Mail & Guardian Online readers who believe that entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth will soon be travelling to Mars on a Nasa space mission have a long wait ahead of them. The M&G Online received several e-mails about this April Fool’s Day joke on Thursday — with some readers proudly saying they weren’t caught, and others thanking the website for such an ”exclusive” story.
Most other publications in South Africa also made use of the opportunity to fool their readers. Charlize Theron to turn a beachfront children’s hospital into a luxury mansion, the shock sacking of Bafana Bafana’s new coach, and champion high jumper Hestrie Cloete being forced to return a gold medal were some of the pranks pulled in the old newspaper tradition of trying to trick readers on April Fool’s Day.
Afrikaans daily Beeld announced that Cloete would have to return the medal she won at the World Athletics Championships in Paris last year because her high school team had not fulfilled the quota requirements introduced to ensure proper racial representation.
Her medal would be given to someone else on the basis of ”merit” with an athletics boss saying: ”Since when is it only how high you can jump that counts?”, wrote Frikkie Falstaff.
Sports jokes continued with the Sowetan announcing that newly appointed Bafana Bafana coach Stuart Baxter had been sacked because of public pressure, and The Star reporting that England coach Sven Goran Eriksson would replace him. He would arrive in President Thabo Mbeki’s private jet and his girlfriend, Nancy Dell’Olio, keen to get away from his former girlfriend, would take over Felicia Mabuza-Suttle’s show, which was canned earlier this year, the newspaper said.
Durban’s Mercury newspaper reported that Oscar-winning, Benoni-born actress Charlize Theron was to turn the Addington Children’s hospital into a Hollywood-style mansion for herself.
She would spend R100-million on the prime 5ha beachfront property and would turn the Victorian building into a luxury 10-bedroom home with retractable roof and helipad because, according to her publicist Martin Fibbs, Durban was like ”Benoni-by-the-sea”.
The Cape Times treated its readers to the first use of stretchy newsprint designed to reduce the number of trees needed to produce pulp. By placing their thumbs on designated spots on the page, readers could stretch the stories. Newspapers would eventually fit into the palm of a hand with the reader stretching the relevant story to readable size.
Recently launched ThisDay announced that the visages of four prominent South Africans would be sculpted into Table Mountain to create a South African version of the United States’s Mount Rushmore.
East London’s Daily Dispatch reported that South Africans would start driving on the right-hand side of the road in an effort to boost tourism and the export of right-hand drive vehicles.
The Pretoria News had former Transvaal Republic president Paul Kruger leaving his pedestal in the city’s Church Square to make way for an African-style market to bring more life into the inner city.
The normally serious Business Day had a story written by ”Marata Helele” (”gossipmonger” in Sotho), reporting investor concern against a new rule that would allow companies to exclude losses in divisions that ”do not try”.
The Citizen had the Democratic Alliance’s Tony Leon insisting on ”cheap-generic anti-radiation medication cocktails” for all South Africans as protection against lethal gamma rays produced during geomagnetic shifts in Southern Africa.
Some newspapers such as Durban’s Daily News, Pietermaritzburg’s Witness and the best-selling Sun did not have an April fool’s joke.
”Our joke is that we didn’t have a joke. That’s just how it turned out this year,” said Witness news editor Reggie Khumalo.
However, some newspapers bravely wrote stories that had their readers calling in to check whether the story was true.
Cape-based Die Burger reported that Minister of Health Manto Tshabalala-Msimang — who it dubbed ”Dr Garlic” after her recent endorsement of garlic as a weapon against HIV/Aids — had been sacked because Mbeki was ”sick and tired” of a rash of embarrassing public displays and that there were rumblings of discontent over the constant smell of garlic at Cabinet meetings.
April Fool’s Day has its origins in the introduction of the Gregorian calendar in France in 1562, which changed New Year from the end of March to January. The news was slow to reach everyone and people who didn’t know about it, or rejected it, were scorned and became the brunt of practical jokes on the ”fools”.
The tradition of playing jokes at that time of the year, which is spring and a time of gaiety in Europe, spread. French children took to pinning paper fish on to their friend’s backs and yelling ”Poisson d’Avril” (April Fish) and the Scottish refined it to become a day of jokes about the bottom.
The tradition also coincides with the Hilu festival in India on March 31, where revellers celebrate the arrival of spring by smearing each other’s faces with coloured paint.
Read our April Fool’s Day story