Krisjan Lemmer
With less than a year to go before the centenary of the Anglo-Boer War, there has been muttering in the Dorsbult Bar about the belated discovery by the Brits that Lord Herbert Kitchener, the war hero, was a bit of a cad.
The BBC’s Reputations series appears to have stumbled upon the fact that the man whose handle-bar moustache earned international notoriety on World War I recruiting posters imploring the British working classes to throw themselves into the trenches as cannon fodder for king and country wasn’t such a first-class chap after all.
None of this is news in the Groot Marico, Kitchener having spent his time as commander of the British forces in South Africa inventing the concentration camp and the scorched- earth policy as methods of warfare.
Nor is it news to the Sudanese or Chinese, earlier victims of the tea- drinking mass murderer who was Queen Victoria’s favourite soldier.
The programme’s producer, Jad Adams, believes his brutal war policies resulted from his Spartan upbringing and quotes one relative who says that as a boy Kitchener was pegged out on a croquet lawn in the blazing sun for misbehaving while the adults sipped tea and ate crumpets.
What is new, and has provided much mirth in the Dorsbult Bar, is evidence that Kitchener wasn’t such a manly marauder after all.
When not massacring people in exotic locales, Kitchener was a keen flower arranger, collector of fine porcelain, and an interior decorator. Adams concludes that Kitchener was a suppressed homosexual, which will not surprise the French, who believe this is true of all products of the British public school system.
But is he not offering one of those cheap pseudo-psychological explanations for pathological behaviour? That, unable to consummate his desire for the young officers he surrounded himself with, Kitchener packed the Boer women into concentration camps, where 27 000 died? Isn’t that taking misogyny just a little too far?
The Robert McBride saga becomes curiouser and curiouser. Readers might have seen reports that the Mozambican authorities – seemingly despairing of ever making the charges stick that he was plotting the overthrow of the South African government – are now investigating the possibility that he was in fact a secret agent in the loyal service of the government he was trying to overthrow.
As the saga drags on, questions might well be asked as to what his employers at the Department of Foreign Affairs are doing to relieve his plight.
Not very much, judging from their performance this week when a bunch of McBride supporters – led by Winnie Madikizela-Mandela – marched on their Pretoria offices.
The department’s acting director general, Tutugile Mazibuko, apparently hearing the rumble of approaching tumbrils, fled her office – scuttling out of a back door.
In her absence, it fell on a Mr Labuschagne to accept the memorandum presented by the protesters. At least someone had the guts to face the wrath of the people.
The latest Volkswagen television ad shows an industrial factory floor, romanticised with images of glorious welding sparks and the like – all to the music of the hymn “Jerusalem”.
Would someone please point out to the illiterates who made and approved this commercial that Blake’s poem, Jerusalem, is a vehement protest against the ugliness and cruelties of the “dark, Satanic mills” which represent industrialisation?
Radio Algoa has an arrangement with the Eastern Province Herald by which they are entitled to broadcast stories “lifted” from the newspaper. This week their reporters lifted the paper’s front page lead. The subject? “Radio Algoa sold for R32-million …”
Northern Province Premier Ngoako Ramathlodi made a dramatic entrance at the Makuleke land-claim signing ceremony on Saturday.
Amid some grumblings on the ground that his administration had done little to assist the community’s 18- month battle to regain ownership of some 25 000ha in and around the Kruger National Park, Ramathlodi nevertheless made his presence felt on the historic day of celebrations.
Rather than belittle the occasion by simply driving the two-and-a-half-hour journey from Pietersburg, Ramathlodi went all out and organised a helicopter ride – presumably to ensure that his arrival was noticed by the participants – and later departed – in a sea of red dust which filtered across the marquees they had spent weeks building.
Lemmer’s recipe for “Spots” – that bar game, beloved of outdoor types, which has participants splashing around in watered-down buffalo dung – has prompted more sporting reminiscences from the hunting and shooting brigade.
There is one bar game that had escaped the notice of the Dorsbult regulars: the bokdrol verspoeg wedstryd. Contestants, so it is said, do considerable research to ascertain the correct consistency of the drol, moistening it with brandy. The clear winner for several years running removed his teeth before competing, which seemed to lend an advantage in the spoeg stakes.
Another was a game which was said to have been popular among rangers in the Zambezi Valley. When suitably pie- eyed, the rangers would throw a mattress into the back of a Land- Rover, let down the tailgate and reverse to within a few dozen yards of a snoozing herd of elephants.
A volunteer would then tip-toe up to the rear-end of one of the beasts – invariably giggling as he went – and pull its tail before racing off after the revving Land-Rover, hopefully managing to hurl himself on to the mattress and speed away before the mastodon could catch him.
And if he failed? Well, that is reflected in the name of the game: Splat!