A South African struggle hero, Murphy ‘Patel” Morobe, defends a deputy-presidential shopping junket to the so-called United Arab Emirates (read ‘Dubai” in large neon letters) or alternatively Abu Dhabi, depending on which newspaper you happen to read; dead struggle heroes Govan Mbeki and Raymond Mhlaba supposedly to be illegally exhumed and reburied in the Voortrekker Monument; a real Native American becoming president of his own country (Bolivia, in this particular case — Washington next) for the first time in recorded history; a harmless geriatric executed at the behest of a testosterone-crazed Austrian B-movie actor who fulfilled the American dream by becoming governor of California; tobacco baron Anton Rupert dies in his sleep and gets away with it; and a North Atlantic bottle-nosed whale becomes the first acquatic mammal to seek refuge in a European Union member country by holding a silent vigil on the Thames-side steps of Westminster Palace, only to be driven away by stiff-upper-lipped yeomen from the British working classes, but not before upstaging thousands of other asylum seekers from West Africa, the disunited Arab Emirates, Pakistan, India, British Somaliland, Guatemala, and many other beleaguered spots on the map. There must be some connection between these events that have heralded in the first month of 2006.
Morobe found himself in the spotlight, having accepted the dubious honour of the job as spokesperson for the Presidency. I suppose stranger things have happened in many a political career, but having to publicly pass off Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka’s Christmas junket with family and friends in a South African Air Force Falcon, complete with bowing and scraping pilots and crew, as nothing more than a storm in a teacup at the reasonable price of R700 000 must have been a weird act to pull off for the highly principled Morobe.
‘You could have built about forty thousand houses for that price,” came one angry response supposedly representing the tax paying public.
Morobe was stuck with the uncomfortable role of avoiding explaining what was probably going on in his head, namely, ‘You can’t compare a horse with a donkey. A Deputy President is a Deputy President, and RDP houses are RDP houses. Let’s try and be grown up and separate the two.”
Of course, whatever Morobe said was bound to draw howls of protest — even if he had apologised and offered to give back the money out of his own salary over a period of, say, six to 10 years. The damage had been done.
Raising the issue of spending revenues collected by the tax authorities for housing rather than petrol for VIP aircraft is bound to be emotive in our post-apartheid climate. Putting Morobe on the sharp end of the question, with his chief, President Thabo Mbeki, son of the same late Govan who was later to be threatened with exhumation, hovering in the background, was a carefully orchestrated manoeuvre. What, after all, had the struggle been about, if not providing houses, jobs, education, and allowing freedom of movement for long oppressed populations? Were these, especially the idea of freedom of movement in luxury military aircraft, to be the prerogative of a new elite alone? Oom Gov and Comrade Ray, let alone Oliver Tambo (who has also recently been threatened with relocation from Boksburg cemetery) would be turning in their graves if they heard that it had all come to this.
Hence, somewhere or other, the idea of following this through and digging up those struggle heroes, against the express wishes of their families, was hatched.
The victory of Evo Morales in the Bolivian presidential elections would have thrown another spanner in the works for the neo-capitalist turn that our noble revolution has taken. Morales has performed the seemingly impossible feat of returning the country to its rightful owners — the Mayan and other Native Americans who were dispossessed by European conquistadors so many generations before, and still form 60% of the population. Until now, in spite of this impressive weight of numbers, they had been the Silent Majority. Now, there they were, in their bright blankets, chiselled cheeks and bowler hats, dancing with the man who promised to rescue them from their wretchedness. No mean task in this ever globalising world.
To rub salt in the wound, President Hugo Chavez of neighbouring Venezuela did not miss the opportunity of launching a broadside, as he arrived for Morales’ inauguration, against the world trend towards increasing minority elitism, making the bald statement that capitalism is the greatest evil on earth.
So how does a whale in London’s River Thames fit in with all of this? Well, to begin with, it’s a whale of a thing, and almost had the city at a standstill as the common people and the news crews braved the cold at all hours of the day to catch sight of this three-ton leviathan moving up from working-class Essex and the East End as far as trendy Chelsea.
All these things are signs of one kind or another. The whale, consciously or unconsciously, was engaging in some kind of protest. Its North Atlantic environment, like the rest of the vast ocean, has been steadily polluted by noise and waste released by enormous ships ploughing through the waters —advancing the cause of globalisation at whatever cost. Even for a young whale, there seemed to be no hiding place. The Thames, for all its cockney chattering, must have seemed like an oasis of relative calm — but in the end proved to be a lethal refuge for the disorientated animal.
‘Foxes have holes; the birds of the air have their nests; but the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head.”
It was true way back in Biblical times. It remains the debate of the day into the present — even for the lost and lonely whale.