And the anti-coconut parents descended upon the sandwich platter ...

If you had told me that South Africans were passionate about their constitutional right to call each other by derogatory terms, I would have told you to put the blunt down or pass it along coz you’re clearly smoking potent stuff.

If you had told me that South Africans would be sufficiently moved to pen intelligent, 2 000-word essays peppered with big, academic words to explain passionately why coconuts were the scourge of our nation and the devil’s very own spawn, I would have laughed at you: “Ha ha, you delusional little idiot. My people have much bigger fish to fry than worrying about snot-faced little brats who go around malls speaking English through their noses in striped blazers.”

It takes a big man to own up when he is wrong. Allow me the dignity to be magnanimous in defeat. I was dead wrong. It seems that I completely downplayed the importance of weeding out coconuts and all coconuttyness from the landscape. The short little bishop with purple frocks seems to have got it wrong too.

I must confess that when I wrote my last blog about coconuts, I did so rather flippantly and without too much effort. When I made those assertions, I was under the delusion that I was stating the obvious. For the record, the universal truths I thought I was stating in that column were:

1. The whole notion of describing people as coconuts is retarded because the term is not very well-defined.
2. Whether any person is a coconut is a subjective matter and relative to where one is standing. That’s what the fancy graph was about.
3. In any case, honing in on whether people are coconuts is misspent energy. We have enough to worry about — who gives a flying kite that some people are more Eurocentric than others?

The more astute reader who followed the whole cadenza unfold will be quick to point out to me that most of the 130-odd comments on the actual blog seemed to agree that worrying about coconuts is a bit retarded.

In my defence, I’ll point out that the naysayers were far more passionate and compelling about the evils of coconuts than the guys who shrugged their shoulders and said: “Yeah, everybody knows that.” And I haven’t touched upon the avalanche of emails from readers who think I should purchase a one-way ticket to London to contaminate the atmosphere over there with my Eurocentrism.

But the real reason I’m dedicating an entire blog to the detractors is a bit more selfish and cynical. I really enjoy readers’ complimentary comments. After all, who doesn’t like being called a genie? (Thanks, James Tobias). However, I get an extraordinary and morbid satisfaction from the angry, righteously indignant ones. Really. I derive waaayyy too much pleasure from whipping people up into an emotional rage. I may or may not even be known to pleasure myself as I skim-read (can’t read ’em all) through a 1 900-word response to a 1 400-word piece I’ve written.

So what got my peeps’ drawers so twisted into a bunch that they descended upon me like parents on a sandwich platter at a Tuesday PTA meeting? Well, it seems that quite a few people read the piece and started fantasising about a lot of things I didn’t actually say. I’ll confine myself only to my favourite hallucinations from my beloved readers. (Add “Ndumiso said” in front of all them):

1. The ONLY criteria for being a coconut are: speaking English with a “white” accent, having white friends and harbouring anti-African values.
2. Coconuts are great people. We should all aspire to be coconuts.
3. Coconuts are better than black people who hold on to African values. In fact, everything from Europe is better than anything from Africa.

Some members of the angry brigade defending their rights to hate coconuts as a matter of “national importance” were greatly entertaining. One of them induced uncontrollable fits of laughter in me when he started grading the coconuts according to certain categories. DJ Fresh, for instance, is an “innocuous” breed of coconut because he only twangs and nothing more. You have no idea how hard I laughed at this.

Another coconut-buster introduced some new criteria for identifying coconuts. It seems that the espousing of anti-government views also makes one a bona fide coconut, for example Xolela Mangcu. As my beer buddies would say: eish! It seems that not even black consciousness credentials will save one from being fingered as a coconut — yeah, the same Dr Mangcu, who was the director of the Steve Biko Foundation until recently. The paradox.

Perhaps my favourite comment of all came from a regular reader (he has a general Silwane Files-induced boner) who accused me of saying that all white people were the same. I guess that whole bit about me asking what Casper de Vries had in common with Bill Gates sailed past his head like an Israel-bound missile. For these crimes against humanity he suggested that I was guilty of hate crimes punishable by incarceration under the UK’s race-relations laws. I guess I won’t be joining the notorious chicken run, then.

But like I said, I’m a changed man. I believe that one of the attributes of intelligence is the ability to receive new information, process and assimilate it and come to new conclusions. Being exposed to new information and retaining one’s original stance makes one an impermeable rock of retardation, I always say. Having said that, allow me to exhibit just how far I have come in one short week.

I have seen the light. The discussion we are having about these self-loathing coconuts is an issue of national importance. I think that in the greater scheme of things, the right to call people coconuts, kaffirs and other such names is an important one. Just a few weeks ago, I would have thought our priorities looked something like:

1. Poverty alleviation
2. Racism eradication
3. Education
4. Unemployment targeting
5. Fighting HIV/Aids
…
97. Fighting coconuts

But I have seen the light. I think coconut-plucking needs to move up about 96 places on the priority list. I personally do not believe in bothering with anything that does not have any a practical use. I would hate for us to have such an exhaustive debate without trying to find some way of implementing our resolutions. Because I am an action-oriented type of fellow, I have taken the liberty of coming up with an action plan for the complete eradication of the cancer of coconuttyness from our midst. In the interests of simplicity, it is going to be a three-point plan of decoconuttisation (POD).

1. Development of tight coconuttyness criteria
Let’s all agree. We can’t have the current situation where the coconut witch-hunt is undermined by a lack of clarity about who is a coconut. Why, in my last post I invited the ire of some readers by suggesting that Jacob Zuma might be seen as a coconut by someone who hadn’t left Nkandla. I have already seen the error of my ways. The idea is ludicrous indeed.

My humble submission is that this serious matter of coconuts roaming the streets freely would need to be overseen by a parliamentary committee. The chair would have to be someone really focused and completely uninfected by this plague. It would be a tad difficult in the absence of the criteria, but I think that we can all agree that someone as determined as Bhutana Khompela would probably suffice.

2. Rounding up of coconuts
Once the criteria were established and agreed upon by the parliamentary committee on the decoconuttisation of the population (PCDP), every black person in the country would have to take the coconut test and anyone scoring, say, more than 60% on the test would be taken to a purification centre (PC).

We have a Bill of Rights in this country, which means we are not savages. We would never, for instance, round up the coconuts WWII-style and lock them up against their will. We would first implore all official coconuts to volunteer themselves to the PCs for re-education programmes like we do with TB patients. But we all agree that the gangrene of coconuttyness has probably eaten away at every fibre of Africanness in some advanced coconuts, and some more drastic measures might be needed.

To “encourage” coconuts to “volunteer” for re-education programmes at a PC, we might stamp every black person’s ID with his or her coconut status and make the “Coconut or pure African” field compulsory in every official application form. A little nudge in the right direction might even be the introduction of coconut quotas in the workplace, just to sweeten the deal. You will be surprised just how many people would voluntarily enter a PC to purify themselves under those circumstances.

3. Re-education of coconuts
Let’s face it, some people are probably lost causes. I’m not going to name names here, but some coconuts’ Eurocentrism has reached disgusting levels. I actually know a woman who moved out of a previously white neighbourhood when the number of darkies in her street exceeded three. “I moved out of the township to escape this nonsense,” she told me in confidence. That is just sickening.

But we are the rainbow nation and we would be undeterred in our quest to re-Africanise our lost brethren. The programme would have to be an extensive, six-month project. Six months seems to be just the right amount of time needed to indoctrinate our boys in tight-fitting blue polyester pants with appropriate values such as donnering bergies and sloshed students in that stupid little town under the big lump of rock. Six months would probably do the trick here as well.

We would have to lean on that great educationalist, that British woman … whatshername … who runs the Department of Education, to develop a tight curriculum. I imagine that the curriculum would probably cover topics such as:

1. The word is pronounced “mutter” and not “matter” — getting rid of the shackles of colonial speech.
2. Mogodu is your heritage — saying ox-tripe smells like shit is not cool.
3. Getting rid of the Xolela Mangcu affliction — even when the president is wrong, he is right.
4. Everything African is good and everything European is bad — weeding out that inferiority complex.
5. If you absolutely have to be a coconut, be an innocuous one — the DJ Fresh model.

I have absolute faith in my readers and I can say this much: someone is bound to come up with a much better programme than mine. I know I will not be disappointed. But this much is clear — we cannot live with this scourge.

PHANSI NGAMA-COCONUT, PHANSI!

The collective nation can thank me later. I will take the Order of Good Hope, thankyouverymuch.

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