Robert Kirby LOOSE CANNON
If, like so many of us, you are a wide-eyed apprentice democrat, you will have been following the fascinating television edutainment series, presently being mounted “collectively” by the Department of Labour, the SABC and Wits University’s Centre for Applied Legal Studies – or Cals. The series is called Buang: Let’s Talk.
I don’t know whether Cals was the originator of the Buang idea, but I do hope so, as I’ve always been a committed fan. It would use up the rest of this column’s space were I to try to list the names of the fabulous legal minds that had their knuckles warmed before this fine oven of jurisprudential gift.
Cals is to the immeasurable but flawed universe of the law what Colonel Saunders is to chicken shit: just cause.
Extending this happy metaphor: haven’t we all tasted the takeaway specials on offer at Cals outlets? The family-size Labour Relations Act and the pending Employment Equity Bill with free Coke long-weekend offer? Now, it appears, Cals has decided that once again it needs to sink its gums into showbiz proper. Remember Future Imperfect and Let’s Pretend We’re All Judges and BA Law?
Hence the latest Cals co-production, Buang – a show that is no more than the Labour Relations Act rendered as a seventh-rate sitcom. A series of shop-floor parables is delivered by some very desperate actors from a script laced with the aphorisms of the picket line.
We are, of course, fairly used to seventh- rate sitcoms on SABC television. But with Buang there’s a difference. Concurrent to the series and as an aid to those with slow minds, Cals publishes a seri es of commentaries in which all the cripplingly funny Buang jokes get patiently explained.
I’ve only read two of the Cals Buang articles and found them to be robust supplementary learn-aids. I am now convinced that the SABC, the Department of Labour and certain Cals-fed lawyers are secret ly trying to turn South Africa into one great workers’ paradise.
It’s a future world into which we are offered seductive glimpses. The televised Buang episodes celebrate the working-life adventures of someone called Beatrice. (Apparently more than one name per character is deemed too testing for SABC2 viewers.) Beatrice is a pivotal heroine- worker in a portable lavatory factory some scalding script-wit decided to call Rainbow Inc. No limit to jestful invention when you’re surfing the statutes.
In one episode, Beatrice is interviewed by Florence for the advertised job of production manager. Much to her fellow workers’ dismay, Beatrice gets the job.
The episode goes on to explain that Beatrice’s dilemma has to do with her wearing of two hats, that of “defender of workers’ rights” and management flunky. For several interlocking reasons, Beatrice fails at her new job and resigns despite the offer of a company car.
A little further on and the story becomes even more anguished. “Florence immediately advertises her [sic] post as an ‘affirmative action’ appointment. Florence handles the interviews badly, offending a multi-lingual white woman and a Chinese applicant. They [sic] unwittingly engage a racist white woman who is later fired after a clash with Beatrice.”
Once you’ve recovered from this searing chronicle of lust and deceit, Cals strides forward in print to explain that the story can only be enjoyed at its humanist best when seen under the dispassionate lights of the Labour Relations Act.
Hence the lucidity of Cals lines like: “In this case an employer might be justified in preferring women, say, and discriminating against men, because women are usually disadvantaged in appointments.”
A few more paragraphs of merciless deconstruction and you realise that what Cals et al are really trying to do is turn everyone else’s life into a good day at the nylon spinners.
For in such sweet nature does this reverie unfold. Behind Cals’s haggard lullabies is revealed an enchanted planet. One where legal elegance is supplanted by unionised homilies; where happiness is “equitised” against “unfair discrimination on grounds of race, sex, gender, political or religious belief as protected by our constitutional rights”, where the working citizenry is forever addressed in the tones used in the 1950s when instructing the garden boy.
From the SABC and the Department of Labour you expect this species of simplistic, patronising baby talk. When it comes from Cals you begin to wonder what other considerations are at work.
But then again, in a world of deep-fried democracy, it’s not only fingers that need to be licked.