These past couple of weeks some first-rate ”moving moments” have emanated from top government circles. Not least touching of these was the most recent, a photograph published on the front page of last week’s Sunday Times, of Thabo Mbeki, dressed in a Springbok rugby jersey, his arms raised in passionate support for the national rugby side. Cynics say Mbeki lacks the common touch. His convincing impersonation of the way Nelson Mandela encouraged the triumphant 1995 World Cup rugby side puts the lie to that.
Another ”moving moment” for me was when I turned on my television set a week or so ago and listened to part of a speech Mbeki was giving at the United Nations. I didn’t stay long as I get quite enough of Mbeki from the SABC, as it is. No Auckland Park news bulletin these days seems complete without, at the very least, a couple of visits to the oracle. Like Smetana, the SABC knows which side its bride is bartered. (Pun by Frank Muir, circa 1970.)
Mbeki was particularly affecting when he spoke on behalf of people who were poor. As he was referring to African people, it tempted the parody of a famous line of Orwell’s: all African people are born equally poor, but some are more equally poor than others.
For instance, in order to speak so poignantly in the UN on the suffering associated with being poor, Mbeki had to forswear the luxury of first-class air travel. Such venality can only be afforded by the leaders of prosperous countries. Mbeki had to make do with arriving in some 18-months-old corroded claptrap of a R600-million Boeing 737-800, fitted out with 10 seats, a table and a shower at the bargain basement price of a measly R104-million.
I can just hear the anxious dialogue that took place in the Presidency as Thabs hastily strapped on his bespoke sackcloth before leaving for the UN.
”Essop, come over here. I’m shooting off to New York this time so you’ll have to do the ANC Today presidential website letter this week. If you can’t think up something original, bomb all over the putrid white racist attitudes that still infest the Democratic Alliance or the Freedom Front or anyone else we want to bad-mouth. Sprinkle the copy with words like nugatory, epistemological and sciolistic so that it looks profound and intellectual. And don’t publish it until you’ve faxed it to me for checking. I’m still dodging questions about what you wrote under my name about Grace Mugabe being the ideal candidate for African Woman of the Decade.
”Smuts, come here. Sit. What do you think of this tie? Not gaudy enough? I’ll have you know this tie is pure handspun silk. It cost the presidential clothing budget more than 7 000 rupees. No, Joel, I haven’t got the time to make statements about trivial issues like Jacob’s personal finances. Tell Bheki to dream up something prophet-like and attribute it to me. If he wants to quote me on HIV/Aids tell him to repeat anything I’ve said over the past five years. It’s all exactly the same.
”I’m sorry, gentlemen and ladies, I can’t deal with anything else now. Fish Eagle is waiting on the Waterkloof runway and even with its engines idling that mother costs two grand a minute.”
It was with an aching heart I listened to Mbeki speak to the UN and the world about the abject conditions of grinding poverty, of disease, of conflict and dispossession and having only R5-million a year allotted to the upkeep and irrigation of the presidential golf course.
Another moment so moving as to bring tears to the eyes was the statement issued by the African National Congress in response to former South African author, JM Coetzee, being awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. Bheki Khumalo, President Mbeki’s official spokes- person, took about three minutes to come out with: ”We take off our hats to salute our latest Nobel Laureate and bask with him in the glory radiating from his singular achievement.”
As the Sunday Times recalled, that was a bit different from the ANC’s submission to the Human Rights Commission a while back, which ran: ”JM Coetzee represents as brutally as he can, the white people’s perception of the post-apartheid black man … it is suggested that, in these circumstances, it might be better that our white compatriots should emigrate because to be in post-apartheid South Africa is to be in ‘their territory’, as a consequence of which the whites will lose their cars, their weapons, their property, their dignity. The white women will have to sleep with the barbaric black men.”
You can bask in that one, too, Bheki. What it seems to indicate is that Nadine is far more to the ANC’s taste.
To close: with signal grace Steve Connolly of Struik Publishers has given me permission to publish his letter in defence of Darrel Bristow-Bovey on my website: www.cockroach.co.za.