Tourist-hunting season now open

You know something, this sucks mightily. Tourist-hunting season opens, and we hear of it first from the British? Typical of our authorities. This is incompetence at its most apathetic. How African of the government. No wonder the Brits want to re-colonise this place. What, have you never heard Uncle Bob Mugabe speak?

Wouldn’t that be jolly good fun though, having His Awfulness Gordon Brown as Glorious Comrade Leader? Or, if we wait just a bit more, we can have that dreadful oink David Cameron who, ahahahaha, cycles to work. No, on second thoughts, not. Luring them here with the promise of terrible sunburn and massive hangovers then executing them in a hail of machine-gun fire is more ticklish.

I was first alerted to the fact that South Africa’s second favourite pastime had begun (the first being the Currie Cup. Obviously) by a helpful article in the UK Daily Mail. A very orange Victoria Smurfit breathlessly related how she narrowly escaped death in Cape Town’s war-torn streets. (Smurfit. Her surname is Smurfit. My one brain lobe almost fused as I tried to grapple with the sheer enormity of this fact. It’s too much for me. I’ll leave the mocking over to you.) “Crack! Or pop? I can’t really work out exactly which sound is correct as it happened so fast. Maybe it was a crack and a pop as the bullet entered through Charlie’s window,” she gaspingly wrote. “Everything became very slow. No one looked at each other. It was not the sound of the copper bullet that told us we had been shot at, at point blank range, it was that we all felt it journey past us.”

If she wasn’t already being shot at for being a tourist, I’d have thought she was ducking bullets for her direful prose. Ok, onto the serious business. Remember, as a South African of substance and upbringing the assumption across the world is that you know your Kalashnikovs from your koeksisters. It will be egg on the face big time if these foreign okes should find out you’re a tjop when it comes to weaponry. We’re like, the capital of crime, tjina. It gets put in brochures and stuff, bru. What’s that you say? There are Saffas who like, don’t know guns? Ja, rubbish. One half of the country knows guns because they were sent to the Caprivi Strip to shoot comrades, and the other half knows guns because the comrades gave them guns to shoot Boers with, 9mm pistols are so “Mbeki administration”. They play golf, sip on single-malt whiskeys and read deep poetry. They’re a huge no-no. AK-47 assault rifles are all the rage these days, don’t you know. Nowadays you can even buy one with complimentary leopard skin and white takkies thrown in for free. All Saffas know that.

Spotting tourists is easy. If they have bad teeth and wear their shorts up under their armpits, then they’re from the UK. Their elderly have a habit of appearing at the beach in nothing but scants, exposing everyone to the terrifying spectacle of droopy red flesh. Extra points for bagging one of those.

If they wear khaki shirts and go straight for the prostitutes, then they’re German. It’s the female of the species you want to go for here, the much feared German cougar. If you don’t watch out, she’ll accost you in the streets and you’ll never be heard of afterwards. Keep a weather eye out when hunting for a German trophy.

If they’re surprised to see no giraffes in the parking lot at the airport, then they’re American. They make terrible trophies, though. There’s almost never enough room above the mantelpiece for the mounted head. They’re best put to use as fuel for the winter months.

If they take photos of absolutely everything, then they’re Chinese, who can’t run very fast on those little legs. They’re no fun. Leave them for the children.

Jeremy Nell (he of jerm infamy) was kind enough to let me crib some of his tourist descriptions.

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