/ 3 October 2005

Cocking a snoek at poverty

As far as I can remember from second and third-hand conversations here and there (not having been formally raised through Sunday school, unlike some people’s children whose names I could mention), there’s a very famous bit in the Bible where it say that this fellow Jesus came upon a group of poverty-stricken-looking guys with shabby clothes and ragged beards looking lost and forlorn by the Sea of Galilee.

‘What’s up, dudes?” he struck up in a friendly manner. ‘I’m new around here, up from Jerusalem, had to get out of the rat race for a while, know what I mean? What do you cats do?”

‘We are fishermen,” came the baleful reply from the most talkative of this non-communicative lot, having sized up the cheeky newcomer with the natural suspicion country folk are born with out there, wherever out there is.

‘Cool,” said Jesus, ‘sounds like fun. Make much money?”

The baleful fellows with the beards looked at him. ‘When there’s fish,” came the cautious reply.

From the looks of things, the empty nets lying on the sand by the empty boats, the vacant, hungry stares of the would-be fishermen, the generally mournful wailing of the wind along the shore, business wasn’t exactly buzzing. In the village on the other side of the dunes, fish were not exactly sizzling in the pan for supper. The marketplace was not exactly buzzing with fish merchants from nearby holiday resorts wanting to restock their fancy restaurants where fat cats and their kittens from Jerusalem and Cairo came to brush up on their suntans after a killing on the stock market.

No, things looked very bleak indeed. Jesus had been travelling around the desert for a long time thinking about things, however, trying to ‘find himself”, agonising over such questions as: ‘Who am I? Why am I here? Where am I going? Is the man I call ‘Dad’ really my father? Or am I an adopted orphan?” The kind of stuff that goes through many young people’s heads to this day.

But he was a young fellow with bright, laid-back ideas. He had been formulating this notion of like-minded young people dropping out of the rat race and getting themselves together in easy-going, free-love communes, making their own rules as they go along, living by an ‘each-one-teach-one” caring philosophy, with baby chores being shared so that no one had to worry about growing up an unloved orphan and all that. Who actually needed to own more than they needed for their daily essentials? What was all this greed that was giving people high blood pressure and ulcers around the Temple back in noisy, hectic Jerusalem? ‘Heck, you could feed a whole wedding party with a loaf of bread and three fishes,” he said, and then tailed off, suddenly realising that he had been speaking out loud at the end of his ecstatic thought, and the fishermen who had no fish to catch that day were staring at him with loathing and suspicion bred of fear of the unknown and the look in those hectic, dreamy eyes.

‘Anyway,” Jesus went on, undaunted, ‘imagine us starting off as a small commune like that and the idea gradually catching fire till the whole world eventually joins in, and people can live hassle-free lives! It only takes a few of us, like you and me standing here, to get the ball rolling.”

And then he uttered the famous line: ‘Drop your nets and leave your boats, brothers. Go with me and I will make you fishers of men!”

Well, we all know what happened next. The ragged, bearded guys reluctantly joined up one by one, followed Jesus on his chaotic caper round the Holy Land for a few years, and then barely escaped the gallows alongside their messianic leader when the secret police caught up with him and made sure that he was crucified in the town square as an example to other would-be hippies. Although they did go on to make a tidy living in later years by writing a best selling book about it all, which is still ticking over nicely in bookstores around the world to this day.

Anyway, this all comes to mind when one picks up the story in the notorious Mail & Guardian of a couple of weeks ago about Presidency Headman Smuts Ngonyama supposedly getting caught up in a scheme to give one of his relatives a leg-up in to the lucrative off-shore fishing business previously under the monopoly control of a small handful of white South African families. Someone supposedly whispered into Smuts’s ear: ‘Forget about the Freedom Charter and all that hippy, men-fishing nonsense, broer. Go with me, and I will make you and your family fishers of fish!” Fish, he was reminded, is big on the stock markets of America, Europe and Japan, which is where the real world (and the real hard currency) lives.

The scheme, it seems, came something of a cropper — not just because the nosy people at the M&G got wind of it and blew the whistle, but because the boat Smuts’s people ended up buying was way too big for the modest catch it was supposed to go after for a small profit in the South Atlantic, and ended up being busted by the Department of Marine and Coastal Management for taking on several tons of bestselling snoek destined for international consumption instead of the handful of hake it was supposed to pick up each month to sell in a modest manner in the local marketplace.

As with most of the tantalising stuff that pops up in the South African press, it seems we will never get to the bottom of this story. But it does suggest that our new top people are getting the message: manna doesn’t come from heaven. It comes from right here on earth — or under the ocean, as the case may be. ‘Don’t take dat ole Bible at face value, brother,” the moral goes. ‘Read between the lines. Get hip. Get a boat.”