Bafana Khumalo
WHAT the bloody hell am I doing here? I am on an Air Force base tarmac and am about to catch a cold from the rain that has been building up from a gentle drizzle to a serious body-drenching downpour.
“Well, I am doing Gallagher and thereafter I don’t think that I am going to be able to handle more, so I will be going home,” says a woman and I wonder who Gallagher is and why such intimate details about him should be a matter of such public discussion.
My teeth are chattering and I shrug my shoulders as I decide that it is none of my business and I should, for once, keep my nose where it belongs. Sticking it in wrong places sometimes gets it bloodied.
Already it got a bit bruised in an encounter with a policeman who, at the gate of the Waterkloof Air Force base, had politely officially asked me if I had a gun. I looked at him with what people sometimes call a mischievous glint in my eye and asked him, “would hands like this handle a gun? Ha, ha ha.” He looked at me and officially responded that he, “did not ask you about your hands. I only asked you if you had a gun on you”. Ouch! This is no one-liner time, I decide.
I am here to meet the Island girl, Elizabeth Windsor, about whom I have been quite excited. My excitement has died down somewhat as I am wondering why I am waiting to meet a traditional leader. I am wondering whether any other member of the Congress of Traditional Leaders of South Africa would have this number of people coming to meet him on his visit to Gauteng. Maybe not.
I look around me and start to feel decidedly uncomfortable as I am the only brother around and I am starting to think that perhaps all those people who say my blacker-than-thou radicalism is just a face that I put on for the world are right. A radicalism that has no substance “We should have ignored the short English woman’s visit with the contempt that it deserves,” I think.
Too late to have such noble thoughts for I already am here and I had better enjoy myself. There is hope, however, because this is Pretoria and we all know very well that there is no love lost between the Afrikaners and their former oppressors, don’t we? Looking around I am heartened to discover that there seem to be comrades who feel the same way as I do. Standing in front of me is woman with a tattoo of a swallow on her left shoulder. My heart warms as I see the look of murderously active boredom on her face. She furiously sucks on a cigarette and stares daggers at the military types around who have taken this rare opportunity to be seen in their blue uniforms to heart.
The rain becomes unbearable and we decide that if we went to seek some shelter, we would not miss Mrs Windsor’s arrival. We therefore retire to join a number of our boys in blue who have been deployed to ensure that none of us mug the poor queen of England.
Even in the New South Africa, I have to confess that I still feel bloody uncomfortable with our boys in blue. So whenever I am in their presence I make sure that I don’t give them a reason to want to do what they do best, beat the heck out of me.
So, I was decidedly uncomfortable when a German photographer started talking about shooting the English queen. That is a crime, isn’t it? “This is the life. I’ve always wanted to leave Germany to stand in the rain and shoot the queen,” he says. I feel the responsibility to keep him out of trouble as we are in the presence of a few mean policemen who might misunderstand his crack for something else. “Photograph, you mean photograph, don’t you,” I say very clearly making sure that I am not misunderstood and be construed to be using the F word with the English gloved one.
Finally, right on time the British Airways plane taxis onto the tarmac and we all rush forward to do what we came here to do, see a foreign monarch walk down from a plane and meet a man with a name that is a capital of a foreign country. Five minutes pass and she walks down the stairs with the next person on her entourage walking a good four, five metres behind her. She walks into a Rolls Rolls, she waves and in the safety of the arrivals lounge, about 15 metres away the Gauteng premier Tokyo Sexwale emerges and shakes the alien monarch’s hand.
Ok, gentlemen let us rush back to the office. There is a deadline to meet. When is she going home?