/ 21 May 2004

Chorus of dissent

Awkward questions were asked in Pretoria this week about how South Africa won its Football World Cup bid without consulting a single praise singer.

Disturbing evidence of an entirely spoken bid presentation has come to light, and speculation is rife that the bid team had neither a praise-singing contingency plan nor an emergency backup ceremonial leopard tail.

An unnamed source close to the South African Football Association said this week that he was ”pretty sure” Thabo Mbeki and Nelson Mandela ”could have strung some halalas together if things got tight” but declined to comment on why no qualified praise singers had been included in the bid team.

It was just the latest twist in the decades-long saga that has gripped filmmakers, novelists, oral historians and other degenerates over the years.

As most people know by now, the praise-singing fraternity was in tatters by the late 1990s. A splinter group, claiming that hip-hop slam oratory was the future of feudal sycophancy, and calling for a blanket ban on all similes involving elephants and thunder, split away to form the Black Liberated Azania Praise Singers’ Interim Executive, or Blapsie. Those moderates left behind, who still clung naively to iambic pentameter and refused to have their leopard tails fitted with Velcro for easy detachment, named their new association the Peoples’ Organisation of Praise Singers (Poops).

A strained truce was arranged, and despite sporadic outbreaks of purple prose and one ugly incident involving a hyperbole and a panga, it seemed that the old hostilities were over.

But last year saw a sudden upsurge in verbosity and redundancy as fresh unrest broke out when Poops demanded that the Scorpions investigate claims that Blapsie was lacing Poops jackal-skin codpieces with Deep Heat.

Just days later, Blapsie accused Poops of industrial espionage, producing surveillance footage of Poops cadres tampering with top-secret calabashes and flywhisks. In a statement that lasted just more than nine hours, Poops denied the claims, saying that just as the ant accuses the elephant of causing the thunder to roar, being small of wit, so Blapsie sought to hang a false fruit, a rotten fruit (rotten like the fruit that lies upon the ground having rotted and fallen, because it is rotten, the fruit) upon the towering branches of the baobab.

But this week the bickering came to dramatic halt as the newly formed Praise Singers’ Youth Council Head Office (Psycho) demanded to know why no card-carrying praise singers had been selected to accompany the World Cup bid team to Switzerland.

Citing its own development programme, where Young Apprentice Praise Singers (Yaps) are molded for the future, Psycho said it was outraged that the bid was awarded to the South African delegation without even a brief performance by promising Yaps.

”Our Grade Three Yaps had been preparing a short presentation for months,” said a Psycho spokes-singer. ”Now their little hearts are crying, crying like the rain when it rains.” He said the children would have read from their workbook, Sipho, Thandi and Spot Go To The Supermarket and Praise the Bag-Packers.

Meanwhile, a veteran praise singer warned his younger colleagues to pace themselves over the next few weeks. Speaking on condition of anonymity, he revealed that his own career had been ruined by an obsessive admiration for Nelson Mandela, resulting in a medical condition known as Excessive Praise Singing Over Madiba Salivary and Laryngeal Tissue Stress, or Epsom Salts.

”Halala Danny Jordaan!” he croaked. ”Halala Madiba and Thabo! Halala everybody, but let us remember that six years is a long time, long like the road that leads from the place you have been to the place you are going to, there and back again, like a road, like a snake, yebo.

”Yes, they conquered the mighty peaks of Switzerland without the crutch of Eurocentric skis, those little planks of globalisation that level the playing fields but leave deep scars behind in the pure snow. Yes, they are bringing a great treasure home, the Oscar of Oscars, the Heinz Winkler of Heinz Winklers.

”But now it is time to build like the termite. With our spit and our red sand we will build. The stadiums will be strong like a hippo, and round like the moon, and have lots of chairs like Yankee Stadium where the Yankee stalks. Nca, it will be glorious!”

Asked what the World Cup meant to him, the praise singer said he was hoping to find a job on a construction site somewhere.