Robert Kirby : Loose cannon
I would like to be among the first to rocket to the rescue of the reputation of Witwatersrand deputy judge president, HCJ Flemming. Talk about an irresponsible, a flagitious press, radio and television – never mind Raymond Louw. This last week or so poor Monas Flemming has had more scorn poured over his sage judicial crown than he has any right to expect.
And all because he singlehandedly banned the publication and sale of Allan Greenblo’s appalling little libel Kerzner Unauthorised. On the subject of this wretched little opus, hear what the book’s hero had to say about it. A few of the Jeppe-Bronx adjectives to have issued from Sol’s honeyed lips were “arrogant” and “untruthful” and that good old standby “malicious”. For obvious reasons Sol couldn’t call Greenblo “racist”, but he probably considered it.
Back to his nibs. I believe that in banning Greenblo’s book, Flemming was doing the honourable fibre of the New South Africa a whole marble of good. I speak for many when I say I’m heartily sick and tired of this new and brightly-lit world of sovereign intellectual life, candid discourse, honest opinion, unmutilated films, amnesty, pardon, release, freedom of speech and visible pubic hair into which Kobus van Rooyen has led us with his science of publications control. The trouble is now that Van Rooyen has let censorship get on with things free from the guiding nudges of his nimble scissors, it’s gone from bad to worse.
Last week Judge Flemming leaned down from his gilded bench, offering a burnished ladder to a nation as it plunged downward into an anarchy of yet more licentious biographies, yet more salacious investigative reporting, yet more corruption, yet more revelations of the eroticism, offensive dope-smoking and murky wife-vandalising apparently running riot among our local celebrities.
Alert to the reams of the statutes among which he floated, Flemming steered an immaculate legal course. He didn’t actually state anything to the effect, but phosphorescent in the subtext of his wake was a fearless acknowledgement of long- overdue gratitude.
South Africa owes Sol a lot. In terms of Herculean art alone, there are few who could so perfectly encapsulate the greater white South African aesthetic quintessence as Sol did with his fabulous Lost City. Non-racial to the last, he even created a brand new Bantucentric race of expired monkey-worshippers among whose fibreglass tribal reliquiae he erected an animate monument with its very own ladies bar. (And it didn’t stop with this Kubla Cohen. They say he’s gone on to transfigure Red Indian history, too.)
During the harshest years of the previous apartheid regime, it was Sol who spread the readies among starving homeland leaders like Stella and Lucas and Kaiser whatshisname. Who else kept them so obedient?
And what about Zinzi’s wedding and Thabo’s 50th birthday bash? Isn’t Sol Baby supposed to have paid for them, too? Had he not, such crucial democratic expenses might well have had to be diverted from the Mpumalanga housing budget. And all those K-millions rumoured to have fuelled National Party dreams? A lot of us are still asking who the anonymous benefactor was who donated all those crayfish thermidors at Tony Leon’s barmitzvah. It’s long been whispered that it was actually Sol who designed and donated the Voortrekker Monument. To oblations such as these can there ever be obstacles?
I intend no disparagement of our honourable judge. I will leave what — among a whole casino of other wrathful phrases – Sol’s lawyers called “a licence to print filth and slander”, to the likes of Greenblo, Jonathan Ball and other unmentionables who shame us by trying to denigrate national folk heroes. The brave new precedent Flemmers has set will not only give us disempowered elder people a platform on which to balance the fragile structures of our remaindered prejudices, it will become a treasure of rare reactionary worth in a world of fin de sicle decadence.
Blessing be upon your house, Milud. You’ve given South Africa the moral boot up the groove it sorely needed.