Channel vision
Some long years back I got trapped in an aircraft window seat by a young Pik Botha. I think he was then at the World Court in The Hague. We were on a flight from London to Johannesburg and the more Pik banged on to all around him about the moral certainties, the long-term ethno-benevolent strategies of Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd’s National Party, the longer the impending journey seemed to become. After drinks had been served, Pik’s discourse grew even more generous. When he learned I worked for the SABC, the floodgates burst wide. I fled to the flight deck and the preferable company of the late Brian “Dickey” Bird and his crew.
Watching Pik Botha on last Sunday’s Newsmaker I couldn’t but remember that wordy night all those years ago. Notwithstanding his highly adaptable political fidelities, Pik hasn’t changed much since. Given half a chance he still blathers like a desperate Lothario.
Guided by the deep cunning gained in his long years of marketing the South African reverie, Pik has decided that joining the ANC isn’t going to be like joining the Nats was. Ja baas won’t be nearly enough this time around. This time one of apartheid’s most grizzled ancients is going to have to prove that no matter how autumnal the tints to his apotheosis, an apotheosis it indeed has been.
And where better to display all this reconditioned sycophancy than on the old enemy’s new stamping ground, the always malleable SABC? Watching the urbane Vuyo Mbuli interview Pik Botha was to feel genuine pity. One after the other out tottered the geriatric platitudes, though I must admit it was encouraging to hear Pik refer to the South African majority as “our people”; a refreshing change from “the black man” he’s always preferred.
Pik slurs his consonants a lot more than he used to but this might just be because his tongue is terribly tired. Soon after he announced he was going to join the ANC, Pik got down to some necessary glossoproctic chores. He’s realised that if he wants to catch up with democracy, there’s a lot of lowbrowing to do, deep and humid grooves he’ll have to explore. Foreign minister to foreign object isn’t such an easy step, after all. But then what can a man do when in his glum dotage he suddenly acknowledges the blinding truths which have for so long not afflicted him?
With a regretful sigh I turned off the telly. Ten minutes was enough to show that in a career such as Pik Botha’s there has to be an ongoing multiple choice: “What this country of ours now desperately needs is the vision, the fine fiscal discipline, not to mention the global statesmanship of Dr Verwoerd and/or Mr John Vorster and/or Mr Kaizer Matanzima and/or Mr PW Botha and/or Field Marshal Lennox Sebe and/or Mr FW de Klerk and/or Mr Lucas Mangope and/or Mr Nelson Mandela and/or General Bantu Holomisa and/or Mr Thabo Mbeki”. Down the line they’ve all felt this penguin’s sticky peck.
The much advertised Pieces of Mind on SABC 3 turned out to be another example of the pretentious “scientific” pabulum so favoured by United States television producers. Ostensibly a documentary on brain function, the programme chose instead to cobble together some neurological party tricks involving the actor Alan Alda.
It’s always a mistake to use “personalities” in these kinds of programmes, if only that they can’t help but carry their celebrity baggage with them. Withal, the programme itself flitted from one thing to another, dropping some interesting hints along the way but never offering much more than those. We do, however, now know what Alan Alda’s electroencephalogram looks like when he’s asleep and dreaming. What a bonus.
For most of the time television serves trivial appetites. Now and then, almost by mistake, it comes up with something so formidably profound as to stun. Such was a report last week in a BBC World news bulletin. It showed a ten-year-old Grozny boy, both legs amputated at the knee. He and his fellows in a school soccer team received a Christmas blessing from the monstrous Boris Yeltsin. It came in the shape of a tank shell. Four boys in the team were killed, another seven maimed.
I recalled a recent SABC news item showing our unctuous foreign affairs mandarins all but slobbering with smarmy camaraderie for a Russian foreign minister. Pik has nothing on his would-be bedmates.