Lemmer has always enjoyed the honesty of revolutionary rhetoric, since it is one of the only forms of human speech that instantly and completely betray the speaker’s limitations and paranoias. And this week the rhetoric coming out of the African National Congress Youth League on its website was as purple as a gesuipte sheep-rustler’s schnozz. Patriotically springing to the defence of the ANC’s education policies (which, in current discourse, means accusing the Deeyay leadership of being Grand Dragons of the Ku Klux Klan), youth league president Fikile Beebopaloola started with a florid history of his movement: ”Like the Sphinx rising from its ashes, we rise majestically to assume our place as the a champion of youth emancipation and development.” Lemmer hadn’t realised that the youth league had ever been incinerated, but he couldn’t help feeling that Fikile’s elegiac simile — plucked out of a mind apparently uncluttered by classical education — was more or less the last word on the education debate.
Get behind me, Vavi!
Congress of South African Trade Unions general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi clearly doesn’t have the faintest idea what he’s talking about, said the Widower Du Preez this week after Vavi declared the ANC to be ”the most contested organisation in the world”. No, said the Widower, the most contested organisation in the world is the Dorsbult Choir (run by the Widower’s wife, who isn’t actually dead but spends so much time there she might as well be), in which every practice is fraught with subterfuge and plots, power struggles over who hands out the music and who hugs the choir-master first. But it was the Dominee who reminded the manne that pride comes before a fall: Vavi’s urging that the workers ”make the ANC in our own image” felt like theological thin ice to him. Lemmer wonders if he has a point, and whether certain deities in the ANC firmament wouldn’t mind seeing Zweli the Light Bearer and his rebel angels cast down …
Agter elke Mandela
Jislaaik, but sometimes Lemmer has to wonder about celebrities. This week, while reading You magazine on the toilet, he learned that Steve Hofmeyr scored an audience with Madiba, to which he naturally took along his little son. Now if Oom Krisjan were granted some face-time with the grand old man, he’d probably blush and stammer and shake his hand and say something like ”Sjoe, dankie Meneer Mandela”. But he wouldn’t introduce his offspring as ”the next white president” of the country, as proud Pappa Hofmeyr did. Cringe …