BRENDA tried to stop me from telling the truth this week. I kept her at bay with a new stick that my neighbour, Ted, had carved for me. The woman was shrieking like some cursed banshee cast adrift on the steppes of Kazakhstan. With a few deft strokes, I managed to herd her into a corner and from there down to the basement. She’ll find a way out soon enough. That’s one of the challenges of marriage. Right now, I have vital information to pass on to the people of this country.
Mark Shuttleworth was not on the Soyuz rocket that we saw leaving Planet Earth on April 25. I know this for one reason. The rocket never existed in the first place. Shuttleworth’s trip to the International Space Station was recorded in a studio on the outskirts of Milan and transmitted to the world’s media from a mobile studio somewhere between Tuxpan and Campeche in the Gulf of Mexico. I am unable to divulge the precise location to protect certain people. How do I know the entire affair was faked? Roberto Vittori was one of the three cosmonauts. Four years ago, Roberto married into the Trovato family in a traditional wedding in a village in northern Sicily. The ”trip” into space was devised by his first born son’s godfather as a fund-raiser. That was in 1999. In July last year, things began moving quickly. Flight commander ”Yuri Gidzenko” came on board. A distant relative of Benito Mussolini, ”Yuri” had been sent to Naples to cool off. A family matter. He was recalled to Palermo when an ambitious young lieutenant spotted him riding a moped and snatching bags and generally lowering the tone of the organisation. With his fascist good looks and haunted eyes, he was a dead ringer for a Russian. He even knew a few words from his dealings with outraged Muscovite tourists he encountered in Italy. With ”Yuri” and Roberto signed up, the scouts turned to South Africa for the third member of the party. Shuttleworth was perfect. Obscenely rich and gullible, he was ripe for the plucking. By the time the drugs had worn off, the $20-million were in a numbered account far from the Milan studio that came equipped with a scale model Soyuz, a hand-held version of the International Space Station and the latest in chroma-key technology.
The recording took longer than expected because Shuttleworth kept getting nauseous whenever he was dangled upside down in front of the blue screen. Instead of smiling and giving the thumbs up, he would whine about his vertigo and ask for a Big Mac break. ”Yuri” wanted to teach him a little Sicilian resilience, but Roberto talked him out of it.
Eventually, the blast-off and link up with the ISS were captured on tape. But the landing was a particular stroke of genius. An oversized melting steel pellet hurtles out of control through the stratosphere and ends up drifting beneath an enormous cream-coloured canopy to bump gently to a halt in a grassy field in the middle of a region once ruled by the Mongols and now inhabited by little more than 36 million sheep and a sleep-deprived shepherd. No witnesses. Perfect. That’s why the Americans were left out of it. They would have insisted on a landing in the middle of Madison Avenue. Why do you think the Russians are refusing to let Shuttleworth buy the sputnik as a souvenir? After all, it’s only a piece of burnt-out tin. Actually, it’s made of cardboard and is only half a metre long. With the action shots in the can, cutaways of Shuttleworth’s mother weeping (genuine tears brought on by the news that her son had just blown R300-million) were edited in and the tape was rushed off to the secret transmission point in Mexico. CNN was the first to pick up the feed. Moments later the rest of the world was slobbering over itself in an unseemly rush to get pictures of the first African in space.
And that’s how Brenda ended up in the basement. Keep your mouth shut, she said. Why ruin a dream, she said. I’ll tell you why. It was the ACDP. That’s right. Our very own party made up of African Christian Democrats who occasionally subscribe to the sharia law of lopping off the limbs of shoplifters. On Tuesday, the ACDP congratulated Shuttleworth on his ”sense of adventure, his coolness under duress and his leadership to the youth of our land”. By then, I was gagging on the ”first African in space” label. I desperately wanted to tell the world that he was actually a white man, but since nobody else seemed to have noticed, I kept quiet. But then the ACDP added: ”Because Mark made it, the youth can make it! We can all make it!”
That clinched it. The lies simply became too much. In suburbs and townships around the country, children are being led to believe that they can one day travel into space. Even worse, they are being told that it is hip to be square. That maths and science are cool. One lie after another. By exposing this conspiracy, I have probably signed my own death warrant. When an Italian breaks ranks, the consequences can be severe. But an entire generation will thank me one day. I urge parents to tell their children that they will never be space travellers. With a bit of luck, they might be able to afford a second-hand car. Tell them that maths makes no sense and encourage them to drop science for something useful like woodwork or cooking classes. Tell them the truth. Don’t let them end up like my boy, Clive, who climbed out of his window and was found flapping and screeching and claiming to be the first African on the roof of the institute.