I must have dropped off just for a second there because when I looked at the TV screen again there were scenes of Biblical mayhem that the mind was hard-pressed to comprehend.
This was not murder and mass immolation in the Third World. This was not Auschwitz or Belsen. This was the heartland of England’s green and pleasant land, and livestock was being slaughtered by the tens of thousands and then set alight on vast sacrificial sites, from which all but the most select of high priests and their minions had been excluded.
The rolling English countryside was deserted. Sturdy English farmers, of the same yeoman stock that had seen off impudent assaults by Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte and Adolf Hitler through the years, looked on ashen-faced as the British army swarmed on to their lands, wiping out their herds with ruthless efficiency.
The normally cheery English country inns – famed for welcoming travellers with warm cider, jeering laughter and the merry tinkle of hard cash disappearing into tills – stood silent as revellers veered away from the black pall of smoke that hung over the picturesque Lake District.
Hearty walks along country footpaths were banned as a health hazard – not to the humans indulging in them, but to herds of cattle, sheep and pigs as far afield as Russia and North Carolina.
Foot and mouth disease, a highly infective malady that strikes at cloven-footed animals of all sorts, had brought panic to the West. And worse was still to come.
Horseracing was cancelled at Cheltenham, wreaking untold havoc in the lives of millions of addicted punters.
England’s strange, carp-like prime minister was forced to bow to pressure from the opposition benches in the House of Commons and announced a postponement of local government elections until such time as the national crisis could be contained.
The Bishopstock Music Festival, one of the largest blues festivals in Europe, was also postponed. Government restrictions on the use of certain facilities, such as the fields where the thousands of cloven-footed fans would have pitched their tents at the festival’s home in Devon, meant that it would have been impossible to host the prestigious line-up, which included the venerable Ray Charles, Taj Mahal, Buddy Guy and the Delta Blues Cartel, comprising Honeyboy Edwards and Homesick James.
American and Japanese tourists, having witnessed what I had witnessed on the telly, were generally feeling homesick even before they left their respective countries and decided to stay home in droves. The effect would be to shut off about $1,4-billion of tourist revenue that Her Majesty’s hard-working subjects had begun to take for granted as an annual tribute.
Banning the nags at Cheltenham was one thing – after all, a horse is itself some sort of a cloven-footed animal and can be expected to add to the mayhem of an already infected country by the unhygienic way in which it pants and slobbers its way around the racecourse. It is common knowledge that the foot and mouth bug is capable of travelling for more than 64km through the air once it has been slobbered out of an animal’s mouth, and Cheltenham is deep inside England’s prime sheep belt.
But rugby is a different matter. Having shut down horseracing, on the grounds that English horses could infect their Irish counterparts and vice versa, and thus cause the epidemic to spread even further afield, the British government took the same stance when it came to allowing Welsh and Irish rugby players to participate in the annual Six Nations competition on British soil. All those nasty, slobbering fellows charging up and down the pitch with lord knows what sort of hooves hidden away inside their studded boots was considered a further health risk for a country in dire straits. The Six Nations Cup started tottering towards catastrophe.
I could have understood all this fear and loathing in the British Isles if there was a serious risk of the disease leaping from domestic herds into the human population, and causing a life-threatening epidemic. The puzzling thing is that foot-and-mouth doesn’t affect human beings at all, and even in animals it is not a fatal syndrome.
Foot and mouth has always been around. In the Third World, it is regarded as another hazard in an already tough existence. When herds are infected, the disease is usually allowed to run its course, which takes about three weeks. Thereafter the animals are fine and dandy all over again, and ready to be led to market to be sold and then eaten.
But how it happens in the Third World does not count (even though most of us live there).
The only way I can get my head around this unprecedented English crisis, which has alarm bells ringing all over the civilised world, is that it is about money.
Animal husbandry in the civilised world is not about producing food: it is about producing cash. The cloven-footed beasts that are at the centre of this current holocaust are bred, fed and monitored for the sole purpose of yielding large cash sums within a given time frame. When some get sick and then infect the rest, the market won’t take them. It’s no use asking the buyer to come back in three weeks when all will be fine.
The buyer will be off on his jet to another, healthier market across the globe and the deal will be dead.
So, in the logic of the market-driven, globalised economy, it makes more sense to kill millions of beasts that you will never eat in order to salvage some portion of what you had intended to take to the market on a given day.
In the logic of the Third World, on the other hand, looking on at these images of Armageddon on the TV screen, it looks like people in the First World have simply got money to burn.
Same as it ever was.
Archive: Previous columns by John Matshikiza