Now, the Oom’s memory is longer than a Kruger elephant’s stream of piss, but even he was stretched by some claims made this week by our very own RW ”Cecil John” Johnson.
The South African-born former Oxford academic and former director of the Helen Suzman Foundation offered his take on Africa in a distinguished daily business paper this week. First he expressed sadness at the current Liberian crisis, but this proved to be a mere flexing of his intellectual pecs as he limbered up to tackle his larger theme: What Is Wrong With Africa?
The entire continent’s history is actually very simple, the manne were riveted to read: precolonial anarchy (because the darkies were left to themselves), sublime colonial peace and order (the darkies in their place), now anarchy again (the darkies trying to run the show).
Not quite the way the Oom and his extensive ancestry remember it all, but that could just be the mampoer, he thought, as he moved in a daze to RW’s central diagnosis: ”As much of Africa reverts to precolonial chaos African countries are quietly shelving the old rhetoric of anticolonialism and are asking to have the old colonial order back again.” Really? When did they make this surely watershed request? And how did the flood of invitations from anarchic Africa to the peaceful north escape the attention of the Dorsbult?
But the Oom is comforted to know that all those deluded heads of state at last month’s African Union indaba in Maputo must be out of the loop as well. And he is sure Thabo Mbeki has been on the phone urgently to Cecil John to get it all explained to him.
Doctor who?
Back in the days when movies were fillums and the local videoshop was a bioscope, Julie Christie was what got Oom Krisjan into the dorp every Saturday night. That haughty blue-eyed stare, that glorious blonde hair, that wonderful British accent … oh, ja, I’m meant to be telling you about her sidekick in Dr Zhivago.
Omar Sharif, whose other big hit was also opposite a beautiful, blue-eyed English blond (Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia), has fallen on hard times. After the strains of Lara’s Theme faded from public memory, Sharif became a world-class bridge player, but his penchant for cards and horses lost him most of his earnings. He’s admitted that losses of up to £75 000 a night caused him to agree to make some terrible films.
But, throughout, his image was one of the suave, reserved gentleman, so Lemmer was shocked to hear that he’s been convicted of head-butting a police officer at a casino near Paris. Sharif (71), apparently got into an argument with a croupier while in the process of losing â,¬30 000 (if the shrub-editor who prunes this column doesn’t convert that to rands, rest assured that its a helluva lot of tickeys) in a high-stakes game of roulette. The croupier called the police and Sharif became even angrier, culminating in a Liverpool kiss on the gendarme.
Strange bedfellows
Journalists are always using the imagery of a sexual liaison to describe the toenadering between political parties. So Lemmer will be interested to see how many rightwing boers will be willing to ”get into bed” with the new Death Penalty Party of South Africa.
For the DPPSA is the Gay and Lesbian Alliance (GLA) in a new guise. From claiming to lobby for gay rights to advocating the death penalty, the GLA’s controversial leader Juan-Duval Uys (also now überqueer of the DPPSA) says his new party will contest the 2004 election at national level.
And, Uys insisted, gay and lesbians’ needs would still be served — as long as they supported the death penalty — in the new party’s ”lesbigay league”.
Ill-disciplined
The pinnacle of the Oom’s intellectual attainments, as Dorsbult regulars are weary of hearing him say every time Professor Kader Asmal appears on TV, came in the 1962 Groot Marico chicken-shearing qualifiers, when he edged out the Marico’s finest and produced the closest-cropped bird in the fastest time since the contest began two centuries ago. And damn proud he is of that, too.
So it was with a sense of fellow-feeling that he hushed some early morning visitors to the bar when he heard a university academic being introduced on radio who promised to reveal the fruit of her research into those blood-thirsty desperadoes whose main gainful employment is cash-in-transit heists. The academic had interviewed some of these bandits, and the recent upsurge in these especially homicidal onslaughts gave the radio interview a timely edge. Lemmer assured the respectful regulars that all would now be revealed. The manne noticed the first furrows on the Oom’s sage brow appearing when the academic proposed that the culprits resent discipline. After all, morality and legality aside, those heists surely take highly concentrated and coordinated planning, and for success discipline would appear to be essential.
But Oom Krisjan’s furrows cleared when the scholar soared over this first hurdle with contemptuous ease: ah, but they resent exercising such discipline while they are doing so. Right, to the crucial question, then: why, oh why, do these thugs do it? Because they believe they need the money, apparently.
Oom is off to the local university believing, ”It’s chicken-shearing school for you, my son.”
Not pretty in pink
There are some respected papers in the world printed on pink newsprint — the Financial Times and Gazetto della Sport spring to mind — but it’s not something that’s ever caught on in South Africa. So Oom Krisjan was a bit surprised to see last weekend’s Independent on Saturday in piesangland covered in a rosy wash. Was it an attempt to attract more gay readers? An unfortunate accident at the printers?
No, it was the baked bean king’s half-baked idea of celebrating Women’s Day. Little boys in blue, little girls in pink; how progressive and appropriate.