It’s good to be the king. Not that Ruddy Prince Harry will ever know. The pink Windsor, his regal epidermis eternally flaking off his sun-blasted ears, has to face a life of listless consumption, an endless round of spending and getting and meeting and forgetting.
His eyes, long since bleached from royal blue to the colour of the skies that stretch over desert truck-stops where men in dirty overalls asthmatically stuff the last few femurs of their victims into gym-bags, tell us nothing about this bleak future of pointless wealth that stretches before him.
But at least he’s in love, according to the Sunday papers. Indeed, like a Zimbabwean canned lion, his princely heart has been tracked by the Selous Scouts of amour, corralled by the helicopters of desire, and blown away by the assault-rifle of infatuation.
The huntress, herself sniped at by telephoto lenses, was declared a ”blonde beauty”, the adjective implying the noun to those knee-jerking typists who write such things. But while one is eager to give the benefit of the doubt to somebody who is not only blonde but rich, all yours truly could establish from the grainy pictures (or the parts not obscured by the Giant Red Spot of Harry’s noble pate) was some yellowish hair with dark roots showing, and a striking pair of nostrils, reminiscent of a debutante who has run headlong into a plate-glass window.
One hopes they will be happy together in their cocoon of sunscreen and whiteness, but alas genuine royal excess will forever elude them. They can sizzle on yachts in the Aegean, but they will never match the almost ascetic obscenity achieved by the Swazi monarch this week.
Which is not to say they wouldn’t feel right at home. In Swaziland, just as in Sloane Square and Kensington, one in five women are illiterate. Both realms are home to thousands of people who have never had a job. Both have a life expectancy of 39, although to be fair Swazis tend to die less from scooter accidents and liposuction complications than of HIV/Aids and preventable diseases.
So perhaps it wasn’t entirely inappropriate for King Mswati the Umpteenth to buy a R3-million car this week, a Maybach fitted with a fridge, surround-sound, and a radar system that locates 16-year-old virgins. Not that there’s anywhere to drive in Swaziland: rev and you’ve hit the border. Still, it’s important to show the people — 70% of whom live on less than a dollar a day — who’s boss.
Perhaps one day Swazis will get tired of living in the 13th century. Perhaps one day King Mswati will say ”Let them eat my dust” once too often. Perhaps on that day his subjects will decide to cut their king down to size, perhaps by about a head, with a blunt axe. But until then he provides the region’s megalomaniacs and petty godfathers with a role model.
Not that South African football apparatchiks need any encouraging. Having had its lips firmly glued to Fifa’s bottom for the past few years, Safa in the person of its president last weekend detached them with a loud smacking sound and confirmed, with the kind of fart-sniffing armpit-scratching boorishness that has become its stock in trade, that it is drunk on entitlement.
When accused of being an embarrassment by Fifa media committee member Emmanuel Maradas, Molefi Oliphant responded that Maradas had better never set foot in South Africa or he would be ”sorted out by my guys”. Now to me that sounds like the Safa president kindly offering the services of his personal pedicurist and masseur, but the killjoy Maradas heard a death threat.
Adhering to the principle that if you’re going to embarrass your country, do it properly, Sports Minister Makhenkesi Stofile waded in to wag a finger at Fifa’s apparent desire to have a say in the appointment of a tournament organiser. ”That is not the right thing in the spirit of democracy and good governance,” he said.
While this sentence was not the right thing in the spirit of grammar and articulate speech, it served to remind one that anybody who mentions democracy, good governance and Fifa in the same breath is either desperately stupid or is trying to sell something.
Either way, all concerned were missing the basic point: Fifa needs Safa like Swaziland needs a Maybach. World Cup 2010 might be signed and sealed, but how long until the trophy hunters decide to add an Oliphant head to their wall?