The manne at the Dorsbult bar were glued to the television this week for the opening of Parliament down in the Visdorp, and they agreed that never before had a celebration of African democracy looked so like a Victorian debutante’s ball. The hats were immense, the tails starched, the soldiers dashing, the carpets red, the columns marble; but no one looked more bonny than Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, resplendent in a little electric green number. Asked by the SABC about her outfit, Dr No smiled beatifically. ”Yes, I like hats,” she said. ”They just pep you up a little bit.” Is that an official prescription? Should we be adding hats to our garlic and African potatoes? And did she wear a hat because she needs pepping up? Ag siestog.
Pucker up
We thought Vrot Snoek was a kiss-ass when he baked a melktert for his new foreman, but he’s got nothing on ANC MP Dennis Bloem, who arrived wearing a shirt with the face and name of the president emblazoned down its front. (Lemmer can only imagine the howls of condescending outrage from the revolutionary left should a Republican congressman ever pitch up on Capitol Hill in a Dubya shirt). However, you can’t keep a good sycophant down: Bloem is also apparently naming his first child Thabo. The manne are already placing bets over Mr Bloem’s first parliamentary contribution this year, and whether or not he’ll detach his lips from the president’s bottom before speaking.
Swingin’ Tony
Lemmer was fascinated to watch Tony Leon’s curious body movements as he spoke to the SABC outside Parliament. The leader of the Deeyay, the officious opposition, quickly set up a hypnotic swaying motion from left to right, as if in urgent need of a bathroom. The manne suggested he might be presenting his party’s policy vacillations in a kind of interpretive dance, but Lemmer reckons he was simply acting out the role of the opposition as defined by the government: hanging by the neck, twisting in the breeze.
Ladysmith Black Mampara
Oom Krisjan was delighted to see Ladysmith Black Mambazo winning the Grammy this week for Best World Album in the traditional music category: ever since Graceland he’s been doing Joseph Shabalala impressions in the bath (”Awa awa, empty as a pocket, with nothing to lose …”), and the manne reckon the award merely underlined what we locals have known for years. The group’s record company, Gallo Music South Africa, said in a press statement that it ”could not contain its joy when hearing the news”. But it seems it couldn’t contain its inability to spell, either: according to the first paragraph of the release, the 47th Grammy Awards were held in ”Lost Angeles”.
Better dead than read
While using the internet to research her grade six school project on dinosaurs, Lemmer’s little niece Pandemonia stumbled across the website of the Herstigte Nasionale Party. Now the last Dorsbult heard of the HNP was when old De Wet Ingilsmann-Wurger left the local party in disgust at its liberalism, and founded the Herstigte Regeformeerde Herstigte Nasional Party. Naturally there was no mention of De Wet on the website that sports powder-horns, the Vierkleur, and riveting paranoia about the black Jewish communist lesbian crack-whores who run the world. But Lemmer smelt a rat in the mission statement of the HNP’s newspaper, Die Afrikaner: ”Die Afrikaner’s news and background is a definitive alternative for thinking people who do not want to be part of the mainstream and the misled masses … (RED)”. Oom Krisjan assumes the final parenthesis indicates a ”Redakteur”, but he can’t help wondering if the commies have infiltrated even the media nerve-centre of the last outpost of the bittereinders …
We shall fight them
Winston Churchill’s grandson, named after gramps, was stunned this week over the results of a poll that suggested that 15% of British teenagers think Winston Snr is a bulldog who sells insurance on British television. ”It makes one want to despair,” said the former Tory MP, presumably chomping on a cigar and flashing V-signs about. ”How many of the younger generation know Britain was responsible for freedom in Europe today?” Yikes, Winnie, steady on. Not half a word about the tiny American contribution?
Zap! Kerpow!
Dominee ”Nogmaal Nagmaal” Naudé doesn’t come into the Dorsbult bar often, so when he strode in looking smug and banged down a copy of Die Kaapse Son, the manne were all ears. ”What have I been telling you?” he said, pointing to the headline ”Gay-dominee ontplof”. Vrot Snoek began to cry, vaguely recalling that he had drunk an awful lot the night before and had hugged nine men, telling them all that he loved them; but Naudé said that if he repented he might not immediately be exploded by divine wrath. Everyone rushed home to kiss their wives, but Lemmer remained to read on, and to find — disappointingly — that the gay dominee had merely exploded into angry words. A case of ending not with a bang but a poof.
ThisDay gone tomorrow?
While cleaning out his budgie cage, Oom Krisjan found an old issue of ThisDay from October last year, in which the editor assured his nervous readers that the newspaper’s closure was temporary, and that it would relaunch ”in the next couple of weeks”. Time flies when you’re in the red, but finally it seems the paper is set to relaunch, this time as a weekly. That is, if the Financial Services Board somehow finds the R2-million that went missing from staff pension funds, and decides not to prosecute publisher Nduka Obaigbena. Was it a case of ”why do at this ThisDay what you can put off until tomorrow”?
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