‘Fee, fi, fo, fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman!†says the gruesome giant at the top of the fairy tale beanstalk, referring to the intrepid boy Jack, who has come to seek his fortune in this unlikely place up in the clouds.
There is also Shakespeare’s Macbeth, who ends up literally wallowing in blood. ‘Blood will have blood,†he says broodingly, having murdered his sleeping regent, as well as his pal Banquo, and numerous other innocents standing in his path to absolute power.
Later on, when the chips are down, he makes the comment: ‘I am in blood stepped in so far, that should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er.†And his wife, Lady Macbeth, has gone bonkers at the thought of how much blood she and her old man have spilled for the sake of political ambition. ‘Who would have thought the old man would have had so much blood in him?†she asks of no one in particular. And, of course, the famous line, widely misquoted: ‘Here’s the smell of blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.â€
Blood is also used in supposedly more uplifting fashion in other contexts. ‘There are they which came out of great tribulation,†it says in the Bible, ‘and have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.†The ‘Lamb†being Jesus Christ, I suppose. (And I suppose we still generally believe that Jesus was a white man.)
Blood is a perennial metaphor, in all kinds of literature, for the well-being or otherwise of humanity, such as it is. No surprise. Without blood, we’re dead.
Blood has popped up as another kind of metaphor, with knobs on, in the fairy tale politics of South Africa last week. It started with the shock revelation that the blood of the president himself had been rejected as unsuitable for human consumption by the nation’s overworked blood transfusion agency.
Thabo had dutifully gone to set an example to the nation by giving blood at a blood-donating facility. He failed to fill out some bureaucratic forms describing his lifestyle, habits, and general medical history (Why should he, anyway? He’s the president) but they somehow found out that, oh, no, he was not just the president, he was a black man. So they automatically rejected his blood, apparently without even checking whether it was any good in the first place. His blood was thrown straight into the incinerator.
So all sorts of startled, yellow journalism investigations sprang up, in the course of which it was revealed that not only the president’s, but all blood loyally donated by black South Africans was being headed off at the pass, so to speak, and chucked down the drain.
With the levels of slaughter that this country excels in, from domestic violence to road carnage to random acts of madness and brutality, blood transfusion is an urgent and perennial necessity.
As in the world of Macbeth and his missus, more blood is spilled round here than can easily be replaced from existing stocks. So all sorts of campaigns are mounted, urging patriotic members of the rainbow nation to give blood till it hurts.
The alarming thing about these recent revelations is that they suggest that the majority portion of the rainbow, being black, is not regarded as fit to respond to these campaigns in any case.
And so the blood transfusion services, having gone to all the trouble of filling out forms and sticking needles in people’s arms and drawing their precious life blood into big plastic bottles, have actually been wasting everybody’s time.
The underlying theme is that it begins to smack of the old apartheid days, only practised with a tad more discretion. Instead of sticking up signs in the waiting rooms of the blood transfusion services that say ‘No Blacks Allowedâ€, the national blood donor agencies appear to go through the motions, put us all through the trauma and fainting spells that go with the territory, pull out the needle, put on a plaster, give us a Fanta, smile, and tell us to go away.
(This does not necessarily only happen to darkies, by the way. I am told by a lily-white colleague that if you try to give blood in the United States and make the mistake of admitting that you have spent some time in the Dark Continent, you are bluntly told to fuck off.)
So once again, being African, or being in any way connected to Africa, becomes a humiliating experience. Unless you are white and actually living in South Africa. In which case your ego is boosted by the fact that it is your blood, and only your blood, that can be used to save lives under the conditions that I have described above.
One does not necessarily dispute the findings of the scientists who have discovered exceptionally high levels of HIV infection in members of the black community. (In fact, this is the scariest part of what these revelations have uncovered.) But the same findings have also revealed increasing levels of infection in the white, Indian and coloured populations that have so far been put higher up on the pecking order of blood exploitation.
Being a layperson, rather than a nurse, a doctor or a scientist, I had always assumed that blood was tested after a blood donation has been made — not before. I had thought that infected blood was rejected not on the grounds of race, but of quality control.
If Thabo’s shabby experience at the hands of the blood transfusion service is anything to go by, this is not the case. Quality control happens up front. If you’re black, your blood is automatically jacked.
(Hey, but imagine waking up after your operation with a white person’s blood coursing through your veins. Surely you feel and see things differently. But we won’t go into that now.)
Like the gruesome giant said: ‘I smell the blood of an Englishman.†I guess that means it was good blood, worth waiting for.