The Brand South Africa campaign is, from what Lemmer gathers, meant to make you feel all warm and fuzzy about our country. Why then does it make Oom Krisjan all hot and bothered.
Maybe it’s because of what happened to Oom’s good friend Evita Bezuidenhout. Since Tannie Evita’s ”Bapetikosweti” disappeared along with the rest of the apartheid jigsaw puzzle the grand dame of South African politics has turned her talents to a much more worthy cause: trying to inform people about Aids.
This has made her even more famous and well-loved, but put her at odds with some in the government (notably the president and a couple of health ministers) who continue to play ostrich on Aids.
A few months ago the Brand South Africa lot decided to make a TV advert, roping in many of the country’s biggest celebrities and icons. Naturally, Tannie Evita was invited — along with Madiba, the Arch, Baby Jake Matlala, David Kramer and others.
(When rumours of this big event made it to the Dorsbult Lemmer spent several days waiting for a call from the producers, which sadly never came.)
The two-minute ad had a budget of more than R8-million, so it wasn’t unusual that the producers agreed to trek off to Nelspruit (where she was informing the lowvelders about the joys of safe sex) to film onse Evita. They descended on the dorp as though they were about to make the latest in the Harry Potter series. They set up a chroma background so that they could later slot in the Union Buildings as a backdrop and filmed Tannie Evita’s line: ”And the laughter!”
So Oom Krisjan was rather surprised when he finally got to see the grand opus on TV that he couldn’t spot Tannie — not in Nelspruit, not in the Union Buildings, nowhere.
It appears that Mrs Bezuidenhout’s efforts remained on the cutting room floor because the word came from somewhere on high that Pieter-Dirk Uys, Tannie’s friend and confidant, is ”anti-government” and couldn’t be part of a pro-South African commercial!
When history repeats itself it takes tragedy and turns it into farce.
Citizen caned
One of the perils of working in the media (or on the fringes of it … OK, spending a lot of time in a pub frequented by those working in the media) is that you can often be taken in by members of the public.
Last week The Citizen published a letter from one Mohammed Saeedhal Sahhaf, who purported to be a speechwriter for the Ministry of Health, attacking all and sundry for daring to criticise the government’s Aids plans. He even went so far as to say that ”Aids does not exist”.
The next day the newspaper assured us that the letter was a jest and tried to convince us that they’d known all along that the supposed author, Sahhaf, was none other than the former Iraqi information minister, better known as Comical Ali.
Hew and cry
Lemmer is curious to know whether Sahhaf has taken refuge in Kimberley. Daar in die noord Kaap, water and electricity bills are accompanied by a one-page newsletter, Sol Plaatjie Calls. The June 2003 edition saluted the youth of South Africa with these words: ”To all of us, the 16th June is regarded as the day the youth of this country demonstrated their collective will and bravity when they declared war on a system of education that sought to turn them into hewers of water and drawers of wood.”
Hotel Raj
You can’t keep a good politician down, just ask Winnie. The manne had a lekker lag recently when reading the piesangland auditor general’s report on the goings-on in the KwaZulu-Natal legislature. One of the points brought up was that several MPLs were living at the Holiday Inn in Ulundi rather than in flats allocated to them in the town.
Among those enjoying hotel accommodation at the taxpayers’ expense was the old Bengal Tiger himself, Amichand Rajbansi. When questioned by the auditor general’s team, Rajbansi revealed that he had popped into his flat once but had found clothes hanging in the closet. He deduced that his flat had been occupied and decided to seek refuge in the Holiday Inn.
Love the bomb
Lemmer would like to direct readers to www.coxar.pwp.blue yonder.co.uk, a spook website about the United States’s inability to locate weapons of mass destruction. This site, created in February by Birmingham pharmacist Anthony Cox, has become one of the biggest hits on the Internet. It’s getting more than a million visits a week — so popular that if you type in ”weapons of mass destruction” in the Google search box and enter ”I’m feeling lucky” it will direct you there.
The site, designed to look like a genuine error message — replete with ”bomb” icon — informs you that ”these Weapons of Mass Destruction cannot be displayed”. It suggests your country ”might be experiencing technical difficulties, or you may need to adjust your weapons inspector’s mandate”.
It tells you to click the ”bomb” button ”if you are Donald Rumsfeld”. In a delusional moment Oom Krisjan clicked said button and was directed to the Amazon.co.uk page offering a DVD version of Stanley Kubrick’s classic 1963 anti-war film Doctor Strangelove.
The ”Detect Weapons” icon takes you to an Amazon page offering a book by humorist Hart Seely, purporting to be a collection of Rumsfeld’s poetry (collected from his speeches). Cox told Reuters he had created the site merely to amuse his family and friends and was surprised at how news of it had spread around the world.
He’s done a similar lampoon of The New York Times with regard to the reporter Jayson Blair, who was fired for making up his stories www.coxar.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/ blair.html.
Readers wishing to alert Oom Krisjan to matters of national or lesser importance can do so at [email protected]