Robert Kirby: Loose Cannon `One day you boys will find Latin phrases like these come in very useful,” alpaca-coated Brother H used to murmur as he savagely whipped our upturned hands with a thick leather whalebone-spined strap. Six hits. Three for the left, three for the right. A rider discipline to the hand- thrashings: learn an additional batch of useful Latin maxims.
That evening as we turned the pages of our Latin readers with swollen, sometimes bleeding fingers, we reflected on how poignantly right this ordained extension of Christ’s love had been.
I’ve waited a darned long time for some of Brother H’s collection of Latin phrases to come in useful. Occasionally the easy ones do when, at a dinner party, I hear myself showing off with a sighed cogito ergo sum or a mea culpa or a sideways non compos mentis. Some longer ones, too.
I can’t remember what half of them mean. But there was one which, when it was flogged in by Christian Brother H, lodged in some cranny of my mind above the 50-year floodline. It goes: judex damnatur cum nocens absolvitur. The judge is condemned when the guilty is acquitted.
Last Sunday I was reading that excellent fellow David Bullard’s column. He was going on pungently about how it seems that the Reverend Alan Boesak will never come to trial.
Out of a clear blue mood came judex damnatur cum nocens absolvitur. I realised just how right Brother H had been. May he bake less hot in the fires he now shares with certain others of his ferocious peers.
Alan Boesak and all who surround him, support him, rush out to the airport to welcome him home and promise him painstakingly monitored due cause; those who commission instant “not-guilty” findings in case Dullah cocks that up too , those who praise and envy Boesak, are but dry leaves before old Publilius Syrus’s gust.
The dominant question is no longer whether Alan Boesak is guilty or not. A subsequent and uglier felony has been in the delay, the dawdling, the obfuscation over Mr Boesak’s forever-pending trial. This crime has already been committed, and continues to be.
Every curl in Alan Boesak’s squalid wake gleams with hypocrisy, with underhand manoeuvrings, with lies. Apparently blind to the superjacent moral implications of the Boesak matter, his brethren continue to dish up explanatory syrup: equal mixtures of self-pity and self-admiration. “How can you colonialist fascist bastards even begin to doubt Alan Boesak? He was one of our heroes in the struggle for liberation from your brutal chains.”
That argument usually finishes: “Historically privileged whites just don’t understand. In things like setting up a state-of-the-art video studio for his continually disadvantaged wife, Alan Boesak was only using money meant for millions of starving people the white racists dispossessed in the first place . So, you see, it’s all actually your fault.”
Sounds absurd doesn’t it? Third World basket-case stuff? We’re not really that bad? But then it was Alan Boesak, himself, who was up on television a few hours after that ingenious Advocate Gumbi lady had cleared him of all charge s by means of a two-and-a-half-page “let’s put this nasty stuff behind us and get on with democracy” inter-office memo to Mbeki T.
It was the very same Alan Boesak who, on the very same occasion, crowed that, within an hour of the Gumbi verdict, no less than Nelson the Elder was on the blower congratulating Alan on his instant acquittal and telling him the top Geneva job was now a certainty. How does that old song go again? Judex damnatur cum … something?
It took a great deal of levering and persuasion to get the judicial powers- that-be to allow someone to actually get around to charging Alan Boesak. I take my hat off to the often reviled Mr Frank Kahn for having crowded his judicial breech. It must have seemed impossible.
But it really is time that all the writhing and slithering, the coiling and spitting of politicians and their lawyers be ignored. Alan Boesak must come to open trial and soon.
Else, to some degree, South Africa, itself, is made ridiculous.
We are starting to look like a nation of cheap hustlers. Another mudslide republic where corruption is a virtue and unpunishable.
Worse, we are starting to think like a nation of cheap hustlers.
The National Party is supposed to be principally responsible for making South Africa the polecat of the world.
Well, so far.