Despite what conspiracy theorists might be thinking, the dog poo found last week under Mangosuthu Buthelezi’s seat in Parliament was not placed there by goons in the employ of disgruntled African National Congress MPs.
Yes, the day before the incident ANC chief whip Mbulelo Goniwe had flung both his knotted panties and his toys to all corners of Parliament over what he considered Buthelezi’s attempts to stir up Zulu nationalism. And yes, the resulting scenes of Victorian horror that ensued once the noxious little Lunch Bar had been discovered did give the ruling party an opportunity to patronise Buthelezi with hugs and jovial banter. But the police have established that the guilty party was a security officer and his dog, and if the police say it, especially if it’s about their employers, it must be true.
Of course, the questions, like the bouquet of Parliament’s carpet, will linger. For instance, how exactly a highly trained sniffer dog decided to let fly while on the job. After all, these are not cynical, incontinent dachshunds idling away their autumn years between the settee and the beef stroganoff. They’re called things like Ajax and Mussolini, and have the willpower of Buddhist warrior-monks. Starve them for a week, give them a lamb chop, and with a single command you can freeze them in mid-swallow. These dogs don’t just squat when the urge arrives: they fill out a form in triplicate and provide a notarised inventory of their stomachs.
And then there’s the matter of the handler, who, according to the police, ‘did try to clean up the mess but obviously missed some”. Fair enough. But how exactly does one miss something like a soft-serve on the National Assembly’s floor, especially one on which one’s dignity and job depends? It’s not as if Alsatians eject millions of microscopic pooplets that float down unseen into the fibres of the carpet: we’re talking about a square foot of floor and a very distinctive fugitive. Oh for Tommy Lee Jones with his US Marshals — ‘The average footspeed of Alsatian poop on uneven ground is zero miles an hour, which gives us a radius of zero miles. Okay people, I want a soft-target search of every hen-house, whore-house, dog-out and out-house in a zero mile radius. Especially the dog-houses and the out-houses —”
Of course, Marshal Jones would have been denied another successful conviction: no action is being taken against the apparently blind, nasally congested, desperately negligent handler. Parliament is indeed forgiving. Or else it can’t risk another stink, this time from the handler, if he were dismissed (as he should have been if this is all true) for a crime he didn’t commit.
But all this is pure speculation, the stuff of paranoid reactionaries, and right-thinking people buy none of it. Besides, one never knows when an acting judge, inspired by party dogma about unpatriotic journalism, will descend and leave one’s column a mass of blacked-out text. So in the interests of harmony, I’m wholeheartedly endorsing the official story, and hope the whole affair brings us closer to a new understanding of the sanitary rights of dogs.
After all, the cause of the furore was the attitude, endorsed by some African cultures, that the dog is the lowest form of life. Interestingly, in many 18th-century European cultures, Africans were the lowest form of life. This was because Europeans hadn’t ever bothered to get to know any Africans, and perhaps one day Africans will get around to investigating their own cultural prejudices by acquiring a dog.
It’s a long shot, of course. Developing societies need all the self–confidence they can get, and dogs aren’t good for the ego: nothing like spending years in therapy trying to get a handle on loyalty, tolerance, courage, camaraderie, joy and empathy, only to discover that one’s new puppy has mastered all those things in four months by simply chewing tennis balls and digging holes in the garden.
What a dog show.