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Jozi
18 December 2005
The fun part of this end of the year shutdown time is the opportunity to meet old buddies who have moved offshore and who pay a passing visit to catch up with friends and family.
So on what was once called Dingaan's Day, and has now been deconstructed to some other unremembered reason to have a day off work, I shared a heap of ritually burned meat with an old friend. He is a guy who moved his factory offshore about five or six years ago, to avoid the BEE licensed property theft arrangement, that was blowing in at that time on the winds of change. He has since become rich working out of mainland China and exporting to many places.
He does still maintain a distribution office here now, and pops in and out about four times a year to check on sales, and shake hands with his favourite retailers for a few days. Talk soon turned to The Zuma Affair. 'When I was here a few months ago', he said, 'the news media communicated a definite sense of immanent revolution, I had to go somewhere to see a customer and the area was jammed with rallying supporters chanting weird things like 'down with Thabo'. It was dammed odd...what happened to 'kill the boer?'
'Aagh-a luta continua' I said, 'They are at least two thousand down, and many of the survivors are off to farm in Aussie.'
We then had some comment on the number of prominent personalities who had publicly backed Zuma and how they were all desperately scrambling around now to get their exposed arses back onto the correct seat in the great game of political musical chairs while the music's playing again.
'Now' he said eventually, 'It's like Zuma never existed. He has completely vanished. He's become- 'The man who never was'.' Then he paused and made his dramatic declaration- 'We've just seen the 'Rape Card' used for the first time.' He finished, 'The country's politics are evolving.'
'Oh-' I waited because I knew he wanted to say more, and living in China without speaking Chinese he doesn't get to talk often.
'No one was unhappy when he was accused of stealing, or whatever he was supposed to have done. It was normal and ok to most people, but the first whiff of rape and he's gone.'
And then of course since the man has become a born again racist over the past decade he had to have a theory-involving race, that he had disingenuously evolved from some anti-white tirade presented by our beloved leader last year.
'According to your Thabo the Great,' he said. He likes to lay on the 'your' bit, with that edge of sarcasm reserved especially for whitey's who associate too much with black people or are empathic with their issues.
"You remember that blogging thing he does on the Party's web page. I read it during a stopover in Hong Kong, 'All white people think all black men are natural rapists,'-remember that?'
I vaguely remembered, I said.
'So this is the new variation on the auld Race Card. Thabo's used the race card so successfully that people like me became politically impotent and left.'
'The race card?' I said, being disingenuous again: I thought we were talking about a rape card?' I like to stoke him up a bit.
'We are, but I want to illustrate my point. It's the same principle. The "race card" is used on whitey. You raise a reasonable objection to some outrageous policy direction that you know will have undesirable, unintended outcomes because its like... 'been there done that can't we try something different' and instantly you're silenced-
He manipulates the the old prejudice. Everyone 'knows'- 'All white men are racists' and of course we are. You can't escape it -So therefore you must be a racist to say what you said, and instantly everyone switches off you are equally instantly discredited. Now the same thing has just been done to Zuma-same rationale-same outcome- same cleansing of disagreeable opposition.'
And of course then there was the inevitable conspiracy theory, which i interrupted.
'Okay there are two issues here,' I said, cutting into the conspiracy and buying time with the old binary 'two issues' trick, while figuring out how this needed to be dealt with, or whether we should change subjects and deal with something more useful and tactful;, like generating better business. 'Firstly I disagree that this represents an evolution in our politics and secondly I don't think race is the issue here-for a change. Do you remember Excelsior?' I asked him, while we stirred the meat around on the Weber.
'Who doesn't?' His laughter was hearty: the past is such fun, and we digressed for a while into our shared past, to a time when a 'racist' was someone who despised Afrikaners for excluding us from the game. In similar braai conversations thirty five years ago the3 bullying ruling class of Afrikaners were regularly and contemptuously referred to as 'sandblasted blacks', and frankly Black people had been pushed so far off the agenda through the various litany of oppressive insulating mechanisms used by the white ruling class that most of us were so barely aware of their existence that it was generally convenient to employ the standard stereotype and dismiss them entirely.
Except for one thing, the Immorality Act. This piece of legislation made sexual contact between human beings of different skin pigmentation illegal, and any such 'discovered' contacts were the subject of regular salacious press report in such glorious tabloids as the late Sunday Express. The police vice squad had nothing to do except hang about Zoo Lake spying on courting couples [those were times when people could snog in their cars with no hindrance from itinerant peripatetic rapists and hijackers-one had only to be concerned that the occupants were complimentary in colour when the inevitable cops came checking with their flashlight that everyone was white-Others having been banished by night. We would sneer about policemen rubbing their willies in grand anticipation of what they found naked in motor cars.]
A considerable number of the people I have known over the years confess [now] that they had their first sexual encounter, with a home domestic worker, but such things were beyond secret [then], and were never shared until we were well over the times when such an act could put you behind bars. Men who had been caught especially prominent Afrikaner men, those who supported the law, regularly committed suicide in those bizarre times.
'Then we had Excelsior,' he shouted 'Yes, a whole mini-town wasn't it, suddenly acquiring a previously non-existent coloured population and rising rage amongst the Tannie Kollektive: the old mother grundies, those guardians of morality with their stern oversized hats, vast frocks and their mouths pulled down at the corners in permanent disapproval.' He was triumphant at the recollection. Excelsior was a landmark of note
"Okay but how did it all come out?" I asked
'No idea but I'm sure you are going to tell me aren't you?' He laughed.
'All the main dudes in the alleged town were at a dinner party, at an important person's house.' I was dredging up an imperfect recollection, reconstructing the lead Sunday Express story at the time, filtered through layers of booze.
'The important person was showing off and was abusive to a serving woman, who placed her hands on her hips and announced to him and the roomful of disapproving tannies - 'JA-Right now it's you stupid focken K-.r but later tonight when madam is sleeping, then it's 'my lovey', 'my little sugar', 'my little darling'-
The party ended in an uproar. Someone told the press and the town which was somewhere in the middle of fucksville, nowhere, became a cause celebré forever and the immorality act quietly died. That serving woman, whoever she was, struck a blow for freedom that night and I hope this male dominated new majority has honoured her for her stirring role. She also spawned an army of copycats, according to the urban legends of the time, and suddenly every prominent person was a potential target. "There is no evolving politics here-Black men aren't the only men who take a good fuck,' I finished my point.'
My old friend grudgingly relinquished a part of his theory, but added that guys like Tokyo Sexwale who was rumoured to be thinking of pitching for the 2009 nomination must be shitting themselves wondering who might come leaping out of the woodwork to denounce them, just as they start to develop a head of steam. 'The rape card is out of the bottle!' he declared -then remembering the second part of my objection to his hypothesis, demanded 'And what do you think it is, if it's not race?'
'It's a gender thing-for serious feminazis, all penetration equals rape.'
'Tell that to those horny chicks making the 'L word'' he tossed back.
'Whatever.' I wasn't going to be diverted by this standard sexist response. ' You know it's only power mad people who put up with all the shit you have to put up with to be in politics. And there is nothing much more power mad than women.' I said- He nodded, he knew-he's had four wives and still counting. 'The next President will be a woman.' I concluded. 'And I believe you are wrong too about this 'conspiracy' idea'. I tossed in for good measure.
'I'm sure I'm not.' He launched into a fanciful collection of conspiratorial conjectures that became progressively more intricate than a Hollywood epic, and were huge fun for a while. People so love their favourite conspiracies and there are so many, of such huge complexity. What always baffles me about these conspiracies though is their apparently seamless execution. In the real world in which we plod about, all around us, all we ever encounter in our day-to-day affairs are incompetent, lying morons who have no idea what they are doing. You know what I mean everyone you ever have to deal with seems to have been doing their job for about ten minutes or you got them on their first day. So -like how come we never encounter these amazingly competent conspirators in the real world?
'I don't think you can have it both ways' I said to him, passing him a stiff Gin and tonic. 'Surely, if your 'Thabo' argument, about a black man being prone to raping at a moment's notice, holds any validity, and I personally know of no study that conclusively demonstrates that, then no conspiracy was necessary, Zuma was an accident-in-waiting.'
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