Krisjan Lemmer Jnr:FRIDAY DISPATCHED
The world was shocked this week by the disclosures made by the distinguished political scientist, Professor Schalk Lourens, visiting professor at the Pofadder campus of Naboomspruit University, that World War IV will break out in the Groot Marico at 9.05am on Friday July 1 1999.
Prof Lourens made his chilling disclosure at a hurried press conference called at Tante Elize’s Kombuis Huis after reading predictions splashed across the front page of the Naboomspruit Recorder by his old rival, Professor Willie Breytenbach of Stellenbosch University.
Prof Breytenbach announced at the weekend that on the basis of a close examination of the writings of the 16th- century prophet, Nostradamus, he was able to predict – “in a sceptical sort of way” – that World War III would probably break out in the Balkans in about June, or July.
In an interview after Prof Lourens’s press conference, attended by this correspondent on an exclusive sort of basis, Pofadder’s leading intellectual disclosed that Prof Breytenbach had hurried into print after receiving a tip-off that he (Prof Lourens) was about to make even more sensational disclosures based on the writings of a 17th- century sage whom, for reasons he would disclose later, he could only identify at this stage as Sh… You Know Who!
“Let me explain. I am sceptical about the man Sh… You Know Who! whose prophecies were made around 1666,” said Prof Lourens, tucking into one of Tante Elize’s biggest koeksisters. “I am also, by training, a social scientist who grapples with empirical facts in the social, economic and political fields. But after reading The Man Known As Sh… You Know Who! by Elizabeth Windsor and Pik Botha’s seminal work, Hier Kom Die Alabama, I became fascinated by his seemingly accurate predictions of: Blood River, Slagter’s Nek, Spionkop and Eugene Terreblanche’s big bum, clad in holey green underpants and hovering over Jani Allan.”
Finishing off the last of the koeksisters and moving on to the melktert, Prof Lourens added scornfully: “Of course, Nostradamus wrote in quatrains, while the form perfected by Sh… You Know Who! was composed of three quatrains and a terminal couplet which made his work much more comprehensive, reliable and satisfying than the Frenchman’s, whose mind, anyway, was doubtless rendered feverish by a diet of frog’s legs.”
The professor pulled out his wallet and, from within its well worn, but otherwise empty folds, reverentially withdrew a piece of paper which was charred at the edges. “This,” he said, “is part of the earliest record of the writing of Sh… You Know Who!, printed in 1666 and rescued by me from the embers of the Groot Marico schoolhouse fire of 1964.”
Pausing to scoop an errant morsel from his chin, Prof Lourens looked at me sorrowfully: “You are probably too young to remember that tragedy,” he said with a sigh. “Everyone fell in love with Sarah Prinsloo when she returned from finishing school in Switzerland, her suitcases all bulging with those strange, foreign books, to take up the position as Groot Marico’s teacher. When she died in that terrible blaze she left dozens of broken hearts,” he added, wiping a tear prior to shovelling another wedge of melktert.
“There were some questions afterwards. Some have asked why there was no trace of her bones and those lovely white teeth we all admired, or even the diamonds from the ring she wore after Oupa Prinsloo gave her in marriage to Jaap Bredenhorst, the richest and oldest cattle farmer in the Groot Marico. There were even those who claimed she had subsequently been sighted clinging to the arm of a virile young smouse working the farms down in the Klein Karoo. But for myself I can only believe she died tragically, probably trying to save for the world the knowledge of its own future, the fragments of which I am now sole guardian having dashed into the flames to rescue them.
“I spent the next 35 years studying these fragments, puzzling over its words so obviously pregnant with meaning. Pointing at the top of the piece of charred paper he said: “You see, The Complete Works of Sh…, and the next bit is missing.”
Squinting closely at the fragment, he read: “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow …” He paused, pointing a trembling finger at the scrap of paper: “Note how he asserts his authority from the outset. A prophet! A man concerned with tomorrow.
“Creeps on this petty pace from day to day,” he continued. “Well that’s Groot Marico to a T,” he said, adding thoughtfully: “Strange; I remember Sarah Prinsloo often used to mutter those words; she must have seen the significance of them as well!
“Out, out, brief candle. Wonder if she spotted that?” he said, shaking his head sadly. “Imagine, reading of the circumstances of one’s own death!
“Life is but a walking shadow … Well that is obviously one of those new-fangled American stealth bombers we see on TV.” He looked excitedly back at the piece of paper: “A poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage. That’s probably Clinton!
“And then is heard no more. Assassinated!
“It is a tale told by an idiot …”
Friday Dispatched is an occasional column celebrating the silliest journalism from South Africa and the world. This is a sequel to an article published by a national Sunday newspaper
Gatvol South Africans go to the poles
The electoral posters of the opposition parties on show in Johannesburg make for dismal reading. “Hang Killers and Rapists”, “No Mercy”, “The Guts to Fight Back”, “Death Penalty for Murderers” – blood and guts, visceral stuff.
One may be inclined to dismiss this sloganeering as a desperate attempt to capture attention. But the opposition slogans are not to be dismissed so lightly. While these parties and their profiled leaders do not, by and large, strike a great chord among the majority of the electorate, their visceral messages might.
We are living in the midst of a vast but fraught transition. Substantial gains have been achieved in a mere five years, but these are threatened by persisting problems – violent crime, the crisis of unemployment, the HIV/Aids epidemic. How do we react to the challenges of our society? With humanism and rationality, or by unleashing savage impulses?
The pre-eminent historian of our age, Eric Hobsbawm, has a particular take on the 20th century. He reads it as a century of decline from the values of the Enlightenment, a century threatened by barbarism.
This decline has not been entirely unilinear. There was a “golden age” after the 1945 global defeat of fascism. Nonetheless, the predominant trajectory of the century, Hobsbawm argues, has been “a crisis of the beliefs and assumptions on which modern society had been founded since the Moderns won their famous battle against the Ancients in the early 18th century – of the rationalist and humanist assumptions, shared by liberal capitalism and communism, and which made possible their brief but decisive alliance against fascism, which rejected them”.
According to the polls, most South Africans acknowledge significant progress, while also having a realistic understanding of the deep-seated problems in our society. But for all of us, as the African National Congress manifesto acknowledges, there is a short-fall between reality and hope. The persistence of expectation to challenge achievement is, I believe, an entirely positive thing. A sullen, gatvol South Africa would be much worse.
Frustration in the face of serious problems is understandable. The question is: what kind of leadership do political parties provide in the face of challenges?
Sadly, virtually every opposition party has jumped on to the bandwagon of visceral barbarism. The Pan Africanist Congress’s president has been the most blatant. Bishop Stanley Mogoba has proposed a three-year ban on trade unions, threatened gays, and, of course, repeatedly called for the mutilation of offenders. Has the bishop grasped that, in a country of racialised poverty, those who will overwhelmingly end up amputees are not going to be “settlers”?
It is, of course, crime that calls forth the most retrograde responses. The United Democratic Movement has dusted off Roelf Meyer’s 1980s, apartheid-era, state-of- emergency national security management system, proposing that the judiciary, the police and army should be collapsed into one. We would be back with securocratic rule, behind the facade of democracy.
For the New National Party, Freedom Front and Federal Alliance, judging by the posters, the death penalty has become the single election platform. But even parties like the Democratic Party, which hope to present themselves as more sophisticated, have fallen back on a message of gatvol, appealing neither to intellect nor heart, but to myopia and “guts”.
The South African democratic breakthrough of 1994 kindled hope in our country, and around the world. The end of white minority race rule brought, not black race rule, but a vision and programme of expanding democracy. President Nelson Mandela has led a majority movement able to make the empathetic leap from black suffering to a solidarity with all oppressed – the poor, workers, women, rural people, the disabled, gays, the Third World. These humanistic impulses remain the predominant trajectory of our transition. On June 2 they will again receive an overwhelming electoral mandate … but, as the posters remind us, in the face of an ever-present inclination towards barbarism. – Jeremy Cronin, South African Communist Party deputy general secretary
Lest I be misinterpreted: I have supported the ANC since the late 1950s and am an active member of the Yeoville Community Forum and my local street committee. I have been sincere in all these commitments. From my experience and continuing involvement, what follows, follows.
In The Myth of Sisyphus Albert Camus writes: “There exists an obvious fact that seems utterly moral: namely, that a man is always prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them.”
In an article in The New York Times, 46 years later, Wole Soyinka writes: “It took the near triumph of fascism to bring the world to its senses. The horror of the Holocaust finally took the rulers of the world back to the original question: what is the true value of humanity? The conversations at Yalta, conversations that led to the birth of the United Nations, were a partial answer to that question.”
The British People’s Charter of 1832 was basically a rejection of the propertied class’s continuing assumptions that had by then been contested on and off since the Magna Carta more than six centuries earlier. Ten years later, in 1842, this protest was presented to the House of Commons in the form of a petition insisting that “government originated from, was designed to protect the freedom and promote the happiness of, and ought to be responsible to, the whole people”. It goes on to accuse the “honourable House” that it has acted irresponsibly toward the people and has “only represented parties, and benefited the few, regardless of the miseries, grievances and petitions of the many”.
In a country with a vast media-wise inarticulate population, this truth is rarely confronted. In Africa as a whole the benefits of such a truncated Western “democracy” are eulogised and its elitist implications ignored: where elitism takes over (has it ever done anything else?) it is condemned.
So what’s new, in Africa or elsewhere? People in power operate for “the general good”. It vouchsafes a good salary for parliamentarians and bureaucrats, who are more or less genuine in their intentions. For all our sakes, let us not demotivate the ones who are genuine. But the public face of it – for which we have to thank our free press – is discouraging.
When I recall my feelings when I first read the Freedom Charter in the late 1950s, and the growing frustration and anger of the next four decades with its dislocations and enforced submissions, then I would say South Africans are justified in asking the same questions that were asked – and only partially (or nominally?) answered – in Europe.
And we can do so more adamantly. Having seen all those betrayals and manipulative responses, our best answer is to get clued up enough to say “no”. We are not that stupid. It has all happened before and we can read about it: we won’t be part of the hoax. I am not voting. – Marcelle Manley, Bellevue East
I would like to comment on the article of black students supporting a white president (“We want a white president”, April 16 to 22). Nicholas Nghoma, Benneth Mpehle and Mapaseka Mbatha, you have disappointed me a lot. The power that our parents fought for is to be taken back to our bosses not leaders. Just because “look at how the United Kingdom and the United States are run”.
You, the expected leaders of tomorrow, are the ones who want to sell us back to our bosses instead of our leaders. Never be mastered by a white man because you left your school for his area. A private school differs with a community school – because of the white man whom you want in power.
Never misuse your vote by voting for a white man, just because this country does not belong to him. My fellow black students, let’s just vote for a black president, irrespective of the political affiliation. As long as he is black. And remember that “never, never again shall it happen that this beautiful land will be ruled by another skin except that of a black man”. – Collen Waka Nkwinika, Pretoria
Now that the dust is beginning to settle on the surprise decision to replace Mathews Phosa as premier of Mpumalanga, there has been an amusing performance by some representatives of the ANC in an effort to sell the premier-elect, J Mahlangu.
Mahlangu will be the new premier in June, thanks to James Nkambule and his cronies, and we can only hope they would not bear a grudge of being led by a former leader of the ethnical Kwa-Ndebele bantustan. It will be in the interest of the ANC to support the new incumbent, particularly because he is virtually unknown and does not even enjoy the support in his own backyard of Kwa-Ndebele.
Predictably, the first person in the province to make an effort to sell Mahlangu was January Masilela, who has been named in various media reports as the main player in the anti-Phosa bloc. Masilela dismissed all those who dared to ask who Mahlangu is. He accused them of being new in the struggle because Mahlangu had long been working in the “underground” for the ANC.
Masilela is correct about one thing: Mahlangu has been in the “underground” longer than any other person in the ANC; his “underground work” continued beyond 1994. People who have been in the underground resurfaced and worked for the ANC in 1994 and beyond.
Mahlangu is well known to many civil servants of the former Kwa-Ndebele homeland. Many have expressed relief at his appointment, and others are openly saying, “Sesiyokubusa nje [It is our turn to govern].” By implication, those who were governing were Swazis, and it is now the turn of the Ndebeles – though there are only two Swazis in the current Cabinet. To many people, these sentiments are a signal of the return to the past.
It is no secret that Mahlangu did not earn his position through the ballot. There is a belief that he would not have even made it as an MEC, and probably as an MP or MPL.
In times like these, the ANC needs independent thinkers. If the media reports that Minister of Health Nkosazana Zuma was the only member of the ANC national executive who questioned ANC president Thabo Mbeki, that makes her the only member of the ANC who is not ruled by fear of losing her position. She must be congratulated for her courage.
The fact that none of the alliance structures has openly supported Mahlangu is cause for concern, and could be interpreted as failure to communicate with these structures. Now that he is appointed, he needs that support. The arrogance that Masilela and other leaders have shown has helped to plunge Mahlangu further into obscurity, and we will need more than Mbeki to resurrect him from the second underground. – Peace Mahlangu, Nelspruit
The Mail & Guardian’s knee-jerk horror at the DP’s proposed boot camps for juvenile offenders (“No place for Mrs T”, April 30 to May 6) is naive. Surely the recent murder of photojournalist John Rubython, by a 14-year- old, shows that juveniles can and do commit the most heinous crimes. The challenge facing juvenile justice is to balance the need to protect society with the rehabilitation of young offenders, from bicycle thieves to rapists and murderers.
The DP maintains that a well-supervised community service order is by far the best sentence for most juvenile offenders. However, when a youth commits a more serious crime, the safety of the community must come first.
The problem with the current situation is that there is nothing in-between incarceration of juveniles in South Africa’s overcrowded prisons (which police refer to as “crime schools”) and release into the community.
The release of juvenile offenders in 1995 into under-resourced “secure care” facilities had disastrous consequences when many of these offenders escaped easily to return to criminal activities. The range of alternative sentences for juveniles must be extended to ensure different levels of supervision for more or less serious offenders.
“Boot camp” prison programmes are a rapidly growing phenomenon in the US. Correctional boot camps are patterned after military basic training. Offenders, usually young adults serving their first prison term, spend 90 to 180 days in a boot camp atmosphere. There is a demanding daily schedule of activities, characterised by strict rules and discipline. The DP suggests that boot camp inmates be made to clean public parks and pavements, and perform other useful services required at local government level.
Most importantly, the boot camps would be stand-alone facilities separating juvenile offenders from adult inmates. The most appropriate institutions available in South Africa would be old military training bases.
The DP believes that this sentencing option is appropriate to South Africa’s context where, just as the US is beginning to realise, initiation into crime starts young. – Douglas HM Gibson, MP, DP representative for safety and security
The M&G invites readers to contribute to the Election Crossfire, which will be a regular feature until the elections on June 2