I met Madiba the other day. It’s not a boast (although having one of the Jackson Five behind you in any queue does provide a warm throb) but the meeting provided stark views of how far we’ve come — the chasm twixt us and that golden honeymoon yawns like HIV wearing a kanga. The great man is a brittle link to our brief and former glory as pin-ups for Elastoplast race repairs. There is nothing wrong with climbing a mountain, but, heights can be debilitating when your guide begins to succumb to thin air.
We witnessed Madiba that day, and the jostling and harsh direction he constantly endures. I wondered how our fading saint must feel. Imagine the Big Sleep beckoning from a bed you didn’t make? The house he helped to build has been renovated around him — it’s as if past ideals dance on the walls like shadow puppets of themselves, tricks of light in a hall of mirrors — not faithful reproductions.
The once noble struggle organ seems like an appendix, a redundant function of evolution, used to digest older foodstuff, now rendered obsolete by its own success, and unused to the refined junk food of Western civilisation, yet embarrassingly to its current incarnation, still present in the body — humbly awaiting its own clinical excision or mortifying atrophy.
It’s as if the former freedom fighters are arrows in a quiver set behind the door, while the youth load political guns.
Sorry about the image — we know how the right love a good ghost story before bed … but don’t be rude to them by asking good questions, you run the risk of becoming their next locus of control, apparently.
Perhaps we should accept that former activists seldom make good politicians, because they started off as decent people. Perhaps we should treat our government like any other group of politicians anywhere on Earth — largely losers.
We should also stop letting them get to us. If you are not happy, vote. If you can’t stay, go. If there is a problem, fix it.
I say we leave the fat cats to their shameful, gluttonous business as we go about ours — being better South Africans.
Oh, and somebody referred to me as a “Malemme Supporter” because I criticised Steve Hofmeyr — talk about spoiled for choice, lucky boy.
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