Accepting the job of deputy or vice-president (we shall call them Veeps from now on) is like agreeing to be deputy to the devil, it seems. The devil always does all the partying and gets off the hook whatever hits the fan. The devil’s deputy either gets caught with his/her pants down in a VIP situation (on the ground or in the air) or gets fired to head off the heat. The moral seems to be: either go for the main prize, or stay at home.
This has not been a great week for present or former Veeps. Dick Cheney, being the world’s most important and best-paid Veep, got the biggest headlines when he made a serious blups in what should have been a very ordinary hunting expedition that no one would otherwise ever have heard about. Jacob Zuma, our own ex-Veep, made local banner headlines when his rape trial turned into a media circus, extending ongoing speculation about his seeming sexual prowess and leading to the recusal of a second judge who, it was subliminally suggested, was complicit in the fact that the ex-Veep had bonked his sister 30 years ago, and therefore could not exercise impartial judgement.
It kind of boggles the mind. The Star nudged us towards drawing our own conclusions on the matter by further speculating that whoever finally gets the plum job of hearing this awkward rape case (billed by Zuma supporters as a carefully orchestrated smear campaign) will be white.
This, in turn, implied that all the black judges in the land, lady judges included, would somehow be tainted by too close association with the accused in one way or another-either personally, or through the proxy activities of their close relatives. Which, in turn, took us back to that old, colonial, apartheid implication that blacks just can’t help keeping on getting full of nonsense with each other, and that it takes a white man or madam to separate them, bang their heads together and send them off for their just pushment.
Talk about bringing back the past. The same reports told us that the first judge to excuse himself from getting embroiled in all this stuff, Bernard Ngoepe, was the Judge President of the Transvaal, and that the second, the one who failed to stop his sister getting bonked up by the accused three decades ago, was deputy judge president of the same province.
I had been labouring under the illusion that the Transvaal had ceased to exist some years ago. Now we were being told that it was not only still around, but was alive and kicking, headed up by Negro judges, for a change, but basically operating the same way it always had, whatever the colour of the grave and learned dudes on the Bench.
The accused, meanwhile, remained defiant, and his supporters jeered the accuser and her friends as they entered the court. Political circus it certainly was. Whatever the outcome, and whoever ends up having the unenviable job of passing final judgement on it, the truth of the matter will probably never emerge.
Way back across the stormy Atlantic, that other high-profile Veep, having sulked in defensive silence for a day, finally came clean and admitted that he had fired a shotgun filled with lead pellets into the face, neck and body of one of his best buddies in a shooting accident while ”hunting for quail”. The American comedy industry went into high gear, relieved that they could show off the Free World’s dedication to the ideal of freedom of expression in the wake of the Muslim world’s violent reaction against a bunch of feeble cartoons in a Danish newspaper supposedly vilifying the prophet Muhammad. Cartoonists in particular had a field day, and had a chance to stick the knife into the Bush administration’s general cowboy philosophy, courtesy of the Veep’s incompetence in keeping his own weapon of mass destruction under control.
Many questions remain unanswered. My only recollection of going on a hunt for birds, which took place on an island in the middle of the Zambezi river in the 1960s, was that beaters are sent ahead, to give the birds a fair chance, and cause the birds to take to the air so that the hunters can shoot at them in flight, and hopefully bag a few to take home and show off their masculinity to the people indoors.
Accounts of this particular event fail to tell us how it was that Cheney’s 78-year-old millionaire lawyer hunting companion, dressed, like the Veep, in a loud orange jacket, hunting boots, and so on, could have been mistaken by the vice-president for a quail in flight. Or is there something we haven’t been told? Was the lawyer up a tree at the time, and planning to amuse his companions by jumping down on them with loud Tarzan shrieks to bring some variety to their boring hunting expedition? Did the Veep respond with what he thought would have been the trained reaction of an American Marine in Iraq and let go with both barrels as a precaution?
However, if, as seems likely, the hapless victim was actually on the ground at the time, what was the vice-presidential party doing shooting sitting ducks, as you might say?
Does this say everything that needs to be said about the American attitude to fair play? The fact that the White House administration has remained as tight-lipped as it could, under the circumstances, makes us think that this might well be the case.