Breaking news: the ANC’s infighting has spilled over to the mall toilet.
On a recent visit to a Pretoria shopping centre I was exposed to the following piece of toilet graffiti (is there something called toilet poetry?), written with a thick black marker on white tiles: ‘I seek da sick / symptomz sleek as automatic condomz / wrapped on thougdz of these system / government remains a film / a gangsta movie / and zuma be da hero / mbeki a victim.”
I wondered whether Smuts Ngonyama had visited this toilet. No, couldn’t be. This graffito would surely offend someone who struggled to be rich.
For the waBenzi, toilet graffiti per se must be down there with Julius Malema, Toyota and Yeoville.
Must be a streetwalking rapper type with a message, I conclude. Impressed with the political undertones decorating our public toilets post-Polokwane, I start looking around for more inspirational stuff.
I am disappointed. The rest of the cubicle is filled with the normal ‘call me for hot sex” crap. I suddenly think back to a Melville night when a friend wrote something like that with his boss’s number on an innocent wall.
Sies.
Why oh why the urge to write on walls and mirrors? Could it be the last uncensored space for public expression? Are you telling me there is no market for B-grade political rap in South Africa?
A student friend who recently published a collection of poetry reminded me of the pseudo-intellectual literature that filled our toilet walls at varsity: ‘Relativity is the pornography of the educated mind” or ‘Who needs Viagra when Planck will do”.
Stuff that makes one think. Like the gangster movie with Jacob Zuma as the populist hero, running along the rooftops of Johannesburg with a condom over his head and a bag full of street children and pregnant teenage mothers en route to a boarding school in Nkandla.