Ellen Bartlett
There has been a lot of speculation lately about what the Mail & Guardian plans to do regarding its tradition of designating a Bug of the Year – that is, naming the bug that has had the greatest impact in the last 12 months.
The question, in short, has been: will the M&G in 1999 go further, designating a Bug of the Century, or will it even go all the way and name the Bug of the Millennium?
The answer, we are pleased to announce, is yes. The M&G’s top editors have, after deliberation, chosen the bug that has, for better or worse, most influenced the last 1 000 years.
Never an easy task, choosing among the one to two million or so insect species known to science. Nor do we consider only bugs that have been of a perceived benefit.
Impact does not have to be positive to be powerful. Consider the example of one of the world’s most reviled but also most widely recognised names, Anopheles mosquito.
Other examples are the tsetse fly, the boll weevil, the common cockroach,species of lice, and fleas.
On the other hand, Bug of the Year for 1998, the diminutive Stenopelmus rufinasus, single-handedly eradicated the red water fern, a pestilential weed, from our rivers and dams, and in doing so, forced us to reconsider our assumptions about the banality of weevils.
The mopane worm, Gonimbrasia belina, was chosen on the basis of its nutritive value, and for the way it re-inflates to its original size and shape after a long soak in hot water.
Then there is the dung beetle (Bug of the Year 1997), that rounded and bustling friend of the earth.
“They’re cute,” says Marcus Byrne, Wits entomologist, who is to be forgiven his bias, as he specialises in them. “They’re nice to have around. People respect them.”
Respect, unfortunately, is not a word used in association with the M&G’s choice for Bug of the Millenium, though it should be.
Fear, terror, shameless screaming, paralysis combined with an overpowering desire to run the other way: those are, sadly, more typical responses, along with an urge, from deep in the primitive part of the brain, to kill, kill, KILL! Except it doesn’t die, does it?
By now, the M&G’s choice is probably clear. There is, and only ever could be, one true Bug of the Millennium.
Our readers from the northern suburbs of Johannesburg already know everything they need tollll know aboutllll Parktownllll prawns, but forl those livingll elsewhere, and the as yet uninitiated, the Parktown prawn looks like an enormous, hideously ugly mutant cockroach.
But it is not. The prawn isllll enormous and it is hideously ugly, but it is a perfectly typical “king cricket,” member of the family Anostostomatidae.
An urbanisation success story, the leggy prawn made the leap from its native habitat in the indigenous forests of the northern Drakensberg to its new home in the green gardens of the Johannesburg suburbs, with seemingly little or no readjustment difficulties.
Every year about now, it appears along with, but somewhat less welcome than, the summer rains.
Among our many reasons for choosing the prawn is the power of its presence in our society. A Parktown prawn is like a good politician. You can actually sense, when one enters the room, the almost ineffable force of its personality.
Unlike, say, Bill Clinton, who is said to make people feel good about themselves – well, some people – what the Parktown prawn does is give people a sudden, creepy sense that they’re not alone.
This can be a problem in these paranoid times.
We have all had the experience: of turning, looking around wildly, reaching for the panic button, the pistol, trying to quell the panic rising in the breast, shouting, “Who’s there?” into the gloaming. And the he, or she, is there, crouched motionless on the floor, poised to jump on your pants leg.
If this happens you should try to remain calm, because if you scare him or upset him in any way he’ll release the contents of his digestive system, a slimy, black pudding of partially digested garden snails, doggy doo-doo and worm parts. Words cannot describe the experience of being defecated upon by a Parktown prawn, and yet, oddly, the experience is nearly universal among Johannesburgers.
Which brings us to the most compelling reason for naming the prawn Bug of the Millennium. It is the universality of the human experience that it compels, the unique, unifying emotions that bind all who have sat upon one,or turned in the night and found one on the pillow.
In the Parktown prawn we have found what we needed all along to unify this divided nation: a common enemy.
At the prawn’s feet, all six of them, we can lay our hate and aggression, our bitterness and fear. Indeed, with the help of the Parktown prawn we may even be able to overcome our psychosexual racist logic, arising from our phallic obsessions, Oedipal projections and anal- sadistic orientations.
We may even rid our gardens of those pesky snails.