A crime against humanity
If it does at all, history should remember Jacob Zuma for his obvious belief that the State Treasury is his personal bank account.
And perhaps for his ability to surround himself with sycophantic ministers whose job seems to be to defend him against those who challenge his indulgences instead of calling him to account for them, as those holding their office would do in a true democracy.
Nkandla ought to be Jacob Zuma’s Watergate.
Even though there have been attempts to conceal the evidence of his private excesses, it is there and bare enough: a huge estate consisting of a house for every one of Zuma’s wives, towering security fences, a tunnel leading to an underground bunker, a clinic and tuck shop, reservoir, a million rand cattle kraal and an adjacent helipad.
All of it paid for by public money.
But added to that, Nkandla represents a crime against humanity.
An estimated 160 000 people live in the Nkandla area. Nine out of ten of them are unemployed. The rate of HIV is almost the highest in the country.
Outside of Zuma’s laager, most dwellings are without electricity and adequate water. At two-thirds of the cost of his R260-million estate, they could have both.
Jacob Zuma must know that, for these are his neighbours, his own people. Which can only mean he doesn’t care.
A hot time in the hollow tree
News that a library in the north of England has banned from its shelves a book about the sex life of the natterjack toad makes one wonder what on earth its subscribers may be missing.
He hit town just after dark, riding fast, the sweat of the journey turned to salt on his brow, the taste of dust on his tongue where it had seeped through the neckershief. It had been a long day and it could be a longer night.
He barely slackened pace as he swung into the main street, past the single saloon, for he knew where he was going. He had been there many times before. At a faded sign that said No 17, outside a rough clapboard house, he dismounted and drew his sword and pistol, placing both in a stained duffle bag on the carrier.
Then Horatio Frog leaned his off-road bicycle against a tree.
When eventually he spoke, the question emerged as a hoarse croak. The dust had done something diabolical to his larynx. Yet the answer from within the house was eager, as always: “Yes, kind sir, I sit and spin!”
The lady was a spin doctor for her cousin in local government yet, in the matter of dialogue, Horatio Frog had to admit she lacked imagination.
But with one bound, that left the front door swinging drunkenly on its hinges, he was by her side. He spoke again, passion rising in his voice like a river: “Do you always sit and spin in a sheer négligé from Paris?” asked Frog.
At once, there was a frantic rending as Frog tore away at the material, of the neckerchief still around his mouth. Then, hotly, their lips met and the air became filled with the chemistry of old, of many such nights and many such meetings.
And once more, Missy Mouse (for it was indeed she) fell limply into his arms. Though not without some difficulty, for Frog had forgotten to unbuckle his scabbard.
His embrace was hungrier this time, almost animal. Missy Mouse could feel a wild urgency in him. She managed a small, nervous giggle before they finally came together as one and the night exploded in a myriad stars.
Later, much later, she found the energy to speak. “Of course, you know,” she said, ‘Without my Uncle Rat’s consent, I couldn’t marry the Pres-i-dent.”
The effect on Horatio Frog was as though shocked by a thousand volts. “Marry?” he exclaimed. “Who the heck’s talking about marrying? I’m a travelling man, woman, you know that! I’ve got a reputation to keep!”
But even as he uttered the words, Horatio Frog realised the game was up. For there in the doorway stood Uncle Rat himself. In one large hand was a shotgun; in the other, the stained duffle bag and one of Frog’s bicycle wheels.
Escape was impossible and Uncle Rat laughed and shook his fat sides to see the frog so compromised.
Their wedding, in a hollow tree by the lake, was an elaborate affair although to Frog’s mind the breakfast – prepared by the bride’s fair hand – left a good deal to be desired. “Two green beans and a black-eyed pea?” he muttered to her between the speeches. “Don’t you know anything about insect cooking?”
But in the night, when they were alone, when the moon hung like a plump cricket (or so Horatio Frog imagined) on the water, it was good, it was grand.
Missy Mouse whispered tenderly, “Did the earth move for you too?”
“It wasn’t the earth,” said Frog. “It was the rotten moss in this old tree. I’ve noticed it before.”
“Before?” cried Missy Mouse. “How could you have noticed it before? Unless you were here with another woman?!”
It was their first argument and one aggravated when Missy Mouse got around to producing the honeymoon brunch – two stale carrots and a frostbitten radish. Clearly, Frog thought, her talents lay in other directions. And it was this thought that brought them together once more. So they made up. And made up.
Afterwards, Frog took her sailing on the lake and it was thus the tragedy struck that has become legend. Their beautiful pea-green boat became snarled up in a bunch of weeds. Frog tried to punt them clear with a runcible spoon but to no avail.
So he persuaded Missy Mouse that they would both have to step out on to a convenient lily-pad and push. That lily-pad, as we now know, was actually a large green snake in cunning disguise who swallowed them up.
‘It’s been said before, but I’ll say it again,” the snake was to comment later, to no one in particular. “These mixed marriages never work.”
John Ryan’s Midweek column, Cape Argus.
This gallery contains 3 photos.
A wing and a prayer
LUANDA – Perhaps because of their maritime background, the Portuguese display a healthy cynicism about airlines and flying.
Many still maintain the acronym of their national carrier, TAP, stands for Take Another Plane.
And in the old Lourenco Marques, Mozambique, expatriates from the mainland used to say the name of the internal service, DETA, was equally cautionary. It warned travellers: Don’t Expect To Arrive.
What slogan, one wonders, would they apply to the present-day TAAG (Transportes Aereos de Angola) line in this other independent province?
Terror And Anguish Guaranteed? Transports Arabs And Goats? Either would be apt.
Travelling TAAG is like being on a mid-quality indigenous bus in almost any part of the continent, with the essential difference that the trauma is all taking place at 30 000 feet.
The impression that this may not be your ordinary everyday shuttle begins with a small maul at Luanda Airport at six in the morning – a crush of humanity, of people violently intent on being somewhere else.
To say the aircraft eventually becomes packed would be a laughable understatement. Every seat is taken, three-quarters of them twice over. The additional numbers consist of children, lap-held. Some are sucklings, noisily having breakfast. Most of the rest could qualify as the oldest babies in the world.
Such congestion makes it difficult to slap at the mosquitoes and flies that screen anxious first-timers from the demonstration of how they would be expected to conduct themselves should the aircraft end up in the drink.
A subjective appraisal of conditions suggests that prospect may not be too far distant.
Outside on the apron, a hefty queue of passengers snakes its way to another TAAG 737. Following it is a tractor and trailer bearing that flight’s luggage.
A man in overalls is riding shotgun on the trailer. It hits a rut in the tarmac and several suitcases and parcels fall off. This amuses the trailer attendant to the extent that he tosses a few more over the tailgate for good measure. He continues to chortle as he arrives and helps load the hold.
After the plane to Malanje takes off, five cases and two parcels remain scattered on the apron.
While the cabin doors of our aircraft are about to close, two white men clamour up the stairs. “We’re with the commander,” they say. Immediately, two seats are cleared in the front row and the congestion ebbs back to compensate.
Coffee, tea or milk? A ridiculous prospect on Flight 016. Although there are five hostesses aboard, adding madly to the overload, no trolley would be able to negotiate the aisle.
TAAG captains seem to have a width of discretion on public safety. The man who flies us to Lubango takes the direct route, right over the war zone. And he does not bother with the tight-circle descent, the internationally accepted way of keeping missiles out of posteriors.
We eventually return to Luanda by a deviation further out to sea, taking in distant aspects of Benguela and Lobito. That pilot should go far; the other, the further the better.
Lubango airport is like a scene from MASH, abuzz with helicopters, hospital planes and MIG-21s and 23s. The MIGs are enthralling with their low sweeps and parachute-assisted landings. We have a fair opportunity to appreciate them. The plane from Luanda is an hour late.
But its lateness is less surprising to the government officials who have delivered us to the airport than the fact that it has arrived at all. Apparently every day at Lubango airport contains an element of lottery.
Just ahead in the queue is our commander himself. At the foot of the stairway he is stopped by a private in the Fapla army, who says he may not proceed until the aircraft is searched.
“But I’m the captain!” says the captain.
“Maybe you’re the captain in the air,’ says the soldier, ‘but I’m the captain on the ground.”
TAAG advertises 15 regular flights out of Luanda. Insofar as it is within my power to decide, the airline will be at least one passenger short on every such occasion.
From “One Man’s Africa”
A party in disarray
Almost the first encouraging sign in the early Nineties that a peaceful transition might be possible after all was the relationship formed between Cyril Ramaphosa and Roelf Meyer.
The two were the chief negotiators for the ANC and the National Party in the Multiparty Negotiating Forum, whose brief was to end apartheid and steer the country towards its first democratic elections in April 1994. Public optimism grew even further when Ramaphosa offered to introduce Meyer to the sport of trout fishing and had to remove a hook from the novice’s finger.
It was almost analogous of Androcles and the lion he befriended by taking a thorn out of its paw.
There must have been the same kind of encouragement among many voters recently when Cyril Ramaphosa returned to active politics from big business and became the ANC’s deputy president. Surely, disillusioned voters would have thought, such a cool and experienced head was exactly what was needed to reform the capricious Jacob Zuma or even replace him should he be indicted or impeached.
But hopes of that kind were dashed on Sunday when Ramaphosa urged Limpopo voters to support the ANC “or the Boers will come back to control us”.
Not only was it a tired race card from a man who helped set up a non-race Constitution 20 years ago. It was a race card entirely without substance and suggests the governing party is in a state of complete panic and disarray on the eve of the elections.
Extract from Spy Story
Shack fires in squatter settlements were a common sight for Daniel. A pressure stove would explode, a candle fall over, and a community would lose their life’s possessions, if not their lives. Most squatter homes were made of cardboard and untreated timber that ignited like touchpaper.
The kiosk burned differently. For a while it retained its shape, and Daniel realized it must have an inner shell of breezeblock and solid beams. But as he watched, one rafter collapsed and the other members capsized into the form of a fiery cross. He was reminded of old photographs of Ku Klux Klan lynchings.
Another memory sprang to mind, a memory so sharp he felt a chill at the back of his neck. It invoked a similar scene, another night of flames and smoke but a night, above all, of terror. And with startling clarity, his mind’s eye superimposed a further image on the burning kiosk, the face of an old friend with a unique smile. Then, almost instantly, that image seemed to melt in the heat of the burning kiosk.
Extract from O…
Extract from One Man’s Africa:
The Dark Continent is at once a misnomer and an awful truism. The sun never shines as brightly as it does in Africa. Unfortunately, the brightest sunshine cases the darkest shadows and the miseries that lie in Africa’s umbra are the most abject in the world.
African Americans used to say of their lot (and perhaps they still do) that what white Americans wanted, they themselves had precious little of; but what white Americans didn’t want, Afro-Americans had in great quantity.
So it is with Africa and the West: Africans grow skeletal because the West squanders the world’s resources whereas those things the West avoids – like poverty and disease – Africa possesses in abundance.
And yet, not for nothing has this continent been confirmed as the cradle of all humankind. Not for nothing do we now know that the first people on earth were Africans, and that other races developed from them.
Not for nothing do African’s misplaced citizens – the Afro-Americans and West Indians – hanker to return to fund their roots. And not those people alone.
Everyone of whatever race, nation or creed who comes to Africa feels a magnetism that cannot be ignored or explained. Because it is primeval.
Because Africa is like a mother calling her children home.
Old, addled and poor she may be, but the pull of the umbilicus is still there. Irresistibly.”
Extract from One Man’s Africa.
John Ryan 