Sir – I have once or twice been told life comes easy to me. That is not quite the case, as I have never won the lottery yet, and everything I have, or seem to have, came by through worry, wear and nose-to-the-grindstone slog at times. It may also be the de Jager wile and wit I inherited from my activist mother, coupled with occasional flashes of bright invention and thrust my dad’s DNA managed to insert into my make-up.
The grinding revolution and boiling rebellion that surges and subsides with the cut and thrust of service delivery protests, particularly in KwaZulu-Natal, has left me perturbed, watching perplexed, as the comrades get their facts wrong and reassert the colours of this by now infamous Rainbow nation. We are a comedy of wretched proportions and a tragic allegory in the mould of great old Greek myth-basher and social justice warrior, Plato. Some clever guys out there would perhaps even use the two words, Marx and Brothers.
A colleague and fellow military vet once used the word clusterf***. That may well be, and of epic proportions, with the laughter of the outside world washing over us like a force seven hurricane. The President has fielded several broadsides this week, and his take on the ‘non-existing’ farm attacks remain a puzzling and worrisome thesis. Slick and superficial, it cheerfully glosses over facts and subsumes logic beneath the siren song of personality that decides the pecking order in this movement that seems to think it is a ruling party.
It is less a search for a South African utopia than a chronicle of the ANC’s own ego-trips as they indulge in the fantasy they are uniquely touched by genius in the effort to find the one true meaning or substance behind the Mandellian legend of the Rainbow Nation that has somehow escaped the notice of thousands of previous commentators over many years. It is a kind of documentary where the audience is only an afterthought.
Observer from the Park
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