Robert Kirby: LOOSE CANNON
It is hard to hush one’s scepticism when, within hours of the mindless shootings on the Benoni smallholding, up pop grave-browed politicians in various displays of rue and distress.
Her face set in scrupulous wrath, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela was in court when the gunman appeared. Her ex-husband was at the shoulder of the mourning mother and in the hopsital visiting the spinally injured child. A couple of days later, bringing up the rear, was the Democratic Party waving its cheque book.
I am not suggesting for a moment that this public heartache has anything whatsoever to do with political exploitation. That would be taking the easy way out and, anyway, the next election is still a way off. The sarcastic explanation is that we all know that, as a whole, South African politicians are above such opportunistic behaviour.
What does make me wonder is, where were all these fast-track politicians when recently those 11-year-old and 12-year-old boys got shot by Cape Flats gangsters, a deliberate execution? Where were they when those three old women in Durban got brutally assaulted and raped by young intruders? Apart from vague promises from core members of the Plod family – George, Sydney and Dullah – the spate of farm murders seems to have attracted bloodthirsty media and not much more, save outraged fellow white farmers and their representatives.
With few exceptions, politicians keep well clear of all but the most easily blameable, hence one- aetiology wickedness. You can’t condemn them. No politician worth his graft wants to be seen at every graveside, as some kind of professional mourner. Politicians have to be choosy about which tragedies deserve personally delivered consolation.
Even worse, there’s always the danger they might go off and agonise about the entirely combative catastrophes. Any politician knows it’s one thing to be so brimming with good intentions you go blundering off to the wrong brand of memorial service. That’s why there’s little chance you’ll find Winnie or, for that matter, Nelson at the funeral of some elderly rural Northern Province couple who got kicked to death and sodomised with pickhandles in return for their portable tape-player.
You won’t find a Woolworths voucher-bearing Tony Leon, either. When he’s launching forth to a public weepalong, the wary politician selects his calamity with an eye to good sense. There is far less risk of stumbling when rushing to console the parents of a black baby killed by a white smallholder – more especially a white smallholder with an Afrikaans surname.
But drag on your bulletproof waistcoat and chainmail trousers. Slap on your helmet and go out to Manenberg so you may shed a parliamentary tear at the funeral of a couple of children murdered in order to discipline their parents for having wandered by mistake down the same road where known Pagad members live, and you need your head read.
Politicians are continually faced with these kinds of trying decisions. Tugela Ferry child- murder or Gauteng serial rapist? A prosperous political career is conducted principally in defiance of being caught out. The denser the smokescreen a politician can drape around his or her activities, the better.
What better way of cloaking the fact your wife’s got a stack of shares in Gilbeys and therefore you don’t actually give a limp monkey about drunken driving, than to be seen at as many alchohol-related road-accident funerals as possible? What better way to show that, as a long-serving National Party mid- range provincial operator you’ve at last been forced to own up to having been a clandestine left-wing liberal all along, than by traipsing off to cuddle some black children who survived a bus crash?
I hear the fundis are in the process of issuing a pamphlet containing a set of Cabinet guidelines about how to put the nation’s emotional energies to work. It is an exquisitely apt idea. Politicians will continue to insist they have the right to appear in public on a regular basis, particularly when there’s a chance of exhibiting their boundless compassion.
What the Weep By Numbers guidelines will do will be to apportion public political lamentation on a demographic basis. So many for the ANC, so many for the IFP, so many for the Freedom Front, so much for the DP.
Let someone else’s mortality illuminate all our sorrows. If morally decent, George Steiner was politically rickety when he said the only appropriate reaction to 20th century horrors is silence. Try and tell that to a politician with a grief in his smirk.