Latest Weekend Argus column. As submitted. In other words, you'll see "shits" here and not "s***ts" as printed in the newspaper. -- AD
IT was Alice Roosevelt Longworth, unabashed hedonist and daughter of US president Theodore Roosevelt, who once famously remarked: “If you haven’t got anything nice to say about anybody, come sit next to me.”
For some bizarre reason, I was reminded of that quote, which the redoubtable Ms Longworth had embroidered on the cushions on her settee, by the images of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, the nation’s gogo, and Julius Malema, the nation’s gogga, seemingly inseparable at the latter’s hate speech hearing in Johannesburg.
I mean, you can’t stop him from shooting his mouth off at the best of times, and it’s never very nice, is it? And she . . . well, let’s just say there were jokes about revolutionary cougars on Twitter and Facebook.
But, really, sitting here at the Mahogany Ridge, staring blankly at the pile of newspapers near the door, it’s hard to get excited about any of this simply because we have grown tired of this dreadful saga.
It’s not just Malema fatigue either. There are a growing number of people out there for whom Malema and his vapid rhetoric are anathema but who nevertheless feel that the civil rights group Afriforum and the Transvaal Agricultural Union have done themselves no favours in pursuing this matter of Dubul’ iBhunu (Shoot the Boer).
Far from shutting him up, it’s made Jelly Tsotsi louder than ever. Look at the grandstanding, all the blather about Mickey Mouses, of the struggle and the revolution on trial, and, perhaps most annoying of all, the continued singing of that stupid chant, now belted out with all the belligerent gusto that the young, dumb and violent could muster. That is, when they’re done urinating on lawyers’ cars.
The courts may well rule that the singing of Dubul’ iBhunu is hate speech. But that won’t stop the youth league from singing it. They will continue to do so, because they know it upsets the like of Afriforum and the TAU. It’s that simple. They’ll do so because they’re spiteful little shits. Get used to it.
Your only recourse is to ignore them. Do not, under any circumstances, pick up the telephone and call the nearest talk radio station to mouth off about Jelly and his little potty-mouthed Pecksniff, Floyd Shivambu. Do not join that chorus of whining, braying half-wits. If you do that, the youth league has won. Have a little dignity, and if you really feel you need to talk to a moron talk show host, moan instead about fracking in the Karoo.
Still on matters of freedom of expression -- and, yes, that includes the singing of stupid songs about killing the Boers as sure as it does remarks about people who dance like monkeys -- we now turn to retired Constitutional Court judge Albie Sachs, who was apparently on the receiving end of some flak from the cartoonist Jonathan “Zapiro” Shapiro and the Treatment Action Campaign’s Zackie Achmat at UCT last week.
Sachs had presented a talk on addressing moral tensions around freedom of expression. It was the same talk he’s given a month before, at the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s Time of the Writer festival -- except for one small difference.
In Durban, Sachs had sharply criticised Zapiro’s controversial “rape” of Lady Justice cartoon.
As he put it then -- but not, tellingly, in an abridged version at UCT:
“Can we laugh . . . at a cartoon that might be deeply wounding to millions and millions of other people out there, decent ordinary people who feel we might criticize President Zuma, poke fun at lots of things that he does, but still recognize that he is our President. In their view, you don’t depict the President of the country about to open his fly, with Ministers at his side urging him on, with a woman lying prone and helpless in front of him. For millions of our people that kind of scene is reminiscent of the stereotype of the black male rapist. It ravages the soul, the issue is deep, it’s hard, it’s sharp.”
But then the cartoon was not meant to be a cheery chuckle, a bit of a titter and a snort before we move on to the sports pages. Zapiro had wanted to make a point. “My thoughts were, here is someone who is bullying the judiciary,” he explained. “I knew there were aspects that would offend people, but I thought it was an incredibly important moment. I think it pushed Zuma to say that he actually respected the judiciary.”
And how churlish would it be to point out that the cartoon first appeared in September 2008 -- a full eight months before Zuma became president?
It makes a small difference, I think, getting things right.
Showing posts with label Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. Show all posts
Sunday, April 17, 2011
Sunday, February 27, 2011
A Famous Grouse: February 26
Weekend Argus column, as submitted. -- AD
TO the shores of Tripoli, where there seems to be no end to Muammar Gaddafi’s bad hair days.
Despite the fact that the Colonel shares a milliner with Mrs Madikizela-Mandela and enjoys a reputation for doing absolutely fabulous things with old Errol Arendz frocks, he has of late been losing it rather badly in front of the television cameras, and the red carpet fizz could well be a thing of the past.
His latest outburst had even the most jaded of the Mahogany Ridge regulars stunned into silence, their flabbers very, very gasted.
Daffy would now have us believe that not only have the Libyan protesters been manipulated by al Qaeda, but they are all teenagers on drugs. “Their ages are 17,” the Siren of the Sands explained on national television. “They give them pills at night, they put hallucinatory pills in their drinks, their milk, their coffee, their Nescafe.”
Oh dear, oh dear. And they’ve probably been listening to pop music as well.
The bad hair days, though, could soon be a thing of the past. This however is not good news for Daffy. Even in his most delusional moments, and there certainly have been a lot of those recently, he must be aware that one of the more prominent traits of the jasmine revolution sweeping the region is that these are not drawn-out affairs, and the killing of civilians certainly won’t change this.
In fact, the swiftness with which the Tunisian and Egyptian tyrannies fell perfectly complements the social networking era. It’s like so digital, man, that if this was The Arabian Nights, it would be a thousand and one tweets. “Meet in square, topl govt, then off 2 Ali’s disco. Rock on, dudes.”
Brother leader’s furious avowal, then, that he would die like a martyr may not be such empty blather after all, and here at the Ridge we’ve opened a book on Daffy’s last days.
True, there is a good chance that he’ll be allowed to leave the country -- but, given the universal condemnation of his murderous behaviour, who would have him? The smart money’s on Zimbabwe.
And should it end very badly for Daffy? Well, the odds are strong that it would be at the end of a rope or by firing squad, and less so by stoning or beheading. Given the mysteries of the Sahara, however, anything is possible up there, and it may well come to pass that a revolutionary tribunal will order him staked out in the desert and be trampled to death by stampeding camels.
Our thoughts, meanwhile, are with the Amazonian Guard, Daffy’s elite force of henchbabes. The 40 members of this bodyguard unit are all virgins, cherry-picked -- figuratively, of course -- by Daffy himself.
These young women undergo extensive martial arts and firearms training. They wear their berets at a suitably coquettish angle, bring a certain something to battle fatigues and jumpsuits and, with appropriate use of lipgloss and other beauty products, smoulder with an intensity that, let’s say, is wholly absent in our female Metro cops.
What is to happen to them when Daffy goes? It would be a shame if the unit disbanded. Maybe they could get film work. As it is, they already look like something out of a James Bond movie. And what about a job at Mavericks or Teazers? A lap dance from a virgin who can kill you in six different ways with an eyeliner pencil certainly has dangerous appeal. When she says no touching, you know she means it.
Closer to home, meanwhile, our attention has been drawn to Jimmy Manyi, the recently appointed appointed government spokesman who appears to have been freely helping himself to Daffy’s Nescafe.
Manyi believes there are too many coloured people in the Western Cape -- “this over-representation . . . is not working for them” -- and it would be better for all if they scattered themselves far and wide across the whole country.
Unfortunately, there are far too many people who think like this in government. Politicans who wonder why large sections of the population regard them with such disgust may well ponder the words of the late writer and philosopher, Auberon Waugh, who once suggested that their distasteful urges to power were personality disorders in their own right, “rather like the urge to sexual congress with children or the taste for rubber underwear”.
Manyi’s racist outburst, however, goes so much further than the mere urge to bother ordinary citizens. It rather ominously echoes all the other social engineering horrors: lebensraum, apartheid, the pogroms, the displacements and the final solutions.
Such people, it hardly needs saying, are well advised to take note of events in Libya, Algeria, Bahrain, Yemen and elsewhere.
TO the shores of Tripoli, where there seems to be no end to Muammar Gaddafi’s bad hair days.
Despite the fact that the Colonel shares a milliner with Mrs Madikizela-Mandela and enjoys a reputation for doing absolutely fabulous things with old Errol Arendz frocks, he has of late been losing it rather badly in front of the television cameras, and the red carpet fizz could well be a thing of the past.
His latest outburst had even the most jaded of the Mahogany Ridge regulars stunned into silence, their flabbers very, very gasted.
Daffy would now have us believe that not only have the Libyan protesters been manipulated by al Qaeda, but they are all teenagers on drugs. “Their ages are 17,” the Siren of the Sands explained on national television. “They give them pills at night, they put hallucinatory pills in their drinks, their milk, their coffee, their Nescafe.”
Oh dear, oh dear. And they’ve probably been listening to pop music as well.
The bad hair days, though, could soon be a thing of the past. This however is not good news for Daffy. Even in his most delusional moments, and there certainly have been a lot of those recently, he must be aware that one of the more prominent traits of the jasmine revolution sweeping the region is that these are not drawn-out affairs, and the killing of civilians certainly won’t change this.
In fact, the swiftness with which the Tunisian and Egyptian tyrannies fell perfectly complements the social networking era. It’s like so digital, man, that if this was The Arabian Nights, it would be a thousand and one tweets. “Meet in square, topl govt, then off 2 Ali’s disco. Rock on, dudes.”
Brother leader’s furious avowal, then, that he would die like a martyr may not be such empty blather after all, and here at the Ridge we’ve opened a book on Daffy’s last days.
True, there is a good chance that he’ll be allowed to leave the country -- but, given the universal condemnation of his murderous behaviour, who would have him? The smart money’s on Zimbabwe.
And should it end very badly for Daffy? Well, the odds are strong that it would be at the end of a rope or by firing squad, and less so by stoning or beheading. Given the mysteries of the Sahara, however, anything is possible up there, and it may well come to pass that a revolutionary tribunal will order him staked out in the desert and be trampled to death by stampeding camels.
Our thoughts, meanwhile, are with the Amazonian Guard, Daffy’s elite force of henchbabes. The 40 members of this bodyguard unit are all virgins, cherry-picked -- figuratively, of course -- by Daffy himself.
These young women undergo extensive martial arts and firearms training. They wear their berets at a suitably coquettish angle, bring a certain something to battle fatigues and jumpsuits and, with appropriate use of lipgloss and other beauty products, smoulder with an intensity that, let’s say, is wholly absent in our female Metro cops.
What is to happen to them when Daffy goes? It would be a shame if the unit disbanded. Maybe they could get film work. As it is, they already look like something out of a James Bond movie. And what about a job at Mavericks or Teazers? A lap dance from a virgin who can kill you in six different ways with an eyeliner pencil certainly has dangerous appeal. When she says no touching, you know she means it.
Closer to home, meanwhile, our attention has been drawn to Jimmy Manyi, the recently appointed appointed government spokesman who appears to have been freely helping himself to Daffy’s Nescafe.
Manyi believes there are too many coloured people in the Western Cape -- “this over-representation . . . is not working for them” -- and it would be better for all if they scattered themselves far and wide across the whole country.
Unfortunately, there are far too many people who think like this in government. Politicans who wonder why large sections of the population regard them with such disgust may well ponder the words of the late writer and philosopher, Auberon Waugh, who once suggested that their distasteful urges to power were personality disorders in their own right, “rather like the urge to sexual congress with children or the taste for rubber underwear”.
Manyi’s racist outburst, however, goes so much further than the mere urge to bother ordinary citizens. It rather ominously echoes all the other social engineering horrors: lebensraum, apartheid, the pogroms, the displacements and the final solutions.
Such people, it hardly needs saying, are well advised to take note of events in Libya, Algeria, Bahrain, Yemen and elsewhere.
Monday, January 17, 2011
A Famous Grouse: January 15
Herewith most recent Weekend Argus column. As submitted. -- AD
LIKE many readers, I’m a little dismayed at the incident between the two policemen and the Grandmother of the Nation, Mrs Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, on the Johannesburg M1 motorway’s Jan Smuts Avenue off-ramp on the morning of Thursday, December 30.
Regulars at the Mahogany Ridge, who as a rule won’t venture north of the Huguenot Tunnel for fear of the violence in the hinterland, have had to accept my word that, at this time of the year, this is a peaceful neck of the woods in Jozi.
True, the offramp is near Wits University, but this being the holidays, its campus was largely free of students who’d otherwise have been engaged in some sort of rampaging mob activity, greatly angered that twelve years of outcomes-based Plasticine worm-rolling had little prepared them for the rigour of acquiring engineering or accounting degrees.
It was here that gogo Winnie’s silver Audi A6 was pulled over by the cops who had been following it in an unmarked car since it had joined the M1 at an off-ramp five kilometres earlier.
According to reports, the Audi was being driven in a reckless and dangerous manner at about 150km/h, weaving in and out of traffic, with its hazard lights flashing.
Because the speed limit on this stretch of the M1 is 80km/h, the car was, you could say, behaving in a manner that was suspicious, if not cause for outright alarm.
Furthermore, it had tinted windows, so its occupants couldn’t be seen. This is probably against the law as well.
There are two versions of what happened next. Obviously.
The one is from an archaic and vicious relic of the apartheid era, and the other . . . well, the other comes from Warrant Officer Jannie Odendaal, a police officer with almost 20 years’ experience.
But let’s hear from the former. As I understand their comments in the media, go-go gogo, with her bodyguard and driver, were late for a funeral.
Homilies about “late” and “funeral” spring to mind, but so too does the tragedy in which a 13-year-old member of the Mandela family died in a road accident on the eve of last year’s World Cup. (But, you know, it’s best not to say anything.)
Bodyguard Jacob Monare has claimed Odendaal was not prepared to accept this explanation about a funeral -- would any policeman, I wonder? -- and a heated exchange followed.
When Madikizela-Mandela emerged from the car to calm things down, Odendaal allegedly swore at her, saying: “I don’t give a fuck who you are, get back to the fucking car.” At some point, Monare added, Odendaal’s parner hit him in the knee with an R5 assault rifle.
Odendaal, who together with his partner is in all manner of official and bureaucratic brown stuff merely for doing what he said was his job, suggested the abuse came instead from Monare, who had screamed at him, “Who do you think you are coming to search this car? It’s not apartheid anymore!”
Odendaal was astounded. “I’m a police officer dressed in full police uniform and this guy -- a normal civilian -- he assaults me,” he said. “I then ran back to my vehicle and got a Taser [stun gun] just to intimidate him a bit to calm down.”
Moreover, and far from calming the situation, Madikizela-Mandela had also screamed at Odendaal: “Who the fuck do you think you are?”
Clearly, two Tasers were needed. Or a cattle prod. And maybe a large net.
But both policemen now face disciplinary action and charges of pointing firearms. Their partnership has been broken and they have been transferred to different units. Odendaal has been booked off for a week due to the stress of the situation.
Amazingly, there are allegations -- utterly credible -- that the whole matter would disappear if Odendaal offered a grovelling apology to Winnie, who, it needn’t be stressed, is obviously a powerful figure in the ruling party.
What disturbs me most, however, about this awful saga, is Odendaal’s description of Winnie. He told reporters that when she emerged from the car, “I didn’t really recognise her, you know? She had a lot of white powder or cream or stuff on her face. Her face was pale and she looked very old ... she didn’t look anything like in the newspapers.”
This is alarming, to say the least, and it perhaps offers a hint at the real issue here. True, Madikizela-Mandela is 74 years old. But it is a very young 74, and she leads a very full and active life, one that would exhaust women half her age. And. of course, she looks no older than, um, fiftysomething.
Perhaps WO Odendaal should send her some flowers.
LIKE many readers, I’m a little dismayed at the incident between the two policemen and the Grandmother of the Nation, Mrs Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, on the Johannesburg M1 motorway’s Jan Smuts Avenue off-ramp on the morning of Thursday, December 30.
Regulars at the Mahogany Ridge, who as a rule won’t venture north of the Huguenot Tunnel for fear of the violence in the hinterland, have had to accept my word that, at this time of the year, this is a peaceful neck of the woods in Jozi.
True, the offramp is near Wits University, but this being the holidays, its campus was largely free of students who’d otherwise have been engaged in some sort of rampaging mob activity, greatly angered that twelve years of outcomes-based Plasticine worm-rolling had little prepared them for the rigour of acquiring engineering or accounting degrees.
It was here that gogo Winnie’s silver Audi A6 was pulled over by the cops who had been following it in an unmarked car since it had joined the M1 at an off-ramp five kilometres earlier.
According to reports, the Audi was being driven in a reckless and dangerous manner at about 150km/h, weaving in and out of traffic, with its hazard lights flashing.
Because the speed limit on this stretch of the M1 is 80km/h, the car was, you could say, behaving in a manner that was suspicious, if not cause for outright alarm.
Furthermore, it had tinted windows, so its occupants couldn’t be seen. This is probably against the law as well.
There are two versions of what happened next. Obviously.
The one is from an archaic and vicious relic of the apartheid era, and the other . . . well, the other comes from Warrant Officer Jannie Odendaal, a police officer with almost 20 years’ experience.
But let’s hear from the former. As I understand their comments in the media, go-go gogo, with her bodyguard and driver, were late for a funeral.
Homilies about “late” and “funeral” spring to mind, but so too does the tragedy in which a 13-year-old member of the Mandela family died in a road accident on the eve of last year’s World Cup. (But, you know, it’s best not to say anything.)
Bodyguard Jacob Monare has claimed Odendaal was not prepared to accept this explanation about a funeral -- would any policeman, I wonder? -- and a heated exchange followed.
When Madikizela-Mandela emerged from the car to calm things down, Odendaal allegedly swore at her, saying: “I don’t give a fuck who you are, get back to the fucking car.” At some point, Monare added, Odendaal’s parner hit him in the knee with an R5 assault rifle.
Odendaal, who together with his partner is in all manner of official and bureaucratic brown stuff merely for doing what he said was his job, suggested the abuse came instead from Monare, who had screamed at him, “Who do you think you are coming to search this car? It’s not apartheid anymore!”
Odendaal was astounded. “I’m a police officer dressed in full police uniform and this guy -- a normal civilian -- he assaults me,” he said. “I then ran back to my vehicle and got a Taser [stun gun] just to intimidate him a bit to calm down.”
Moreover, and far from calming the situation, Madikizela-Mandela had also screamed at Odendaal: “Who the fuck do you think you are?”
Clearly, two Tasers were needed. Or a cattle prod. And maybe a large net.
But both policemen now face disciplinary action and charges of pointing firearms. Their partnership has been broken and they have been transferred to different units. Odendaal has been booked off for a week due to the stress of the situation.
Amazingly, there are allegations -- utterly credible -- that the whole matter would disappear if Odendaal offered a grovelling apology to Winnie, who, it needn’t be stressed, is obviously a powerful figure in the ruling party.
What disturbs me most, however, about this awful saga, is Odendaal’s description of Winnie. He told reporters that when she emerged from the car, “I didn’t really recognise her, you know? She had a lot of white powder or cream or stuff on her face. Her face was pale and she looked very old ... she didn’t look anything like in the newspapers.”
This is alarming, to say the least, and it perhaps offers a hint at the real issue here. True, Madikizela-Mandela is 74 years old. But it is a very young 74, and she leads a very full and active life, one that would exhaust women half her age. And. of course, she looks no older than, um, fiftysomething.
Perhaps WO Odendaal should send her some flowers.
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