The latest prescriptive profundities of King Jacob concerning the enormity of black South Africans lusting after white/Western norms and values appear to border somewhere between the comedic and the lunatic.
Our illustrious foot-in-mouth leader appears to have outshone his previous efforts at providing low-grade mental stimulation and general resigned hilarity to the peoples of the Earth in general and South Africa in particular.
To deride caring for a pet and walking one’s dog as being a heinous ‘coconut’ crime against black humankind is grossly insulting to black and white folk equally. To espouse, by implication, that ‘curly, black and kinky’ is the only way that a black woman should be identified as a true distaff of Africa is to further relegate women to the chattel lists of aged men, jealous of their fiefdoms and fearful of change.
By inference, King Jacob seeks an idyllic return to the ‘purity’ of an imagined African Golden Age of bare-breasted women, child on hip and another a’ belly, swaying in the rhythm of tilling the fields or pounding the maize in the blazing African sun whilst the loincloth-clad men folk swill sorghum beer and swap lies in the shade of the trees in the village of mud huts and snotty-nosed bare-assed children playing in the dirt, emaciated dogs slinking on the edges of the scene wary of the occasional random stone or kick directed their way.
This latest prophetic vision of one man, tacitly supported by his fellow travelers in power, preferment and politics, threatens to pervert the very dream which brought this man to power. The law-enshrined freedom of choice and freedom of thought and expression as embodied in the Constitution of South Africa is constantly being undermined by the one person in the entire country who owes his position, by way of an Oath of Office under the Constitution, to that very Constitution itself.
King Jacob does not eschew the trappings of his presidential post, nor does he shun the modern conveniences of life – most of which, many will gleefully to point out, never originated directly or otherwise from African traditional cultures.
Zuma may fantasize about being a new inspirational Chaka replete with his own harem of Spear-awed wives and concubines, surrounded by his uncountable progeny deep within his underground kraal at Nkandla, ruling his kingdom by edict whilst bestowing his favours upon the yes-men and praise singers of his court, but it is a twisted fantasy, a foetid fetish that he seeks to impose upon his people.
King Jacob is even guiltier than his subjects in his enthrallment with Western/white culture because he has the means to indulge himself whereas most of the citizens of this country do not have those means nor do they have the overarching ambition to possess those trinkets of Western money and status.
King Jacob will always desire to flaunt his five thousand Dollar suits, his cavalcades of SUV’s laden with grim dark-glassed security guards, his ‘spare’ Jumbos trailing in his wake when he travels beyond our borders, his secretive and uniquely exclusive private and public residences with every conceivable protection against the wildest real and imagined threats that the fevered imaginations of his fawning lackeys can possibly dream up; King Jacob is as hooked as a heroin addict on the very things he rails against as being un-African and impure.
Outwardly, then, King Jacob is a self-indulgent hypocrite.
Yet…
Perhaps, in all this Freudian – and embarrassingly - public 1930’s- Nazi Germany-style penis envy, there lies a cynical and contemptuous hidden agenda of Nazi proportions.
Notwithstanding the collective governance concepts said to be behind the eminently self-styled democratic ANC and its government, Jacob Zuma continues his periodic attacks on the ANC’s traditional opponents without let or hindrance from the ANC or its allies in government. Always following times when the ANC government is caught out in inefficiencies, corruption or outright lies, the ANC defends itself by going on the attack against those it sees as being its age-old enemies – usually the whites of South Africa, the liberal wings of all parties or the West; all are seen as being synonymous. Disconcertingly similar to the Nazi party of the 1930’s and comically indistinguishable from the laager mentality of its old foes, the ANC, through whoever is the favourite mouthpiece of the month, snipes at those it thinks are most despised by the general population and, occasionally, sends out a raiding party to sow a bit of alarm and division amongst the ranks of the enemy. When no obvious target can be trotted out for public ridicule then our old friend the mysterious and ever elusive Third Force is duly paraded, with muttered and ever-vague hints at the threat to the new South Africa and its resplendent democracy, closely followed by the bugle call of national unity and commonality of purpose in the never-ending fight against Colonialism, Imperialism, Capitalism, Revisionism, Intellectualism and any other …ism that can be drummed up at the time.
The parallels with Nazi Germany are worrying. The Jews we all know about. But there were also the Gypsies and the other foreigners. There were the intellectuals. There was censorship of the press and art. There were the book-burnings. There was the political re-education. There was the clarion call to an imagined previous Golden Age of simplicity, romance and chivalry. There was the concept of what constituted the ideal racially pure Aryan – with the later eugenics intended to bring about that perfect model. There were repeated calls for unity of identity and mission. There was a charismatic Leader of limited intelligence and education. There was a militarization of police and other essential services. There was a move to centralization of government and economic planning. There was a nationalization of economic resources. There were clear revisions of history.
Aside from the book-burnings, all these have either happened in South Africa, are in the process of happening or are on the agenda. Maybe the book-burnings will follow – or perhaps the textbook saga of 2012 was the local equivalent.
So, King Jacob, Your Majesty, when starts the Thousand Year Reich? Before or after the genocide?
Rick.
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