It has been a week of shocking revelations, although not in the sense that the poor idiots who believed in the rapture would have liked. Any New South African, recently accepted into the church of the Rainbow Nation, would be thoroughly confused by a cursory perusal of the news stories of the past few days.
For example, we discover that Barack Obama is actually Irish. This explains why a pizza with ham and pineapple is called a Hawaiian — a combination of ingredients that you would think was incompatible but turns out to be rather tasty if you’re hungry enough. Conspiracy theorists will also note that Ireland is the only Christian country in the world where it is safer to be a Muslim than a Catholic or Protestant. Coincidence? I think not.
The old saw used to have it that the Irish were the negroes of England. It now turns out that African-Americans are the Irish of the United States, or something like that. Obama even made the obligatory missing-apostrophe joke about his name, although I suspect it would fall flat in South Africa, where the apostrophe is like our sense of civic duty: appearing randomly whenever we feel we need to break up a vaguely threatening plurality and obeying no set of commonly held rules.
As confusing are comments by Gwede Mantashe, the ANC’s tea girl. (In line with new job titles proposed by Julius Malema, all handmaidens to devilish politicians will now be known as tea girls.) Apparently, “whites are too sensitive about race”. I’m not sure where Mantashe gets this from. Perhaps he is touched by Steve Hofmeyr‘s decision not to release his song featuring what I am forced to call “the k-word” because of my outmoded sensitivity. Or perhaps Mantashe means that black is a race, whereas white is a pejorative, so get over yourselves.
Imagine how silly South Africans of all races are feeling today! The 72% white management in South Africa has finally trained themselves to hire black people, rather than their cousins, and now they discover they’re being “too sensitive”. Blacks who have embraced the tenets of non-racialism, which basically means not discriminating against people based on their race, are now to believe that they’re just being big girls’ kangas.
Still, the Kevin Pietersens of the world will be happy to note that affirmative action is now in disfavour. Malema, our paragon of democracy, has succinctly outlined the problem by refusing to debate DA spokesperson Lindiwe Mazibuko because she’s the tea girl of the madam. Apparently, black people get jobs on merit only if their employment is based on their surname, otherwise you’re just window dressing. This could just be Malema’s fear of intelligent fanny, as gay people term it — a trait he appears to share with President Jacob Zuma. But perhaps I’m just being too sensitive about gender now.
Follow Chris on Twitter @chrisroperza, or visit his blog chrisroper.co.za