I have to admit that I know very little about Harry Potter, except that he is somehow connected to the British royal family, whose fortunes are apparently tied up with those of the Bush dynasty in the United States of America.
From what I can surmise from hasty scans of the media, young Potter is something of a magician prince who can turn dross into gold, and defeat the forces of evil wherever they might be, by whatever means necessary. Which sounds very modern and appropriate to the times in which we live.
Anyway, the gutter press (which accounts for most of what is out there on the streets) has been focusing on this Harry Potter character, probably out of a sense of relief that there is at least one white fantasy to replace the debunked myth of one Happy Sindane, lately cast (here in South Africa at least) as the successor to the Dulux dog, with somewhat unfortunate results.
It has cost the Dulux company lank bucks to make up for appropriating Happy’s unhappy story for their insatiable publicity machine. But it has cost the world community much more, in my opinion, in failing to stand up and take notice of a tremendously complex human dilemma.
To return to the Harry Potter theme: the Sunday papers focused on more of this mythical fantasy territory this past week.
“Prince William drums African sound” said one of the headlines.
It took me a while to work out who this Prince William was. We have a lot of princes in our own part of the world, some of whom might be called William. The suggestion was that there is only one Prince William worthy of attention. And that, of course, turned out to be the late Princess Diana’s eldest son, currently coming of age (whatever that means) and somewhere or other in line to take his place on the English throne.
“Wills plays it cool,” one paper said (to pictures of Prince William drumming along with a Ghanaian band in Windsor or somewhere). And “He’s got rhythm” (supporting the same dodgy picture) is how South Africa’s biggest Sunday spread put it across on their front page, immediately above a tiny picture of President Thabo Mbeki teeing off on the golf range. The juxtaposition was interesting.
So I guess a lot of us just had to get it: Prince William (i.e. Harry Potter’s real-life alter-ego) rules the world, just like Tarzan did before him.
But there was something that struck me that none of the media appeared to pick up on: the striking resemblance between Prince William, the pink-cheeked, bongo-drumming heir to the English throne, and our own light brown, beleaguered Happy Sindane of Mpumalanga. Here, I thought as I watched the late night news, is a clue to the mystery that is plaguing the whole world: who (or what) is Happy? Has he actually got a point?
Dulux Paints had bought into the idea that Happy could be one thing or the other, colour wise: black or white, pink or yellow, who cares? For which they have had to pay a considerable penalty, since you do not say such things with impunity these days in South Africa, of all places. Paint is one thing, people is another.
But I was more inclined to be on the side of the thinking of the Dulux people, and indeed with Happy himself, for a particular reason.
As I have said before: Happy represents a modern re-interpretation of old stories that are familiar to us all: the lost heir who returns to claim the kingdom.
He has been ridiculed in the cafés, shebeens and pubs of South Africa since his status as the lost son of a lower-middle class white family has come into disrepute (although it’s not all over yet).
But what if his claims were valid, and we are just not ready to understand exactly what he means (since he grew up as a herd boy in Mpumalanga)?
What if, after all, he turns out to be a direct descendant, through some extraordinary route, of the Queen of England herself? What if he is, after all, the unmentioned brother of Prince William, who he so much resembles, smuggled out of Windsor Castle not so many years ago and lost in the forests of Mpumalanga, to be brought up by native peasants?
And what if all this came back to him in a dream, which is what made him run away from the good rural folk who had reared him, and betray them to the police and the gullible press?
Happy bears a far closer resemblance to Prince William of Windsor than to any of the local whites who have claimed him as their own. His features, to begin with, are far more aristocratic than theirs, putting their very pedigree in doubt anyway. Why should he settle for second best?
I would put my money on him if he were to make the far more serious claim of being part of the British royal family. The problem is that he seems to lack the right kind of advisers to help him push this claim—people who could sense a good story, if nothing else, and the ludicrous amounts of money that come behind it, even if the claim is finally proven to be false.
There are people who hang around Fleet Street (or what’s left of it) who do nothing but sniff out stories of this kind and milk them for all they are worth.
They completely missed the opportunity of linking the rhythmic drumming of Prince Wills at his birthday party with the emergence of his dusky half-brother from Mpumalanga, Africa, and go the further mile of attributing his discovery to the magical powers of Harry Potter (now there’s a sequel for you).
One can only hope that my distant howl from the wilderness will bring them to their senses and finally put this sorry episode to rest.
But one never know, do one?
John Matshikiza is a fellow of the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research
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