter university knowing how to at least converse in an African language?

The worrying thing about African languages is that, like most of the world’s tongues, they are probably endangered. There are, according to Unesco, some 6 000 languages in active use, but as many as 80% of them could be endangered -- meaning that they probably won’t be spoken a hundred years from now.

But, you know, that didn’t stop Latin.


* Spartist -- Defined by the Urban Dictionary as: "An individual who observes Marxist theory to the exclusion of all else. Often comndemns most things in society and the world with meaningless far left-wing dogma, and often end up in logical cycles and jumping to conclusions in the process. Such people claim to be progressive, but are as backward thinking, unimaginative, blinkered, hare brained and colourless as the leaders of the former Soviet Union and Communist Eastern Europe. The word comes from the Private Eye 'Archetypal left-winger.' Dave Spart. Tariq Ali, Hugo Chavez, John Pilger, Seamus Milne and Noam Chomsky are typical Spartists."

A Famous Grouse: January 8

(Latest Weekend Argus column, as submitted)

DEAR me, the year is but a week old, and already it has thrown up a foul pun opportunity for the sub-editors.

I refer, of course, to the Frankenchicken outrage, in which a large-scale, up-country supplier, Supreme Poultry, has apparently gone bonzo in the genetically-modified food department, allegedly “treating” its stale and rotting frozen birds so that they be rebranded and sold with new expiry dates.

What happens is that the old chickens are returned to the supplier and they’re thawed for 24 hours at room temperature, injected with brine, and then repackaged and sold with new expiry dates.

Sometimes the birds are treated with chlorine to reduce what is charmingly referred to in the news reports as “bacterial load”.

Call it working the wilder frontiers of sustainable food resource management, but the “reworking”, if you’ll pardon the poultry jargon, of vrot chicken is, according to Supreme Poultry, an accepted industry-wide practice.

Pausing for reflection, the more sophisticated reader may wish to dwell upon the notion that almost overnight, as it were, an expired chicken has, in a process rich with the irony of the post-modern gesture, become an “expired” one. The notion of “chicken”, therefore, actually far outlives the chicken. (At this point, aesthetes may cease retching; it is a cathartic moment -- and therefore high art.)

The lumpen among us, however, have had their suspicions confirmed. All along we knew the chicken tasted of fish -- and not just any old fish, either, but fish farmed in a swimming pool.

Imagine the exchange at the local brasserie:

“Please inform the chef that I cannot eat this...”

“And why not? Is it not to sir’s taste?”

“No, it is not. Sir was expecting the chicken breast to taste of chicken, albeit one complemented by the flavours of the pesto, sun-dried tomatoes and Parma ham stuffed therein. This, on the other hand, tastes of Ryk Neethling’s Speedo.”

“If I may remind sir of the starving masses in Africa...”

“At this moment, sir is well aware of what it means to go hungry...”

But we digress. The zombie fowls have predictably upset the South African Communist Party, who have set about the matter with the customary brio that has made them the most feared Stalin organists of the 21st century.

Delving deep into his grab bag of tired rhetoric and fustian bilge, party spokesman Malesela Maleka has cobbled together the customary nonsense with all the usual culprits. “We are not shocked,” he noted, “precisely because we have always known the capitalist system knows no decent bounds in its insatiable pursuit of profits.”

There is, I suspect, a bit of a pork pie in that. Not about capitalism and profit, but about about being shocked. Otherwise why the bluster about tips of the iceberg and the appeals to both the departments of health and trade and industry to urgently investigate this affair?

The party was also outraged (but not shocked apparently) at the claim by Supreme Poultry that the Frankenchicken was not sold to the big supermarket chains but to wholesalers and spaza shops, Maleka said.

“This can only mean that rotten chicken is being sold to poor black South Africans, the majority of whom buy from ‘cheap’ wholesale outlets and spaza shops. This is a racist trading practice and is offensive in the extreme.”

Point taken, and here at the Mahogany Ridge we shall certainly be thinking twice before asking for a bit of white meat at the Sunday roast. In fact, we may abandon chicken altogether. Who knows who those wholesalers are? Supreme Poultry’s certainly not saying.

But I suspect SACP General Secretary Blade Nzimande expects a little more from us. This week he too had a quick dip into that bag of tired slogans and, ignoring the May 1973 sell-by date, made all sorts of alarming noises which may or may not have contributed to the soaring temperatures: the “bourgeois print media [had] turned one blind eye to the seriousness of this matter”; there was “ideological hypocrisy by the bourgeois establishment and its meat producers”; and worse still, the silence of the “liberal constitutionalists”, which safeguarded the “interests of the elites”.

Ultimately, though, it was all about weight -- or as Nzimande put it, “this ‘strange’ phenomenon of shrinking chicken”. Quoting Zimbabwean sources, he claimed that, when cooked, the zombie bird reduced considerably, sometimes by as much as 40% of its original weight. All that frozen brine, apparently.

But South Africans are used to being short-changed. Look at what they’re promised by politicians. And look at what they get in return for their faith.

In the meantime we may sadly be forced to become vegetarian.