Settle down, learners. You’ve been very naughty today and so I’m going to punish you by telling you the fascinating tale of Thabob Mugabeki and the Grateful Passings of Wind.
Once upon a time, there was a magical fairyland called South Khrazania, which was under the baffled rule of a group of deranged control-freaks calling themselves the Association of Nepotists and Cronies. In control of the ANC was an elitist cabal of fabulously wealthy fairies and pixies and ministers and dwarves and elves and trades union leaders and flibbertigibbets and commissars and gremlins and comrades and imps and pigwigeons, all of whom were hopeless addicts. They couldn’t get through two hours of any day without appearing on the South Khrazanian Broadcasting Corporation’s television news programmes so as to tell everyone how marvellous they were. In this they were encouraged by a very special buttercup-goblin called Snookums, otherwise known as Lord Hau-Hau.
In general and benign super-vision of the ANC was a poetic super-troll called Thabob Mugabeki the Remote. He was Supreme Leader, King of the Hill, Writer in-and-out-of Residence and Defender of the Health Minister. Thabob Mugabeki the Remote lived under an auspiciously mock-colonial bridge called the Union Buildings, from where he could dart out to frighten passing Europeans.
Not only was Thabob Mugabeki remote, he was so intellectually gifted, few could even pretend to comprehend the wisdom he generously let spill from his lips. Some said Thabob Mugabeki was actually a sorcerer. Some said he was plain goofy, three piss-ups short of an imbizo. Some said he was called remote because he was forever jetting off in his enchanted 737-800 luxury bedchamber so as to bring a better life for all down-trodden people in far-off countries. A flying sorcerer, as it were.
One of the minor hiccups in Thabob Mugabeki’s otherwise exemplary democratic administration was someone called King Robert the Psychopath, the gruesome killer-monarch of a neighbouring land. King Robert the Psychopath was an example to anyone who could bear to look his way without vomiting from fear. Every day King Robert would demonstrate the techniques of what he called Advanced Zim-bology. One of these was that, should any one of his subjects forget to clap, leap up and down and shout for joy as King Robert the Psychopath’s motorcade swept by, he would be fallen upon by a gang of drug-maddened policemen and clubbed to death. King Robert’s subjects didn’t find this at all unusual as they were quite used to being clubbed to death for not starving quickly enough.
Things got so very happy in King Robert’s land that even Lord Hau-Hau suggested that Thabob Mugabeki should ask King -Robert to slow down his traditional destruction of his land just a little. He should tell his policemen and soldiers to obey the latest African Union guidelines and only rape girls over the age of seven.
But Thabob Mugabeki stuck to his arms deal. He point blank refused to join in with the global condemnation of King Robert the Psychopath. Thabob Mugabeki said that the longer King Robert remained sprawled on his gold-encrusted throne, the more tips he would get on how to deal with -certain dangerous undemocratic elements in his own country. Like the Free State -Agricultural Union.
It was in the middle of a particularly drippy winter that things seemed to slither off the rails for Thabob Mugabeki. He had been off on a Rainbow Travel Budget Special Off-Peak Five-Day-Seven-Red–Carpets official state visit tour.
Thabob was having a private banquet-lunch with the Acting Deputy Prime Minister of East Murkytania when suddenly his cellphone started ring-toning the Grand March from Aida. (All modern Third-World leaders like to display these little cultural -acknowledgements when they’re looking for investments.)
The cellphone brought worrying news. While Thabob -Mugabeki had been away from South Khrazania there has been a massive shifting of the tectonic plates under Thabob’s bridge, resulting in an overwhelming Tzumani in which a populist Zulu pretender to Thabob’s leadership had snatched power. Making appropriate apologies, Thabob gulped down the last of his Coconut Splendide, grabbed an unopened bottle of 50-year-old Glenfiddich as a weapon, and raced back to his 737-800 luxury -bedchamber. In minutes he was winging his swift way home, his face set in grim determination.
When Thabob Mugabeki got home he found out what we all now know. No massive tectonic shifting had ever taken place. The whole thing about the Tzumani was a subtle hoax, set up by Thabob Mugabeki’s spin-traditional healer, Joel-the-Know-All, as a way to lure the white-owned South Khrazanian media mambas on to another of their racist platforms.
That night there was a grateful passings of winds.
Those of you learners who have been paying attention instead of trying to stoke up this batch of very poor grade tik-tik we’ve been sent will have suspected that there’s a moral to this touching story. As I haven’t the faintest idea of what this moral might be, learners will have to work one out for themselves.
If you get stuck, phone up Mr Kader Asmal. He can detect a felicitous moral anywhere.