“Dreadlocks are very clean,” said Bunny, shimmering with filth. His stench formed a tangible brown aura, a pulsating cocoon of throat-clutching pong that orbiting flies either bounced off or burned up in.
His pants crackled when he moved, starched with the satanic mayonnaise that drips off the cellar walls of French penal colonies. Majestic herds of lice grazed on the Serengeti of his chest-hair.
He introduced himself and told me he was a Rastafarian. I told him that I was astounded, that I had assumed he was a barrister.
Rastafarians like to be called Rastafari. This inability to remember the fifth syllable is the result of a medical condition called ‘smoking weed from the time one can inhale”.
A die-hard few still cling on in Ethiopi, the Rasta motherland, but sadly their numbers are dwindling in Lithuani and Nicaragu.
On the whole Rastafari are unflappable. Drive over their shins in downtown Cape Town and they shrug, seeing the bone-fragments in your Pirellis as the specks of humanity in the great wheel of Jah’s love. Set fire to their hair, and they will admire the Catherine-wheel effect of hundreds of burning fleas jumping clear.
In fact, unless one is proposing to outlaw pre-pubescent ordeal-by-dope initiation ceremonies, it is difficult to rouse them to any kind of excitement at all.
But this week the Olympic Torch is in Cape Town, and if anything will get Bunny hopping it is the sight of what seems to be a huge smoldering silver bong coming his way, held aloft by a posse of upstanding citizens.
This is by far the most famous faggot to pass through the city, and all the stops have being pulled out. Last week Sarel van Deventer, the city’s representative for the Delft Local Organisation Committee, revealed to Sapa that ‘the Delft community, specifically schools and community organisations” would embark on a clean-up campaign along the torch’s route.
Heads are certain to roll in the Cape Town sanitation department. Why, director Blikkies Rommel wants to know, have we not been using schoolchildren for years? You can pay them in Marie biscuits and they’ll go into tricky little places that regular sanitation workers won’t, such as gutters and parks.
Delft is rightly named after its Netherlandic forebear. Both are perennially soggy, the inhabitants facing submersion every time it drizzles. Both huddle against freezing winds blowing straight off an icecap. If the flame of international fair play still gutters dimly after Delft, its further survival should be a doddle. Unless someone drops it overboard en route to Robben Island.
In fact, a carefully timed fumble by the starboard railing, 10 minutes out of port, might be a good idea for those who don’t want to have to figure out how to look dignified and sombre while succumbing to meths-fumes and toxic smoke in a tiny airless cell.
Somehow I managed to miss the process of deciding which worthies were going to hike through the muddy polders of Delft and all the rest. If he’d been conscious, Bunny would almost certainly have voted for Haile Selassie, Supreme Emperor of Ethiopia and The World (in fact, ruler of everything not already governed by Field Marshall and King of Scotland, Idi Amin).
I don’t know who has been ordained to accept the flame on behalf of Cape Town and South Africa, but it isn’t cartoonist Zapiro. Perhaps the Greeks are still sore about his 2000 cartoon in which a bergie spoke for the nation, hissing ‘Athens se ma se p**s!” over a papsak.
That image, and the way it was clutched to the bosom of the people, neatly demonstrated that the country was in no state emotionally or intellectually to host anything more than a baby shower. But journalism, like love, means never having to say you’re sorry.
In the end it should be stately affair. Dignitaries under umbrellas, ankle-deep in last week’s sports section and unsold peaches (where are those damned Delft kids when you need them?) will huddle over the Olympic Cauldron, warming themselves with Zippo lighters as they wait.
Bunny will rouse himself from his slumbers under a wheelbarrow to ask what gives.
Zapiro has a deadline, and so no one is there to yell obsecenities as the flame arrives, fizzing, although Bunny gives a fine rendition of Buffalo Soldier.
The rain is heavier now, and in the cauldron the cubes of Blitz have started floating.