Back in the belly of the beast

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You’ll no doubt be pleased to hear that I am back from my so-called vacation and will no longer be subjecting you to stories of howler monkeys, unrequited priapisms and near death experiences.

A combination of dwindling funds and incipient alcoholic rot forced me home. Costa Rica is expensive and the rand doesn’t go as far as it used to. There was a time it travelled fairly well, but now it’s all palsied and in a wheelchair and needs help getting to the airport on time.

The flights were appalling, as flights generally are. Unless, of course, you fly First or Business Class, in which case the only time the word appalling might be deployed is if the second round of champagne warmed slightly while the cabin crew violently subdued a passenger trying to light a joint in the economy class toilet.

Costa Rica to Panama City to Istanbul to Cape Town, with brutally long layovers in airports the size of small cities filled with hideously garish shops catering for multi-millionaires rather than inappropriately dressed South Africans making offensive remarks about the price and quality of the local beer.

Turkish Airlines brought us dinner at 3am. Local time. Breakfast was served at lunch time. I felt like I was losing my mind. It didn’t help that I was jammed against a window and had to eat like a T-Rex with an amputated arm because I was hemmed in by a Turkish lout the size of Mount Ararat.

Anyway, the immigration official at Cape Town International made it all worthwhile with her cheery cry of “Welcome home!” Kidding. I got the standard sigh, cursory glance and ill-tempered stamp. I’ve had worse.

During the endless flying, waiting, not shopping, drinking, passing out, drinking some more, flying again ordeal, I was surprised to see more than a few people walking around without masks on. A year ago I almost got shot by two German polizei for not wearing my mask inside Frankfurt airport.

There were people on all three of my flights who took their masks off and nobody seemed to care. I cautiously removed mine, feeling as if I was exposing parts that shouldn’t be seen by people with whom I had no intention of being intimate. No raised eyebrows, no shaking of heads. The sense of freedom was almost unbearable. I hailed a passing stewardess and asked that I be given rum and taken to the cockpit for a chat with the pilot.

When the Uber driver dropped me off at the bottle store, I discovered that I no longer even had my mask. I told the girl behind the till that I’d hold my breath and headed for the fridge. When I staggered out with an armload of medication to treat the jet-lag, hypoxia had begun setting in and I was turning blue. She said I needn’t worry.

“Nobody wears masks around here any more. Maybe in Constantia,” she snorted, “but not here.” Not in the Deep South, where nobody really cares if they live or die. She said she’d already had Covid and had no plans to get vaccinated. “Not until, like, they test it on pregnant women, coz, like, you never know what it will do to the baby.” I eyed her stomach. Possibly pregnant, possibly just eats too much. Couldn’t risk it. I paid and left quickly.

Later, I tried catching up on what’s been happening in SA, something that’s generally best done while indulging in low-level substance abuse. It’s becoming increasingly important to dull one’s senses before attempting to follow the news. The lethiferous leviathan that the ANC has become is not to be confronted while one is of sound mind and body. It will crush you.

So our vaccine stash is in danger of expiring and there’s talk of having to destroy millions of doses. Don’t do that. Just leave them on the pavement. No true South African will turn down a free thing. They’ll be gone by morning. Unsold copies of my latest book, Durban Poison, were recently destroyed like a bunch of rabid dogs. The publisher should have put them on the street. At best, the homeless could have used them to roll joints or make fires.

I was planning to go to Durban to visit the old curmudgeon, but the council says it will take six months to fix the very basic concrete bridge over the Tongaat River. That’s my access point to the fleshpots of Ballito. Now I’d have to go all the way through the sugar cane fields up to the N2 and get trapped in savage bottlenecks. After five months on the beaches and backroads of Central America, I can’t do traffic. Someone will die.

Last year, a Chinese developer built a 10-storey building in 28 hours and 45 minutes. In 2015, a Chinese construction company put up a 57-storey skyscraper in 19 days. It’s obvious what has to happen. We need to start breeding with Chinese people in the hope that the work ethic comes through in our children, one of whom will eventually fix the Tongaat bridge in his lunch hour.

Too late for me, obviously, but it’s the next generation we need to start thinking about.

Add one baboon and stir well

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Down in the Deep South, we give our baboons names. Like George and Jezebel and Kataza. Ah, Kataza. Who among us has not heard of your tales of derring-do? Now you’re in trouble, bru. Try a little derring-don’t next time. If there is a next time.

Kataza was out and about with his extended family near the village of Kommetjie when he was kidnapped. Snatched in mid-forage. Bit rude. Next thing he knew, he was in the relatively larney suburb of Tokai. What the hell, he wondered, scratching his balls and pondering if he hadn’t perhaps eaten one of them magic mushrooms from Scarborough. This was definitely a trippy fucked up scene. Where am I? Where are my people?

His crew, meanwhile, had no idea what the hell just happened. The boss was here one minute and gone the next. Like Gavin Watson, only more honourable.

The kids and wives never received a ransom note because that’s not the way the City of Cape Town’s Human Wildlife Service operates. For a start, they don’t call it kidnapping. They call it “re-homing”. Nice. Makes it sound so much more civilised. I, myself, have been re-homed repeatedly over the years. Times I traded up, times I traded down.

Out here, on the last jumping off point for white people, baboons get rap sheets. Kataza apparently earned a reputation as a bit of a naughty boy. Not as naughty as Jan van Riebeeck, but he was after people’s stuff. Not their land, minerals and women, obviously. But other stuff. Fruit, mainly.

Kataza stopped scratching his balls, sat very still and narrowed his already narrow eyes until they were mere slits in his hairy head. To the casual non-baboon observer, he looked like a baboon asleep. Or a statue of a baboon. But why would anyone build a statue to a baboon? That’s crazy talk, that is.

Kataza reckoned this was definitely trading down. Especially since another troop was watching him from a distance. They weren’t exactly rushing over with gifts of roots and grubs to welcome this weary stranger into their midst. In fact, there was a bit of barking. And not the good kind either. Different accent, for a start. The Tokai massif. He’d heard of them. Liked to think of themselves as badasses because Pollsmoor Prison was their turf. Kataza sniffed derisively and yawned. Bunch of pussies, he thought. Because that’s what the Kommetjie posse thinks about everyone.

What he didn’t know was that UCT ecologist Prof Justin O’Riain had been on the radio telling everyone that he (Kataza) was integrating with the new troop and was even being approached by females. I don’t know if the prof has ever been approached by females, but I know from experience that this is not necessarily a good thing.

The prof said Kataza had, before being snatched, been sneaking off with a bunch of “low-ranking females” and shagging them senseless. Is that so bad? Deserving of rendition? Apply that to men and you’d have to snatch or shoot almost all of us. Low-ranking females are the best.

The City says Kataza has better breeding opportunities where he is now. So … you’re saying you did this for him? Because the Tokai girls are hotter than the Slangkop girls? What the hell, bru? How do you even know this? What kind of study are you doing here?

Whatever it was, Kataza felt uncomfortable. What he didn’t know, because his phone had been charging in the electro-fynbos at the time of his kidnapping, was that good humans had created a Bring Kataza Back page on Facebook where they used the exact same idea he had in his own mind.

“Kataza has been kidnapped from his troop and dumped in hostile territory”. If Kataza had been on Facebook, he would have been thrilled to see this. For a while, anyway. Eventually the adverts, recipes and cat videos would have driven him insane.

Kataza considered heading home, but it seemed a very long way away, although it wasn’t really. A bit of a drive at rush hour, sure, but he’d traded his wheels to the incumbent in return for control of the troop. Unlimited access to the naughty low-rankers in return for a rusty old crock with brake issues? No brainer.

Unlike humans, who heave a sigh of relief when the alpha male leaves the room – or even better, the country – baboons quite like having their alpha dude around. He protects them from enemies like leopards and Sanparks officials. He knows which homes have the best humans – the kind who are one with the universe and don’t believe in, like, locks and closing windows and things.

Meanwhile, Kataza was in a quandary. Although he’d never admit it, he had known from a young age that he would never be a contender in the Best Sense Of Direction competition. Not that this was ever a formal thing. Baboons were meant to instinctively know their way around. Kataza had other instincts. It was a tough call. Get the fuck out of Tokai and risk ending up among predators? If he had ever bothered to watch The Lion King, he would have known that lions have baboons’ backs. There was no one around to tell him hakuna matata, bro.

What you don’t want to do in Cape Town is sit around in the belief that someone will come along and help you. It hardly ever happens to humans, let alone baboons. Kataza didn’t know this. But he should have known that his people rarely send out search parties for missing alpha males either. In the back of his weird baboon brain, he probably knew he was screwed.

But he’s not stupid. He comes from the Deep South and knows in his blood there are good humans and bad humans. One of the good ones is Jenni Trethowan. She came looking for him and found him in Tokai. Jenni speaks baboon with a Kommetjie accent. Kataza knows her. Knows she’s cool. If the anti-baboonists employed by the council would like to shoot anyone, it’s Jenni.

Kataza started following Jenni home but one of them got distracted after finding something to eat, probably Jenni, and things fell apart. Or perhaps he saw Jenni’s car and thought not a fuck am I going home in that.

There was no way the council was putting up with this. Cape Town didn’t get to be the best city in the country by letting things slide. The DA ward councillor for the Deep South promised that Kataza wouldn’t be killed and would be allowed to go home. Just as long as it wasn’t on the last train to Fish Hoek, or he’d definitely get stabbed. Not that trains are a thing any more.

This morning (Wednesday) there were reports that the warriors of the Human Wildlife Service were out there at dawn driving Kataza back to Tokai with all the enthusiasm of Seal Team 6 driving Osama bin Laden into a room with no way out.

There’s a Baboon Hotline you can call if you spot Kataza, but word on the street is that’s akin to putting out a hit. The municipality is heavily stacked with humans. Pretty unfair, but that’s how the planet rolls.

Relax, officer

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’Tis almost the season to be jolly. Jolly careful. There are people out there determined to get us locked up over the festive season. Family, for a start. There’s always one asshole relative who insists on pushing our buttons until we lunge across the dinner table and club him to death with a chicken drumstick.

Should you be driven to this point, it’s likely that you will be filled with spirits stronger than the Christmas one. Even an attempted homicide generally requires a liberal application of the old social lubricant. If it weren’t for alcohol, we would all meekly go along with tradition and kiss rather than stab our racist cousins under the mistletoe.

In South Africa, as in most parts of the Christian world, we drink to celebrate Christmas. It’s what Jesus would have wanted. He did, after all, turn water into wine when the liquor ran out at a wedding in Galilee. This was his first public miracle and, quite frankly, I don’t know why he even bothered with the other six. You turn water into wine, you’ll have to get a restraining order to stop me from following you. I suppose it was also a nice gesture to heal the paralytic at Bethesda. Did he do the wine trick there, too? Quite possibly. I get very paralytic on wine but then have to heal myself. Jesus is never there when I need him.

Today there is always plenty of wine at weddings and everyone gets thoroughly trashed to commemorate his miracle on that hot summer’s day in the unoccupied territories. The heathens don’t care much for miracles and only join in because the liquor is free. In the end it all works out and everyone goes home happy.

Oh, wait. Not in Cape Town, they don’t. This is a city that goes the extra mile to ensure we spend a night or three on a horsehair mattress in a filthy cell rather than our own bedroom.

There is no mention in the Bible of a single wedding guest getting bust at a roadblock in Galilee, even though the cops must have got wind that someone was turning water into wine. If the DA had been in charge of the city, Jesus himself might have spent the night behind bars.

I have never been done for DUI. Have I driven over the legal limit? Of course I have. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t. Virtually every car you see parked outside a bar, restaurant or club will later that evening be driven by someone over the limit. Sure, there might be one or two designated drivers among the crowd, but these are like unicorns.

It is the job of the barman to keep serving you alcohol even as it leaks from every orifice in your body, which makes no sense when you consider that it takes just two beers to put you over the limit. I need two beers just to get out of bed in the afternoon. Not really. My point is that the city of Cape Town’s obsession with roadblocks is ruining our social lives. Everyone is too terrified to go out at night for fear of ending up with a criminal record or having their bottom interfered with by a fighting general in the 28s.

Thanks to the police, it’s just not safe to be on the roads at night.

99.9% of people who regularly drive after a few social drinks manage to do so without veering into oncoming traffic or slamming into a lamppost. They might be breaking the law, but they get home quite safely without endangering their or anyone else’s life. And they have been doing it for years.

In Britain and America, police generally need a reasonable suspicion to suspect a driver is intoxicated before requesting a breath test. In many countries you’re given three tests, including standing on one leg and walking heel to toe in a straight line. If you fail all three, you get breathalysed. Fair enough. We don’t get that option here. I might be marginally over the limit, but if I can close my eyes and touch my nose or the cop’s nose or any other body part of his choosing, followed by an arabesque and two grand jetés on the white line, I should be allowed to proceed unhindered.

In the US, thirteen states currently disallow sobriety checkpoints while others require police to provide advance warning of any checkpoints that are planned. That’s right. They have to take out notices in local newspapers notifying people where and when the roadblocks will happen.

Look, I’m not endorsing drunk driving, but I am asking the law to be a little more flexible when it comes to ever-so-slightly-tipsy driving. Nail the heavily wasted, by all means, but stop ruining the lives of the lightly euphoric.

If things carry on as they are, we might as well move to Saudi Arabia.

Or, worse, Australia.

 

And with a lick of her lips, she started to strip (her moer)

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Dear Mmusi Maimane, Bleeder of the Opposition.
Congratulations on finally getting rid of your mayor in Cape Town. Patricia de Lille is extremely dangerous and I’m not saying that just because she is a woman. She was born in Beaufort West, for heaven’s sake. It was only a matter of time before she started selling crack and bludgeoning councillors with her mayoral chain.
You’ve had a rough time of it lately. There will always be barbarians banging at your gate, but more worrying is the enemy that lurks within. The old Democratic Party should never have allowed the New National Party to wheel its Trojan horse into what is now your house. Not your fault. You were fresh out of school at the time. Sometimes I forget how young you are.
You addressed a rally on Freedom Day and made the rookie mistake of suggesting that white privilege was getting in the way of ending black poverty and needed to be addressed. This might have gone down with the great unwashed, but not no much with some of the senior members of your party. By senior I obviously mean white.
Your remarks struck a jarring chord with your silver-tongued shadow minister of public enterprises, Natasha Mazzone, who held up her father as an example of why not all whites were privileged. You’ll be familiar with her tweet but here it is again, just to give you one more sleepless night. “My father arrived from Naples in Italy, he was dark, and could not speak English or Afrikaans, but he was a great chef. He built himself up from nothing to make a good life for his family.”
She has a point. I remember seeing the signs along Durban’s beachfront in the 1980s, “Whites Only – No Blacks or Italians”. It was a struggle for those Napoleons, or whatever the hell people from Naples are called. A new kid appeared in my grade eight class after the second term and didn’t seem to speak any language at all. I liked him. A couple of days later the history teacher threatened to kill him if he didn’t provide his name. It was Giovanni Aquavelva or something. The teacher excused himself and ten minutes later the alarm went off and everyone ran outside into what appeared to be some sort of police ambush. The last I saw of Giovanni he was being carried off in the jaws of an Alsatian dog. He’s probably still trying to get his matric at a school in KwaMashu.
Not being able to speak English or Afrikaans clearly counted in the Mazzone patriarch’s favour. Whoever hired him and helped him on his way to becoming a great chef must’ve mistaken him for a well-tanned mute from Margate. If word had got out that he was Italian, he would have been lucky to find work at the Soshanguve Wimpy.
There seems to be a pattern here, comrade. May I call you comrade? I know the honorific is generally reserved for active members of the league of revolutionaries, but as a white man I find it prudent to call all black people ‘comrade’. Unlike AfriForum, some of us think it a bad idea to continue hammering nails into our own coffin.
But getting back to the pattern. Most of your problems seem to be caused by women. Who among us can forget Lindiwe whats-her-name who claimed to have been human trafficked into the DA and was eventually granted asylum by Harvard University?
You also tried to muzzle your predecessor, Helen Zille, who seems to have developed either a drinking problem or a thinking problem. She does have her moments of lucidity, but then gets onto Twitter and all hell breaks loose.
Then you had Dianne Kohler Barnard sharing a Facebook post by a flaming cockwomble who suggested that life in South Africa was better under the Fuhrer PW Botha.
And Phumzile van Damme resigned as the DA’s spokesperson earlier this year to spend more time “studying” and starting a “family”, which is political code for “I can’t be around these people any more”.
So, in the end, it was De Lille’s radio interview with Eusebius whats-his-face that enabled you to sever all ties with her. “I will walk away from the DA once I have cleared my name,” she said, recklessly violating section 3.5.1.2 of the party’s code of conduct.
Big mistake. Firing her on those grounds, that is. What you should have done is gone around to her house with a baseball bat and made it clear that even if she did succeed in clearing her name, she wouldn’t be walking anywhere anytime soon. You want to leave the DA? Fine. But you’re gonna have to crawl on broken legs, baby. Get Mazzone’s people to do it. They know. Then again, Mazzone and almost everyone in your party has a lot to learn about Omerta. If there’s one thing the DA could benefit from, it’s the Mafia’s code of silence. Do your people ever shut up? Even the president is with me on this.
Because nobody really knew why you wanted De Lille out so badly, the charge sheet was released this week. It seemed a bit limp, to be honest. I’ve been accused of way more serious stuff over the years and have never been asked to leave anything apart from a couple of pubs and one or two marriages.
There was this one thing, though. She had a meeting with a certain Anthony Faul in December 2012 in which he demonstrated a device that would automatically put out shack fires. According to Faul, De Lille later appeared to resent the fact that he would be making R10-million out of the deal and strongly recommended that he give her half. Stupidly, he refused and that was the end of that.
If you can prove just this one charge, Mmusi, the Patricia problem will go away. Possibly for fifteen years without the option of a fine.
People say the DA is misreading the mood of the voters. They are only half right because fifty percent of your voters are preoccupied with menstruating and menopausing and you’d be a fool to guess what kind of mood they might be in. As for the men, well, it’s hard to say. When South African men get in a mood, they don’t necessarily blame their political party and change sides. They might murder their wives and girlfriends or drag the family off to Perth, but it would take more than a palace coup in the mayoral chambers to get them to vote for the ANC.
Besides, a thundering tsunami of fresh crises and scandals will crash down on us between now and next year’s elections. The dogs will keep barking for as long as the caravans keep coming and going. It’s when the dogs fall silent that we need to start worrying.
Speaking of baying hounds, I see the media has begun turning on you almost en masse. I can’t understand it. You were their darling for years. It’s becoming increasingly clear that you need a big move, and the sooner the better.
I suggest you declare the DA a guerrilla movement and start wearing camouflaged battledress. Get yourself a pair of aviator sunglasses and a beret. No, not a beret. A top hat. Instead of going to the bush, you hole up in the coffee shops. There’s a fabulous steampunk outfit in central Cape Town called Truth. The baristas look like insouciant rebels who travel through time and, best of all, they’re black. It’s perfect for your headquarters. You could be the Jonas Savimbi of our time, but better dressed, more eloquent, clean-shaven, slimmer around the hips and, when things get tough, you reach not for an AK-47, but for a mug of gourmet home-roasted coffee. In no time at all, you’d win back the white voters you’ve lost in the past few weeks.
By the way, condolences on what President Ramaphosa did to you in parliament the other day. “We will be the first to defend Mmusi Maimane against those in his own party who deny racial inequality,” said the wily coyote. It was like handing a thirsty man a poisoned chalice. Ancient tactic, divide and conquer. Instead of simply sitting there looking forlorn, you should’ve leapt to your feet and told him in no uncertain terms where he could stick his Machiavellian strategies.
On the other hand, we all welcome a kind word when days are dark and friends are few.
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Day Zero's bubble bursting bonanza

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dogbox2
The water crisis in Cape Town isn’t all doom and gloom.
I saw a newspaper headline this week that said, “Drought could damage property values.” This is excellent news for everyone who isn’t an estate agent or a homeowner who might be thinking of selling. I don’t own property in Cape Town because I never listened to my mother when I left school and became a journalist instead and now it’s too late.
I couldn’t afford to buy a place when I first came to the Mother City in 1998 to help start up e.tv news, so I became a serial renter. Then, in 2004, just when I thought I might be able to get a small place of my own, property prices went utterly berserk. Virtually overnight, estate agents went from vulpine Mazda-driving gin junkies to vulpine BMW-driving champagne junkies. Not all of them, obviously, but certainly the ones who scavenge along the Atlantic Seaboard.
Over the festive season Pam Golding sold property along this gilded seam of ocean frontage worth R167-million. That’s pretty damn festive. It was their busiest December ever. A parking bay was sold for R1.65-million.
The agency’s area manager said despite the water crisis they were still seeing “keen interest from buyers looking for trophy properties”. And why not? If foreigners with tiny willies can bag a lion as a trophy, why can’t they also bag a mansion in Clifton? Actually, many of the buyers are from Gauteng. A trophy house to go with the trophy wife, perhaps.
Since arriving in Cape Town I’ve been behind the curve in every successive property boom. Truth is, it’s just been one long endless sonic boom driven by a real estate industry gone insane with hubris and greed.
Owner: My place isn’t much but I’m hoping to get R700-thousand.
Agent: Don’t be ridiculous. There are people who will pay R3-million for it.
Owner: Are you on drugs?
Agent: Shut up and take the money.
And so the bar for entry was raised sharply and savagely, quickly outstripping the ability of workers, shirkers, revolutionaries and right-brained romantics to get a foot in the door. Hell, by the time the rapacious feeding frenzy had subsided to a dull roar, we couldn’t even get a toehold.
Now, thanks to the lack of divine intervention, things are looking up.
“Drought could damage property values.”
That headline, were it written by a well marinated subeditor with anarchist tendencies, might just as easily have read, “Drought could slash property prices to realistic levels.” But there are no more anarchist subeditors. In fact, there are no more subeditors. They’ve all been darted and sent to the knacker’s yard in the unholy name of cutting back on costs. Let me not get distracted.
The story started off well. There were no typos or grammatical errors. Perhaps there is one subeditor left, banished to a corner of the newsroom where he sits rotting quietly from prolonged exposure to weak grammar and strong alcohol.
However, before the paragraph was out, I was reeling and confused. Because I had been drinking? Perhaps. I prefer to blame the paragraph. Let’s see what you make of it.
“For as long as the Western Cape’s water situation remains unresolved, the property market could take a knock in the short term and first-time buyers could face even higher prices.”
Perhaps it is the alcohol. It has, after all, a bit of a reputation for interfering with one’s thought processes, especially those deployed to the common sense department.
I have become increasingly reluctant to read beyond the first paragraph of any news story. No good can come of it. It will leave you feeling homicidal or suicidal. Sometimes both. Most of the time I get by on a quick scan of the headlines. So it was with long teeth that I read further.
“The influx of property investors is expected to slow.” All well and good. I’ve never been a big fan of these people. They rarely live in their investments, preferring to leave them shuttered up and empty or rented out to nouveau riche white trash who made their money through contract killings, wine farms or medical aid schemes.
Right off the bat, the director of a real estate company said there was “little evidence” that the drought would affect “Cape Town’s buoyant property market”. He would say that, though, wouldn’t he? If you were thinking of buying a house in Cape Town, isn’t this the kind of reassurance you’d want to hear? As opposed to, say, reading a notice from the municipality that from April everyone in the city will be expected to defecate in a bag and wash themselves with sand.
It’s no secret that estate agents have their own unique conception of ethics and truth – a crack house is a renovator’s dream, a vibrant neighbourhood is one where the police and ambulance sirens play all night long and a slight sea view involves standing on the bog and leaning out of the window in the guest toilet.
Claiming the drought won’t affect the property market is like the black knight in Monty Python’s Holy Grail getting his arm chopped off and insisting that it’s just a flesh wound.
Perhaps sensing the need to dilute his denial with a dash of honesty, the director admitted that sales in the middle to upper end of the market might start to slow. “This means we’re not going to have as many affluent Joburgers and Durbanites driving demand for luxury property and prices could take a slight knock in the short term,” he conceded through clenched teeth.
Affluent Durbanites? Oxymorons notwithstanding, anyone properly born and bred in Durban isn’t driving demand for luxury property in Cape Town. They are driving to Blue Lagoon for a bunny or to the airport to emigrate to Australia.
Then he said something that had me scratching my head, bollocks and cat. Not all at once, obviously. He said that if the “double-figure capitalisation in property over the last two years is left unchecked, there is a risk that property values would lose touch with their underlying economic fundamentals and we’d end up in a bubble situation”.
The reporter, I imagine, reacted much like I did. A bit of slow nodding, some drooling, a vegetative state and then brain death. The reporter dragged himself back from the brink. Something had been troubling him from the start. Why would a water crisis mean even higher prices for first-time buyers?
“The first is the likely influx of people that we’re going to see coming to Cape Town to look for work, as our outlying rural and agricultural areas take strain.”
Either the subeditor blacked out at this point and deleted a bunch of words with his face or the reporter, like me, abandoned all hope of making sense of anything and went drinking. The story wrapped up with quotes from the regional head of another agency.
Hedging his bets like a true professional, he said it was too soon to say whether the crisis would affect people’s decisions to buy in Cape Town. “A contained situation for a few months will not impact the long-term desirability of living in Cape Town, but a prolonged situation would temporarily impact sentiment and valuations in the short term.”
It’s a sentence wringing its hands, drenched in false optimism and crippled with contradictions. For a start, the situation is nowhere near contained. If anything, we have a container situation. I don’t even have a bucket.
The chairman of a Western Cape property forum had the last word. “For now things are still good, but we expect that it might change for the worse as the industry is water dependent.” Nonsense. If anything, the real estate industry is tonic dependent.
Gin and water is an abomination.
Dogbox

The new dorsland draadtrekkers

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I find it hard to take things too seriously because in a hundred years from now everyone on the planet will have vanished and been replaced by eight billion people who don’t currently exist. Also, we live on a giant rock floating in space.
So when people come to me with fear in their eyes and say that Cape Town – where I am at the moment – is about to become the first city in the world to run out of water, I guzzle tequila shots and do cartwheels until they go away.
And while everyone is whispering in urgent tones about the water crisis, I haven’t heard anyone talking about a shortage of beer. That’s because there isn’t one. The solution is obvious. Stop using water and switch to beer. After all, beer is, like, 50% water. The other 50% is supernatural happy juice. You can drink it, soak your clothes in it and even use it to wash your face and gentleman bits. Ladies should wash in wine.
Actually, I did have cause to panic earlier in the week when Western Cape Premier Helen Zille tweeted, “Talking to @WorldOfBeer about bottling 12 million quarts of water (instead of beer) to help us in the event of day zero.” What is wrong with this woman? Beer is the only thing that is going to get everyone through this nasty business.
After Cape Town mayor Patricia de Lille went berserk and blamed everyone except herself and her party for the crisis, she was fitted with a muzzle and led away. Zille is now in charge of saving us all from certain death with a series of well-placed tweets. Like this one. “If everyone using water in greater Cape Town, Drakenstein and Stellenbosch sticks to upper limit of 50 litres per person per day, the dams will reach a low of 15%. Day Zero is 13,5%. We can still prevent it by the skin of our teeth.”
By then we won’t have any skin on our teeth. Not being able to brush will have us walking about with mouths seemingly filled with small marsupials.
As princess of the province Zille gets to live in Leeuwenhof, a lavish 17th-century estate lounging elegantly on the slopes of Table Mountain. This week she posted a picture of a tomato in a quarter of a cup of water. “Washing a tomato for supper in a cup. I will use it for other fruit (nectarines and grapes) as well. Then the water left in the cup goes into the toilet cistern.”
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Another tweet had a photo of her standing in a tin basin having a wash – mercifully showing only her bare feet. In response, Mududzi tweeted a photo of himself bathing with kitchen utensils. Zille responded, “No no no! No baths, not even with your pots and pans. Take them into a 90-second shower instead.”
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In an effort to shame the city’s top 100 water abusers, a list of addresses from Camps Bay to Crossroads was released. Just the name of the street, suburb and water consumption. In other words, no shaming at all, really. Topping the list is someone in Haywood Road, Crawford, using 702 000 litres a month. That’s got to be a clandestine grow house. Thanks to this list, everyone in Haywood Road is now a suspect.
So far there is no technical strategy in place for dealing with Day Zero. The city’s only plan seems to be to urge residents not to use more than 50 litres a day. What a brilliant idea. Let’s rely on the inherent goodness in people. On their willingness to sacrifice for a common cause. Does Zille even know what people are like? It reminds me of the time Neville Chamberlain met Hitler and made him pinky swear that he wouldn’t start a war.
Oh, wait. That’s not the only plan. Zille has also suggested that to relieve the pressure on the municipal water system, people could book into hotels for the duration of the drought. I’m not joking. She really said this. That’s fine for Jacob Zuma’s bagmen in the state-owned enterprises – they can go and stay at the Oberoi Hotel in Dubai for free, thanks to the generosity of the adorable Gupta family.
At least 60% of city residents aren’t sticking to the daily limit. That’s because most people don’t care about anyone they’re not related to or have no chance of sleeping with. They’re not going to suffer for the benefit of strangers. They care only about themselves. Cape Town has plenty of them. They are called The Rich. So when you overhear someone droning on about the state of the Salukis (the Range Rover is in such a mess!) because the doggy parlours have closed down, you need to go up to them and say, “Shut your borehole.” You may wish to deliver a light slapping. Apart from hard currency, it’s the only language they understand.
One thing is certain, though. While we the people are wearing edible broeks, pooing in the bushes, eating off open fires, drinking our own urine and rutting like wild animals, The Rich will carry on as if nothing is amiss. The lowering of standards does not come easily to them. They are different to us. They will fill their pools with Perrier and drink cocktails on their verdant lawns. They will also know that we are coming for them. Well, for their water, anyway. Nobody wants the French Revolution.
The chattering classes – those of the metropolitan middle – have it that the problem is not one of too little water but rather too many people. What they really mean is too many immigrants. And by immigrants they mean people from the Eastern Cape.
There are moves afoot to impose a series of incremental fines on households that use more than their fair share. Obviously if you don’t have a water meter you can’t be fined. And who doesn’t have water meters? The poor, that’s who. They get to sit around their communal taps and drink all day long, then wash their goats and hose down their shacks when they catch fire and there’s nothing we can do about it. Damn their selfish eyes.
It hasn’t escaped the attention of Zille’s followers. This from a white rugby player from Kraaifontein, “Why should we that pay for water save if the people that doesnt pay water dont save? And what is the DA doing? Nothing instead of fixing the crisis you guys fight under each other.” At least his privileged education is finally paying off.
The city has issued an online map showing all the plots in Cape Town – apart from the plot to destroy Patricia de Lille’s career, obviously. An incredibly complex system involving coloured dots indicates who is saving water and who needs to be ashamed of themselves. I’m colour blind so it makes no sense to me at all.
I’m not the only one. “What I don’t understand is why the city still tolerates households consuming more than 10k litres? Why is the water map not showing red dots? If I would see my neighbor with a red dot I would go over and have a talk to help them to use less water!” Have a talk, eh? I reckon once that chat was over there’d be red dots of arterial spray all over the house.
Another suggested that watershedding should start now. You’d think, right? Before Day Zero kicks in, there really ought to be a dry run. Haha. “Shut it down now except for essential services … bring in the bowsers now.”
For those who aren’t familiar, bowsers are St Bernard dogs crossed with pitbulls. They are trained to distribute water to the needy and attack the wasteful. Unlike many of us, they are able to interpret the water map. However, they do need help accessing the internet.
Alexandra suggested that people should stop complaining because it does nothing to provide water. “Do your part, be wise with water and prayer. Pray for our government, our leaders and the poor. When God brings the floods they will be mostly impacted.”
It was probably excessive praying for sunny weather that caused the drought in the first place. God has been known to overreact at times so please tone down the prayers for rain.
Meanwhile, another tweet from Zille, complimenting some or other shiny-eyed family of do-gooders on their increasingly ludicrous water-saving measures, said, “Some people are really catching the “gees” of saving water.” Ah, yes. The old “gees”. The spirit. The last time we had it was during the 2010 Soccer World Cup, except this time we’re all going to die at the hands of thirst-crazed gangs with names like the H2 Ous. That’s if the Black Death doesn’t get us first.
By April the taps will be turned off and people will be lining up at one of the 200 distribution points around Cape Town. This could mean at least 10 000 people arriving at each point every day. I’m not going to be able to do it. I can’t be in a queue of ten people without being consumed by homicidal fantasies. Fights over bottled water are already breaking out in supermarkets.
Armageddon outta here.

Swallowing is good for you

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The European swallow stands about five-foot-six in its socks, burns easily in the sun and enjoys a pint or two with the lads. It is also a small migratory bird.
In our summer months, the European swallow of the featherless variety can be spotted in coastal towns from Umhlanga to Hermanus. Come winter, he returns to his natural habitat and can be spotted in The Cock and Balls in Fulham High Street.
I am an African swallow. We prefer to conserve our energy – not to mention our limited financial resources – and migrate within the country. Winters in Durban, summers in Cape Town. Sprawled in my nest in Westbrook on the east coast, nursing a damaged wing after attempting to fly home from a friend’s house one unhinged Friday night, it struck me that the seasons had turned. My instincts said it was time to head west. My instincts have never been wrong, give or take a couple of marriages and a career in journalism.
And so I find myself hunkered down in a shack in the milkwoods of Kommetjie typing with fingers crippled from frostbite. I am clothed in a stinking onesie stitched from the fur of a dozen dassies and lined with the skins of two careless Cape seals.
I appear to have mistimed the migration. Cape Town alone decides when to call it summer. There’s nothing I can do about it now. I’d rather die of hypothermia than head back down the Transkei’s Roadkill Road.
A cloud of panic hangs over this southern tip of Africa. It used to be bong smoke, but now it’s panic. Word on the street is that Cape Town will run out of water by March next year. This is good news. I should be back in Durban by then. What? Don’t look at me like that. Okay, fine. It’s bad news for the people who live here. They could always move to Durban. By next Christmas we’ll all be drinking Chardonnay and paying R5m for a roach-infested rat hole in Gillespie Street.
I’ve never been a huge fan of water. Salt water, yes, but only because the ocean is made of it. I can understand why people would buy bottled water in a country where landmine victims outnumber cars, but nobody ever died in South Africa from drinking tap water. Unless maybe the tap belonged to a neighbour who suspected you of trying to turn him into a frog and shot you in the back while you were bent over drinking. Which probably happens fairly often in Limpopo.
Every day there are fresh statistics to scare the living hell out of everyone in Cape Town. The six dams that supply the city are currently at 38% capacity. Isn’t this quite good? It’s more than I got for maths in matric and I turned out okay.
In the old days when rain was a thing, consumption in the metropole was at 1.1 billion litres per day. It now stands at 585 million litres. A massive reduction. But the number is still too big for us to fully udnerstand. Look at it this way. We’re consuming the equivalent of 292 Windhoek draughts for every man, woman and child. Per day. That’s a reasonable average for the Cape Flats, but you’re not going to get those heroic levels in Constantia and Bishops Court.
I suppose not all of it is getting chucked down people’s throats. There’s bathing and watering gardens and washing cars and a lot gets wasted in places like workshops and hospitals where staff get grease and blood under their fingernails.
But apparently that’s still too much. The city wants people to shower for no longer than a minute. If you get caught running a bath, you’re stripped naked and publicly flogged in Adderley Street. I tried showering for one minute. At six-foot-four, there’s a lot of ground to cover. Sixty seconds was just enough to lather up into a striking resemblance of the abominable snowman. So no rinsing then? Seems unduly harsh. I went and stood outside, letting the freezing wind blow the suds from my quivering body. I didn’t want to use a towel because that would’ve meant having to wash it at some point. The penalty for washing towels is a light stoning. For now. I expect it will be escalated to the amputation of a hand by January. I went to the mall later with flaking patches of dried soap on my face and arms. Mothers covered their children’s eyes. I saw one woman gag.
It has also been recommended that you don’t flush the toilet if you’ve only had a wee. This isn’t a problem for me because I wee outside. Not in the street. In my garden. It’s a territorial thing. When I was married I’d sometimes do it indoors if it was very cold outside. One night my wife caught me in the act of marking my territory in the lounge. I stood there with my willy out, telling her it was the cat. That I was the cat. And the cat was me. Luckily she was hallucinating on benzos and found it all quite plausible. She poured me a saucer of milk and went back to bed. Actually, she didn’t even bother with the saucer.
In Cape Town, you’re also supposed to stand in a bucket when you shower, then use that water to wash the children who have to stand in their lunch boxes, then use that water to wash the baby in a soup bowl, then use whatever’s left over to water the one plant you have chosen to save.
On the rare occasion it does rain, the roads of suddenly full of people driving around aimlessly.
“Quick, get in the car. We’re going to Knysna.”
“Are you mad? Why?”
“They’re having rain. The car’s filthy.”
People are advised to close the toilet lid when flushing, presumably to save the seven drops that might splash onto the floor. They are also encouraged to use disinfectants, face masks and gloves where required. I don’t know about you, but once I’ve done my ablutions I generally don’t need to have the crime scene cleaners around.
Apparently Phase 1 of the disaster plan had been implemented. I didn’t even know there was a plan. A better one might have been to make provision for this crisis several years ago. They knew. Oh, yes. They knew alright. But there’s nothing sexy about desalination and groundwater abstraction projects. Not when you live in a city of mountains and beaches and a waterfront that makes Durban’s look like a dumping ground for junkies, vagrants and medical waste. Which is what it is.
We are warned that supply might be disrupted during peak water usage times. Being ‘self-employed’ I don’t know what this means but it seems unlikely I’ll be affected. People who live in high-lying areas will experience outages. I live two metres above sea level. I’ll be fine up until Donald Trump melts Antarctica and, in the middle of a drought, I drown in my sleep.
The city has appealed to people in low-lying areas – like Mitchell’s Plain and Gugulethu – to curb their usage to help their less fortunate brothers and sisters who are suffering terribly up on the slopes of Clifton and Camps Bay. Seems fair.
The city has also installed seven thousand “water management devices” on the properties of “delinquent” water uses. These are not juvenile delinquents. These are grown-ass people who just don’t give a damn. So their pipes are fitted with the equivalent of ankle monitors.
The city is divided into pressure zones. For instance, there’s no pressure in Observatory. You can wake up at midday, smoke a blunt and get a tattoo or a shot of tequila right there in the main road. No pressure at all.
There’s been talk of remotely manipulating valves in the reticulation network, but this seems to be some sort of code and nobody understands what it means. Apparently it reassures people. Not the paranoiacs, obviously.
If an area is using water above the daily limit, pressure will be reduced to force consumption down. Once consumption is reduced, pressure will be restored. It’s the old “I’ll have sex with you when you give up drinking” ploy. It’s the carrot and stick method, although I’ve never used either during sex, and it doesn’t work because there’s always one guy who wants to fill up his pool and wash his Range Rover, racehorse and trophy wife.
On my way for a surf at Muizenberg the other day, I passed two lots of people down on their hands and knees on the side of the road. This being Cape Town, I reckoned they were drunk, praying or doing yoga. Being the deep south, it could easily have been all three. But no. They were hunkered around an outlet from a mountain stream, desperately filling bottles and drums.
One of them looked a bit like Immortan Joe, the disgruntled civil servant who featured in Mad Max: Fury Road, a documentary about water shortages and how even a woman from Benoni can survive without an arm or leg or even a sense of humour.
Let’s end on a history lesson. Who said this? “It has only been through a century of dedication and a commitment to engineering excellence that the City of Cape Town has been able to guarantee clean water for an ever-expanding population. We are more than up to the task.”
a. Jan van Riebeeck in 1652.
b. Cecil John Rhodes in 1890.
c. Patricia de Lille in 2013.
It wasn’t Jan or Cecil.
It just occurred to me that a water shortage might also mean a beer shortage. Let the stockpiling begin.
Barricades

To not swallow or split

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Last Wednesday was International Migratory Bird Day and I speak for the indigenous avian community when I say we’re happy to see the back of those annoying ingrates. I have never seen such arrogance and entitlement. Disrespecting international borders, they come over here every summer, exploit our good weather and do absolutely nothing to uplift the local economy.
I’m sorry, but it’s just not good enough to fly in on a balmy October morning and start shouting about your brilliant sense of direction when some of us struggle to find our way out of shopping malls. We won’t even speak of the flitting about hither and yon in the hope that someone will catch a glimpse of your florid undercarriage and cry out in delight.
Who do they think they are? They come from dinosaurs, for god’s sake. They’re pterodactyls. Sure, they have a better attitude, but only because they know that if they started snatching our children, we wouldn’t hesitate to make them extinct. Like we did with the pterodactyls.
Then, at the first sign of a chill in the air, they close their nests and bugger off to somewhere warmer without so much as a thank you. I spent the entire summer throwing my bread and spilling my seed into the garden and making sure the little bastards had water to bath their filthy lice-infested bodies.
Living alone as I do, they were the only friends I had. I was learning their language. Do you think they ever bothered to learn mine? Of course not. They are like the British who spend hundreds of winters on the Costa del Sol and still the only Spanish they know is, “Una mas cerveza and a steak, egg and chips, pronto Tonto.”
I’m not asking for a debate on Rabelaisian architecture – quite frankly I’m not sure Rabel was an architect at all – but a simple good morning would have been nice. There was one bird who appeared on the telephone wire at sunset who had a lot to say. He’s gone, now. Probably to the Canary Islands, where, if there’s any justice in this world, he won’t be allowed in because he’s not a canary. I suppose there’s a chance he is a local and can’t afford to migrate, in which case his sudden disappearance is quite likely linked to the neighbour’s cat.
I prefer to think that he was concerned about my well-being and was advising me to leave post haste because winter was drawing dangerously near.
“But where should I go?” I shouted into the twilight.
“Durban,” he tweeted. It’s true. He has a Twitter account. All birds do. They’ve just learnt not to follow anyone after that nasty business with Alfred Hitchcock when nobody got paid even though they totally carried the movie.
My feathered friend had been with me for most of the summer, arriving at dusk every day to see that I was okay. Or, more likely, to gloat. If I could fly I would so gloat at creatures that can’t fly.
He saw my living conditions, there in my shack in the milkwoods of Kommetjie, and must have known I couldn’t afford to migrate to the warmer breeding grounds in the north. He wasn’t even sure I was capable of breeding at all. Nor am I, quite frankly.
I had already been thinking about migrating to Durban for the winter, so please don’t assume that I take my instructions from birds. That would be mad. Unless, of course, it’s crows. You’d be a reckless fool to ignore advice dispensed by crows.
And so it was that on International Migratory Bird Day I fled my shack ahead of looming frontal attacks by wild arctic storms and clawless otters crazed from the cold. I snuck through the crippled milkwoods under cover of darkness and folded myself into the Subaru, hitting the road at 6.15am, the earliest recorded motorised departure in human history.
Apparently it wasn’t. Apparently there are other people on the road at this godless hour. Not one or two, either. Hundreds. Thousands. The entire M3 was backed up for 30kms. It was still night. I wasn’t even able to make out the occupants of the other cars. They could have been flightless birds – ostriches behind the wheel with hysterical penguins gibbering in the back seat – all desperate to migrate to Durban. Boots stuffed with illegal emus and cassowaries who came over by boat but lost their money gambling and can’t get back to Australia or wherever the hell they come from.
What a terrible world this is becoming. I want you here by 8am. But sir, the taxis are on strike, the buses aren’t running, the trains are burning, the roads are jammed, the robots are out, a stoned dodo drove into me … I don’t care. 8am or you’re fired.
We need another industrial revolution but with a lot less emphasis on the industrial. The original idea was eight hours work, eight hours play and eight hours sleep. Heavy traffic, exploitative bosses, watered down tequila and barking dogs have screwed with this formula.
Anyway. I don’t care. I’m in a bar in Jeffreys Bay drinking gallons of The Bird lager. It’s made by a mob of east coast reprobates at Poison City Brewing. I see it as part of the essential refuelling process, much like what the red-faced warblers do when they stop off in Morocco for a hit on the hash pipe before shacking up with those cute Portuguese birds on the Algarve.
Besides, one doesn’t simply spend summer in Cape Town and return to Durban in winter without stopping off in Jeffreys Bay to acclimatise. By acclimatise, I obviously mean surf and drink and gird one’s loins for the hell run through the Transkei. I can’t call it the Eastern Cape because it doesn’t behave like a normal province. There’s no corruption because the entire budget is stolen within minutes of being allocated. The traffic cops are trained in new and unusual methods of soliciting bribes – “Sorry sir. On this section of road, you are forbidden from wearing seat belts”. Dogs run into the street hoping to be put out of their misery.
Look, the notion of spending summers in Cape Town and winters in Durban appeals to me on a deep and primal level. Just don’t call me a swallow. Swallows are people who have a home in London and another in Hermanus. Swallows are wealthy and generally retired. I’m neither, as evidenced by the fact that you’re reading this.
It’s quite simple, really. After spending seventeen winters in Cape Town, nine of them in a terrible state of marriage, I never again want to be cold. Or married.

Privates on parade

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Ted called me this morning and said there was a parade in Cape Town. He suggested that we get onto it right away. As former military men, Ted and I always have enormous fun at parades.
During the war Ted was a sniper and I was a signalman. This is a perfect combination in times of peace and whenever we find ourselves in a large, unruly crowd of young people high on drugs we split up and use the old Zulu pincer movement to isolate the vulnerable females and herd them into the nearest bar where we ply them with cheap philosophy and offers that they hardly ever refuse.
I strapped on the old boots, boshoed and bayonet, went round to Ted’s place and hid in the garden giving the coded signal that in our army days meant “we attack the refugee camp at dawn”. I waited for the appropriate response – “women and children first” – but it never came. This time, I heard a signal with a chorus line. Something about raining men.
All thoughts of Cassinga were driven from my mind as Ted stepped out of his front door. He was wearing some kind of floral lilac dressing gown affair with one of his wife’s brassieres strapped to the outside. I was rooted to the spot, incapable of moving or even speaking. The entire course of the war could have changed had Swapo gone into battle dressed like Ted.
“Come along, old chap,” he shouted. “We’re off to the parade.” I hadn’t even got my voice back and Ted was congratulating me on my uniform. “Military,” he said. “Very sexy.” He started humming the theme tune to Yentl.
“Enough!” I barked, and ordered him to tell me what the hell was going on. He looked at me in surprise. “We’re going to the Gay Pride Parade,” he said. “I thought you knew. You’re certainly dressed for it.”
I was outraged. You don’t get more heterosexual than a former SADF signalman. Obviously I can’t say the same for the snipers, but I always believed that they were real men, too. I could perhaps understand it if Ted had been one of those parabatty boys, what with all that leaping from aircraft and drifting through the sky like big brown snowflakes. It’s just not natural.
Then they were upon us. Boys dressed as girls, girls dressed as hermaphrodites, flagellants dressed as Lutherans, preachers dressed as prostitutes, dogs dressed as cats.
This was pretty wild stuff, even for Green Point. I grabbed Ted’s arm to make sure we wouldn’t get separated. “That’s the spirit,” he said, taking me by the hand. I smacked him sharply on the side of the head, setting off a chorus of high-pitched squealing from a passing pack of sadomasochists.
I backed up against a wall, breathing heavily, fearing that someone would smell the testosterone on me and hand me over to this outlandish authority figure in a skin-tight camouflage skirt carrying what looked like a flexible pink plastic truncheon. “Relax,” said Ted. “Strapadictomy. Quite harmless.”
It might not have been Haiti, but I began to get an idea of how Jean-Bertrand Aristide must have felt in 2004. He was trapped in Port-au-Prince by roaming gangs of blood-crazed voodoo merchants. I was trapped in Green Point by roaming gangs of sex-crazed methylenedioxymethamphetamine merchants. At least Aristide had the option of exile.
Ted broke away and sashayed into the crowd, swinging his hips like a damn schoolgirl and shouting something about beers for queers.
Then an eyeballing situation began developing. People representing at least three separate genders started trying to make eye contact with me. I kept averting my eyes until I realised that this could also create the impression I was being coy. And nothing gets a deviant salivating quicker than the prospect of gnawing on the flesh of a shy virgin in combat boots.
I quickly changed my strategy and began darting stern no-nonsense looks at the perpetrators before letting my gaze trail away to the nearest woman. However, homosexuals operate on a secret code of mixed signals so there was a very good chance that I was letting them know that I would be available upstairs at Cafe Manhattan in twenty minutes. Anyway, the strategy was doomed from the start. I looked around and there wasn’t a woman in sight who would have been prepared to step in and save me from being licked to death by a baying mob of erotomaniacs in leather suspenders and fishnet stockings.
Just then Ted broke through the crowd and grabbed me by the shirt. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” he shouted. I saw that he had lost half of his dressing gown and his bra was hanging from one strap. He still won’t tell me what happened out there. Whatever it was, it turned him right back into the irascible old homophobe that he always was. He says he is organising a Straight Pride March. It’s open to anyone who owns a gun and is prepared to take a polygraph test in a controlled environment.
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Pining for the pines

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I was out walking on the slopes of Table Mountain the other day enjoying the exercise and marveling at the view … oh, who am I kidding. I was out looking for shamanic fungi but I can’t write that or the police will be smashing down my front door before you can say 4-hydroxyl-dimethyltryptamine.
Truth is, nobody can walk anywhere in the Table Mountain National Park these days because a gang of government-backed eco-terrorists are hacking down all the pine and eucalyptus trees. A few days ago, someone spray-painted sad faces onto the ends of some of the executed trees. Then someone else came along and sprayed happy faces onto the rest.
This is how we protest in the Cape. Instead of being like normal people and throwing stones and setting journalists alight, we paint faces onto tree stumps and write angry letters to the local paper.
When I say “we”, I mean white people. Everyone else is “they”. Here in Cape Town, we speak it like it are. But this is not a racist thing. It’s a mountain thing. We take our dogs and our children and our secretaries for walks on the mountain and They don’t. If We see one of Them heading towards us, We stuff our wallet down our pants and try to call the mountain police before They disembowel us with screwdrivers and make overseas calls on our cellphones.
I’m talking rubbish. There is no such thing as the mountain police.
So. Out here in Africa’s last colony, one is either pro-tree or pro-fynbos. There is no middle ground. Stands must be taken and positions defended.
I have given the matter considerable thought – all of three seconds – and have decided to join forces with the tree people. One of their major grievances is that by hacking down all the pines, the Tree Taliban have deprived walkers of any kind of protection from the sun. Apart from a six-pack and a 9mm Parabellum, shade is the next best thing to have on a walk in the Table Mountain National Park.
The Taliban’s argument, which is supported by chainsaws, is that the birds don’t like alien trees. So? They’re fucking birds. They can fly to the Kruger Park if they don’t like it here. Apparently the pines also take too much water. Please. This is Cape Town. Everyone has a drinking problem. It seems unlikely the drought is being caused by a bunch of dipsomaniac pines in Tokai.
Fynbos is not known for its shade-giving qualities. If you’re suffering from heat stroke and desperately need shelter, you could always try to leopard crawl under a Leucospermum lineare and risk having your face slashed to ribbons by its cruel stunted branches. And there is no shortage of options to choose from. In these parts alone there are over 7 000 species of fynbos, ranging from dull to hideous. You can’t miss them. Once you pick up the scent of roadkill, you know you’re in the Cape Floral Kingdom.
Fynbos is not your friend. It will turn on you when you least expect it. Pine trees, on the other hand, are good for all sorts of things. They give you a place to hide when you want to wee. You can also make houses and books out of them. And chopsticks. The only thing you can make out of fynbos is a braai. It can’t even speak English, for god’s sake. Fynbos. What the hell does that even mean?
The Taliban accuse the aliens of being too flammable. So what would you rather watch in a forest fire – a pine tree exploding like a magnificent roman candle or a piece of fynbos popping and crackling like a girly little squib?
The assassins responsible for these killing fields don’t give a damn about what we want. They are fynbosbefok and nothing we say or do will make them see reason. They use made-up words like Afromontane and whine that the fynbos is going the same way as the great white shark. Except that fynbos won’t bite your legs off. But it would, given half a chance.
There’s a charming fellow by the name of Peucedanum galbanum who, if you brush against him, will make your skin erupt in suppurating blisters. Nice.
I haven’t tried it yet, but I imagine that walking through a pine forest instills in one a sense of peace and oneness with the world. I have walked through fynbos. I get agitated and angry and lash out at strangers.
The Taliban say that plantations are not forests and that they were only planted for commercial reasons. This is nothing but arboreal xenophobia. Does the tree know its ancestors came from Europe? Even if it did, would it care? Mine did and I don’t. Come at me with an axe and I’ll have your throat.
Trees are happy to be left alone. Fynbos, on the other hand, has to be set alight every few years if it is to thrive. What kind of demon plant is this? Burn me and I shall rise again, stronger! That’s Satan talking, that is.
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