Those who watch Top Billing are not, as a rule, exposed to disturbing concepts like multi-lingualism. Indeed, generations of selective breeding and some ferociously opportunist and cheekily genocidal shenanigans by Great Granddaddy on the Reef in the 1880s have combined to form a protective cocoon around them, keeping at bay the horror of the middle-class world, with its vacuum cleaners and swimming-pool filters and universities, and all the other repulsive things that poor people get up to.
Of course, the extremely rich do not have time to watch Top Billing, being too busy having Moët enemas while performing carnal sleight of hand on senior government officials; and so it was only the very rich, the desperately gauche and the maniacally revolutionary (who watch the programme to reinvigorate flagging esprit de corps while making nail-bombs in their basements) who witnessed first-hand some weeks ago the use of our 12th official language: East Rand New Money.
The property developer and his wife — known, in ERNW, as his wahf — had erected on the shores of a large lake their own little patch of heaven. That their patch of heaven seemed to have been stolen intact from a Tuscan-themed Las Vegas indoor putt-putt course didn’t bother them a bit. Even the ‘porm trees”, sad drooping little Levantine exiles transplanted into the muddy soil of a strange continent, conspired to heighten the overwhelming kitsch. They were real, but they may as well have been plastic.
‘The porms were put in with a crane,” beamed the mastermind behind it all. To those who speak ERNM, acquiring a tree is something of an achievement, rather like reading a book. It shows someone willing to think, as they say, ‘eyowt de box”, who has a flair for being ‘cree-haytive” that goes beyond making pictures out of macaroni and driving extremely fast. In fact, it demonstrates an almost heretical dedication to the avant-garde, and a playful inversion of cultural norms. To a great many white South Africans, trees are objects of extreme distrust, ugly woody weeds that house Swapo sappers and English pastoral poets. For as far back as anyone can remember, perhaps even as early as 1968, their ancestors have made short work of trees, wiping the sweat from their pioneer brows, blobbing on some more Factor 20, and ordering Elsie to tell Willington to get the handsaw and cut the damn thing down. (‘And not the chain-saw, Elsie. He steals the diesel.”) After all, why have a tree when you can have slate paving stones and a fibreglass post-box in the shape of a barrel, propped up on a spiralling welded chain?
As the sun sets over the prim-ordial ooze and a handful of prim-ordial powerboaters, it was time to leave the porms and to go inside for a ‘guarded tour”. A generation ago this would have meant being ushered through the house with a maize-sack over one’s head, and strict instructions to call the host ‘Herr Leibrandt” and not ‘Ouboet Robey”, but in these reformed times the camera crew were free to be ‘guarded” through the lofty entrance hall into the house proper. One kept expecting to be shown a miniature Fontana di Trevi, it’s wild horses replaced with Dobermanns and its gods now crude alabaster replicas of the 1985 Blue Bulls team.
‘Ma wahf wanted mawble,” he said, gesturing to the gleaming pinkish walls and floor. It looked like an abattoir, given a cursory once-over with a hosepipe. His wahf had wanted mawble, and she had got it. Somewhere right now desert vultures are squabbling over the last scraps of flesh from the camels who fell behind the caravan, their backs cracking under the weight of the wahf’s dream abattoir; while far to the north groundwater and earthworms slowly plop into a gaping wound of the earth’s crust, as deep as a rusty, blood-stained cable and dark as the night gathering over the porms by the dam.
It didn’t come cheap, that geological biopsy. But luckily the lord of the manor had enough folding stuff to manage the odd cramped lakeside villa and still take his bride on holiday to Moerishis, where they no doubt stay in a lawpaw and go on flips in a hally-copter.
‘Poperty is my larf,” he said as a dikkop shrieked plaintively far away across the water. Ah, la dolce vita. Le dulsee veeter…