If a writer called Someone Somebody were to publish a political satire of the African National Congress administration’s performance since 1999, such a publication would quite probably be ridiculed as being a travesty of the truth. It’s easy to imagine the responses from literary critics. In some worthy journal, like the redoubtable London Review of Books, an authentic Bloomsbury tea-cup rattler like Merridew Finecker would comment:
“Someone Somebody’s new book, Let Them Eat Beetroot, exceeds even the most generous liberalities formally accorded to works of satire. Immoderate lampooning of a latter-day African government will delight those who value the fiction that such governments, still bleakly enshadowed by the ferocious diaries of their colonially violated histories, are incapable of anything more than a rampant pillaging of their countries’ resources. But is this really so?
In his luminous study of Henry Fielding, AE Dyson observed that, whereas satire judges the workings of man against an ideal, comedy sets them against a norm. Somebody’s ‘satire’ elects no ideal, rather abrogates its very purpose by a procession of vertical hyperbole. Somebody sneers that his ‘mythical’ South African government, Khrazania, is all but engulfed in corruption, rampant embezzlement of what remains of the public purse after the obdurate suzerainty of apartheid had stripped it of the stupendous wealth gained by the blood and sweat of an enslaved South African majority.
Somebody writes of an imagined South African ANC administration that would actually allow convicted fraudsters to continue to occupy their seats in the country’s Parliament. He expects his readers to swallow the ludicrous notion that such a revered democratic political party would actually accept enormous donations of public money channelled subversively to the party by the most dubious of means.
As if these hollow libels are not enough, Somebody employs even more grotesque embellishment when he describes the presidency of Khrazania, itself rife with corruption and self-enrichment, thereby flagrantly implying that such is the case in reality. Reading the following example of Somebody’s prolix, one is propelled to interrogate one’s own ingrained sense of equity and integrity. Does the author, in all seriousness, expect anyone of conscience to validate as even vaguely accurate the sort of invidious reactionary prejudice of such writing?
‘There were great rejoicings in the presidency when Deputy President Jonah Amuz fell from glory as a result of the demonic machinations of the presidency’s chief adviser, Posse Dahap. “We’ll have ourselves a pretty little banquet over this one,” murmured His Nibs from behind his glass. His Nibs knew that in the clamour and flashlights of the media circus so much else would fade from public view. The party’s secretary general had his fingers in The People’s Bank till, right up to the armpits. The head of the presidency, along with others in the party elite, has enriched himself with a healthy slice of Khranzania’s land-line telephone monopoly. All this embarrassment needed to be pushed into the background before the impending state visit of the Egyptian President.’
Even in the most extravagant of satires is it acceptable that, faced with the awful realities of a runaway HIV/Aids pandemic, the president of a contemporary African country would expound medical opinions that belong in the 14th century? Somebody further challenges tolerance when he describes a modern African health ministry that would be so preposterously irresponsible as to recommend a diet of garlic and beetroot as reliable alternatives to proven interventionist drugs used against the terrible afflictions of the HIV.
As socially and politically obligatory as some would denote the purposes of satire, its illusive virtues are too often employed as justification for the veritable surfeit of gutter comedy purporting to be satire and, thereby, invoking the forbearance that the form has, over long years, earned for itself.
In Somebody’s book, page after sorry page, an embittered slander advances. The fine and universally respected African National Congress is transmogrified in this unhappy book into a devil’s crucible of graft and swindling. From top to bottom, in municipality, in the civil service, greed is the only imperative. The Khrazanian national radio and television station is the tractable mouthpiece for the presidency. Somebody’s Khrazania is the African country which encapsulates the impulses of the greater world order of white supremacism.
The common term ‘over the top’ comes to mind when reading Somebody’s malicious 368 pages, which clearly are devoted to a parody of the phenomenal personal and global achievements of the Thabo Mbeki administration. Alas, not so for Mr Somebody, whose deranged reading of what is so often disingenuously represented as the Zimbabwe ‘crisis’ is, of itself, a parody within a parody. Heine called the impellation of perception unjust when lit as a beacon to floundering vessels of state. In this instance Somebody has transcribed a salient bigotry on behalf of a residual acedia brewing in listless white minds as their predictable response to the bright fabric of a new political disquisition that has found its most elegant expression in the long-overdue post-colonial reclamations of tribal lands in Zimbabwe. History will credit both Mbeki and his vaticinal mentor, Robert Mugabe, for their vision and courage.
Somebody’s lamentable book will be lost in the brilliance of the new light brought to Africa by these two titans.