Sitting and thinking
A message from the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts , which met in Gaborone, Botswana, from February 18 to 22, has pointed out that Lemmer missed an important date on February 22 — World Thinking Day.
Luckily, that Saturday was also the day of Oom Schalk Lourens’s party. As everyone knows, nothing makes you think harder than Oom Schalk’s special home-made peach brandy, which flowed in inexhaustible quantities. All over the house and the grounds people were thinking. One ou was sitting on the floor in the passage, holding his head in his hands, thinking. Another was leaning on his arm against the jacaranda tree outside, thinking. He was thinking so hard that every few minutes he moaned softly from the effort: ”Oh God, oh God.” In the bathroom one of the guests had his head in the toilet bowl, his bloodshot face showing how hard he was thinking.
A couple of the kêrels at the party found it was easier to think in a pair, their arms around each other’s shoulders. ”Try to balance,” one of them told the other, who was thinking so hard he could barely stand up.
So although we didn’t know it at the time, it’s nice to reflect now that we here in the Marico played our part on World Thinking Day.
That caps it
Lemmer is a little disappointed in former Mozambican first lady Graça Machel, now married to our beloved Madiba. She’s the chancellor at the University of Visdorpie, a largely ceremonial role that requires very little from the incumbent except a short message for the Rag magazine and to turn up for graduation week to ”cap” the students.
It seems, however, that even these minor duties are a bit too much of an obligation for a woman who makes a great deal of noise about caring about the youth. She missed all of the graduation ceremonies in December 2001 and was present at just one last December (on that occasion she brought her husband with her). Strangely enough, her son was graduating that night.
Despite several calls over the past week, the University of Cape Town cannot get around to sending Lemmer any facts to dispute this rumour.
Winnie’s secret
Speaking of Madiba’s wives, one of Oom Krisjan’s spies reports from New York that Winnie Madikizela-Mandela also failed to impress at a university last week. The Mother of the Nation was invited by the Students of African Descent at Columbia University to give a talk to coincide with Black History month.
There was some intense hero-worshipping taking place, with repeated exclamations of ”You are the greatest woman in the world”, from an adoring audience when she arrived.
But despite an interesting speech that showed an academic side to Winnie not previously seen (perhaps, whisper it, she didn’t write it?), which included an argument for Afrocentric knowledge, her audience felt short-changed when it ended after only 20 minutes. She then had to be strongly persuaded to take questions, which she did for five minutes. Then she refused to attend a reception organised by the South African consulate.
She and her bodyguard, who it turns out is the husband of her granddaughter, had other priorities: to go shopping. And Lemmer hears they spent a lot of dollars at a certain retail store in downtown Manhattan by the name of Victoria’s Secret!
Nuts up north (#39)
It seems having all the seats bar one on the Harare city council presents the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) with some unique challenges. In a newsletter dated November 5 last year, the MDC mayor describes: ”… the new council’s challenge to restore stakeholder confidence, order and lunacy, albeit under very hostile conditions”.
War of words
South Africans marched against war this month, but Lemmer regrets to say the protesters left their collective sense of humour at home. So here’s a couple of
Oom’s favourite placards from a corresponding march in Britain: ”Don’t mess with Mesopotamia”; ”Stop Mad Cowboy Disease”; ”A village in Texas has lost its idiot”; ”Born to kill. Born to drill”; and Lemmer’s favourite: ”Make tea, not war”.
Co-opting Cosatu
When the labour movement complains there is a communciation problem between it and the government, you’d better believe it. The Congress of South African Trade Unions’s fiscal, monetary and public sector policy coordinator Neva Makgetla’s eyes nearly popped out when she received an invite to Telkom’s intial public share offering scheduled for March 7.
Considering that Cosatu has been fighting privatisation for a good part of its existence, Makgetla thought someone at the Department of Public Enterprises was trying to pull her leg. Nope. The invitation was followed by a phone call to confirm her attendance.
All ears
Oom Krisjan was greatly bemused over his dop when told of the African National Congress-led Cape Town’s ”City Listening Campaign” to sound out what Joe Bloggs or Sipho Dlamini and Jane Doe or MaZungu think.
Ironically, just over a year ago the ANC loudly and viciously complained about the provincial Democratic Alliance-led Ears Campaign, in terms of which MECs were to meet and listen to the Cape’s ordinary folk.
What remains to be seen is whether the city will use the posters (costing a substantial sum) dreamed up by a PR company and centred on the ears of each MEC.
And the role of the New National Party in all of this: in support — both times.
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