Please, kill me now. Some stoner Rastafarian who can barely string one thought together stumbles through the SA national anthem, and suddenly we have a media blitz and a national outcry? What are we, Saudi Arabians?
It’s just a song, people, and it’s just a rugby match. Oh dear. I shouldn’t have said that. The sporty intellectuals are going to be so confused. On the one hand, I’m attacking the idea of a national anthem being important, which is kind of cool, because idiots like the Young Communist Lego League want us to have compulsory singing of anthems in schools.
But on the other hand, the one not clenched in front of my heart, I’m also knocking the idea of sport as the narrative that explains our life. Yes, I’m sure it’s vitally important that we crush the dastardly French so that we can build all sorts of necessary manly and/or transgendered virtues, and I’m absolutely behind the idea that we need to obliterate the English so we won’t feel so bad about how messed up our colonial dream is.
Don’t even get me started on the Aussies and the Kiwis. Apparently, every time we lose to them we’re either bitterly reminded about how we missed that golden window of opportunity to exterminate our own native races, or pissed off that some white people actually got colonialism to work for them and now run a refugee camp for South Africans who have despaired of their own country.
Yep, all very important stuff, and it keeps the mills of the media grinding exceeding small-minded. But it’s all a bit extreme when it comes to declaring a national day of outrage because the unnatural love-child of Jimmy Cliff and Kermit the Frog has sung your anthem badly.
Okay, badly doesn’t really cover it, I admit. And as @GusSilber quipped on Twitter, it’s a fine rainbow day when a black guy called Dumisani doesn’t know the lyrics to Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika, but a Springbok team does.
Poor Oregan Hoskins, Supreme Leader of Sarfu, was apparently ”shocked and horrified by the rendition of the anthem”. Horrified? HORRIFIED? It’s a song, not a three-year-old lying in a pool of blood. Get a grip, jeez.
And now we have another National Uproar because the King Protea doesn’t appear on the replica Bafana Bafana jersey. As Business Day has it, ”Safa in protea emblem fury”. According to Butana Komphela, chairperson of the Parliamentary Sports Committee and a man always described as ”fiery” (an unconscious pun on his gaseous name, I assume), ”Raymond Hack is a dangerous, walking time bomb.”
It’s a FLOWER, people. Okay, also a national symbol,but really — fury? Time bombs? As with the Ras Das contretemps, and the Caster Semenya issue, it all boils down to that unfortunate common denominator, the oddly incompetent official. Whether it’s the greed of Safa, or the laziness of the SA Embassy in France, who could apparently find only one South African singer on their database for France, and decided that was enough because they had to knock off early to go and watch that top French performer, Johnny Clegg, we’re bedevilled by incompetence. And now it’s tuneless incompetence.
Ah well. This is what happens when you get a reggae singer to try and do anything but reggae. According to Wikipedia, ”the 1967 edition of the Dictionary of Jamaican English lists reggae as ‘a recently estab. sp. for rege’, as in rege-rege, a word that can mean either ‘rags, ragged clothing’ or ‘a quarrel, a row.’ Which is all very apt, and I hope we’ve all learned a lesson here: it’s just asking for trouble to get someone called Ras to sing at a Bok game, unless his surname is Erasmus.
I can understand why someone would think a Rastafarian would be the perfect man to sing Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika. After all, Rastafarianism is very much like our anthem. A cobbled-together mishmash of misplaced Christian sentiment, paternalistic nationalism, and anachronistic supremacist gobbledygook. So par for the anthem course.
But alas, they didn’t consider that a representative of a musical genre where slurring your words is actually considered compulsory, and where getting stoned is a religious imperative, might be a little light on actual planning. Not to mention a lack of any real livication. (If we’re to believe Wikipedia, and why not given the ridiculous beliefs most religions espouse, ”Livication” is substituted for the word ”dedication” because Rastas associate dedication with death.)
Now, I’m no Rasist — some of my best friends are white people who think Bob Marley abolished slavery and made it okay to dance like a slinky trapped in a potato sack – but take a listen to Ras Dumisani’s music. You’ve got to hand it to the man, he did himself justice at the rugby. On the John Robbie show, he compared himself to Burning Spear. More like Soggy Joint, I’m afraid.
And blaming Ras Tonedef for the Bok loss is going a little far. Unless the scrum was humming that classic Lee Perry song, which goes ”One step forward, two step backward, down in a Babylon,” I can’t really see reggae as the culprit.
Still, looking on the bright side, mon — As @rayjoe tweeted, via @hwasser, ”Irony of ironies, goofed bra Ras unites SAfricans of all colours & creeds behind our nat anthem. So let’s stand him to a triple … pipe.”
Yep, as with that delightful Rugby World Cup final in 1995, the simple gift of a black man we can all pick on, regardless of our race, has brought our country together, united in shrill indignation. And that’s the beauty of sport. Such a unifying factor. If by unifying you mean us against them.
Follow Chris on Twitter @ChrisRoperZA
