Robert Kirby
CHANNELVISION
I was surprised and not a little disappointed that Mr Mbeki didn’t kick off his ritual sermonising at last Friday’s opening of Parliament with some poetry. We have all come to expect the state president’s outpourings to be well versed, as it were. Below is a humble suggestion, what might have been chosen as apt to both the occasion and, as it turned out, the content of his speech. These lines are by a silly old chap called Auden and come from a poem called The Shield of Achilles.
Out of the air a voice without face
Proved by statistics that some cause was just
In tones as dry and level as the place: No one was cheered and nothing was discussed; Column by column in a cloud of dust
They marched away enduring a belief
Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.
But never mind the poetry, one had to wonder at the bidding of which ludicrous muse the Speaker of the House, Frene Ginwala, had mounted a series of living tableaux outside the Parliament buildings, depicting moments of resistance to colonisation by the original inhabitants of South Africa. The stridently out-of-tune military band, the askew rifles, the whole florid banquet of half-baked Westminster traditions were clearly not enough. Something else of turbulent imagination had to be added to make the affair perfectly embarrassing.
Leave show business to those who know what they’re doing, Frene old dear. (And while I am on the subject, may I remind a certain “satirist” that the affectionate nickname “the Sari with the Whinge on Top” for Frene is my coinage and that, if he’s going to use it, please give due credit and stop passing it off as his own.)
Not that the parliamentary occasion was without its moments. Talk about overweight political machinery; this annual gathering of the fattened political elite, all clutching their precious Nokias and trying not to burst out of their clothing: the caucus collossum? I particularly admired Dullah Omar’s new Saudi-Arabian robes, an outfit he should wear far more often, even if it does make him look a bit like a refugee from a low-budget biblical epic. The day’s top sartorial marks go to Kenneth Meshoe of the African Christian Democratic Party who, true to the occasion, had a special clown costume run up. Well done, Ken. Boswell-Wilkie will open their arms to you.
During its pitiless investigation of parliamentary clothing fashions, SABC television for one inspired moment gave us a close-up of an anonymous nail-varnished female foot, dressed in blue rhinestone sandals, which, along with its dinky little gold ankle bracelet, must rate as one of the single most repulsive bits of anatomy on the continent. As Fats Waller once sang: “Your pedal extremities are obnoxious.” The cameraman who discovered this gaudy horror deserves a medal for his perceptive sarcasm and another goes to the news editors for keeping it in the evening round-up. Now and then, almost as an action of spite, the SABC throws us a crumb to show what its product could be like if freed from political control. Last week’s Special Assignment, on the subject of the ungodly disaster that is Mangosuthu Buthelezi’s Department of Home Affairs, was a case in point. Fiona Summers and Joanne Levitan produced some incisive reportage on the subhuman treatment meted out to those people from other parts of Africa in search of political asylum or, at the very least, the chance to earn a crust. The hostile and deeply corrupt officials of the department are a sore disgrace, matched appropriately by the near concentration-camp conditions of the government’s refugee centres. And there was our president harping on about how South Africans need abandon feelings of xenophobia.
In the times when they fled the oppressions of the apartheid regime, many members of current government structures took refuge in African countries. All of these countries, sometimes at considerable peril, not only accommodated but actively aided and abetted those expatriates to operate politically in defiance of their motherland’s oligarchy.
Now that the battle is won, isn’t it a pity that the new South African government refuses to reciprocate in kind? Instead its bureaucracy treats African refugees with less compassion than normally would be afforded stray animals.