by Ben Trovato
Nicholas is 18 years old. He has finished up at St John’s College and is preparing for a bright future in Australia. Just kidding. I don’t know what his plans are. Given that he achieved nine distinctions, they probably don’t involve magic mushrooms and transsexual crack whores.
I am simply using Nicholas as an example in much the same way that he will in all likelihood go on to use others for whatever purposes he sees fit. As a very intelligent lad, this is his prerogative. It is ordained. It is the way of the world.
The well-educated become wealthy, the poorly educated become poor. Then there is you and me – a little bit educated, a little bit poor, always money for beer. A generalisation, to be sure. Toss in an unexpected work ethic and a couple of genetic surprises and all stereotypes are off.
Nicholas is not a throwback. He is a natural. Or maybe a nurtural, given the massive amount of support his parents must’ve given him. As a schoolkid, I supported the hands-off approach when it came to parenting. They persisted with a hands-on approach, which usually came in a parabolic arc down to my quivering buttocks.
Nicholas totally cracked top percentages in seven of his nine distinctions and it doesn’t matter that he is more fluent in Latin than isiZulu. With the government’s new Woodstockian approach to education – free for all and anything goes – it’s quite possible that we’ll all be speaking isiLatin by the end of the century.
Nicholas is from Emmarentia in Johannesburg. Let’s give him a chance to speak. “I spent my whole high-school career just trying to learn everything well. In a sense you could say that my whole high-school career has led up to my performance in matric.”
Now and then one reluctantly finds oneself in the company of a professional melanchologist from the past, and even though we might plumb the murky depths of our spluttering adolescence, we use words like “disaster” rather than “career” when referring to our passage through high school.
Nicholas said that during his matric year he would wake up at 6am because he wasn’t much of a morning person. This makes no sense. If you’re not a morning person you have no business waking up before midday.
“For my whole life my parents have made it clear that they support me and my education and they would do anything in their ability to help me. In the morning‚ often my mom and dad would make me breakfast. I feel like they sacrificed a lot in order to help me perform at school.”
Breakfast! No wonder he got nine distinctions. I was given a light thrashing and a pebble to suck on before being made to crawl to school on my hands and knees.
Nicholas also played second-team basketball and first-team hockey, which must be reassuring for his parents because if he ever gets brain damage he can still earn a living. He said sport helped him perform better academically. “If you don’t exercise you sometimes struggle to concentrate well.” I don’t know about that. Ritalin is basketball for the lazily gifted. Or something.
Nicholas is taking a gap year and then wants to study mathematics and science in America. Better hurry, Nick, before Donald Trump bans science altogether.
I haven’t mentioned the half-a-million kids who dropped out between Grade 10 and matric. Sooner or later they’ll turn up at the traffic lights. We’re going to ignore them then so we might as well ignore them now.
A VERY POTTED HISTORY OF THE LAND ISSUE
If you look up land reform in South Africa in an atlas, you will see a picture of a Neanderthal armed with a wooden club dispersing a family of Brachiosauruses so that he might build a rudimentary security complex on their traditional grazing grounds. He was the first property developer. And while the dinosaurs went extinct, property developers still walk among us.
Then, in the early Pleistocene – which came to an end when it got ground into the terrestrial carpet – Australopithecus africanus came along and things took a bit of a turn.
“Who the hell are you?” asked the Neanderthal.
“I am the earliest hominid and I am taking this complex for myself.”
“No, you’re not. Besides, I haven’t even started building it yet.”
“Then I shall take your land.”
“You will have to fight me for it.”
“I can’t. Not today. My wife wants me home early.”
“Your wife that Mrs Ples?”
“That’s her. Why?”
“Take my land. You’ve suffered enough.”
Not all transfers of land went as smoothly as that. Before long – well, quite long – Australopithecus sediba was fighting off Homo ergaster who fought off Homo erectus who fought off Homo rhodesiensis who fought off Homo helmei who fought off Homo naledi who thought about fighting off Homo sapiens but chose to end themselves rather than sit through interminable committee meetings on land ownership where nobody spoke the same language and everyone wanted more than they needed. Little has changed.
Then along came the Upper Paleolithic period and everything went to hell in a crudely woven hand basket. Men started thinking they should cover their willies in public and women started thinking … I don’t know what they were thinking and it’s not my place to guess, either. I apologise. Smash the patriarchy.
Hunting and gathering cultures known as the Sangoan began occupying parts of southern Africa. They were the forerunners of the Khoi and the San who, if they started dating, agreed to be called the Khoisan. Otherwise not.
They weren’t that into developing golf estates and shopping malls, preferring instead to get stoned and spend their evenings laughing and painting crazy things on the walls of their caves. They were fun people to have around on a Friday night.
Ultimately, though, they were too nice for their own good. The Bantu, you see, had plans. Well, inasmuch as you can call wandering off in a general southerly direction a plan. I think they must have travelled as I do. Let’s just go a bit further. See what’s around the next corner. Not this one, the next one. Then we’ll stop, I promise. Oh, look. A mountain. I wonder what’s on the other side.
I don’t know who was more surprised to see each other – the Khoisan or the Bantu. Knowing the Khoisan, they would have rolled a massive joint. Knowing the Bantu, they would have taken it.
You’d think that would have been the end of it. That they would start shagging each other and coexist happily. Which they did. Until the novelty wore off. Once you’ve had enough of rogering members of a different tribe, it’s not long before you want to murder them.
The Khoisan was the largest population on Earth at some point. This isn’t me just making up facts. This comes from an evolutionary geneticist from Harvard University. I’m only mentioning it in the hope that someone will notice that I’m doing research and give me money. To spend on extra research, obviously. Not beer.
With their superior agricultural, metalworking and shagging skills, the Bantu soon enough became the dominant population and did whatever the hell they wanted. Which was only right. Those who dominate will always be domineering. That’s the whole point of being dominant.
While my ancestors were dressed in rags and selling potatoes outside a brothel in Rotterdam, the Bantu in Mapungubwe were trading in gold and ivory and building the region’s first gated compound. They had a kingdom, for heaven’s sake. With hot-and-cold running Khoikhoi servants. My people couldn’t even make themselves understood unless they were drunk.
Speaking of barbarians, an Australian-listed company called Coal of Africa wants to open a mine a stone’s throw from this world heritage site. Plans are on hold for now. If they do go ahead, I shall form a company called Wombats of Australia and go off to mine wombats on the Great Barrier Reef or wherever it is these deadly creatures live.
So. The Bantu began expanding faster than Khulubuse Zuma’s waistline at a free buffet. Existing populations were displaced or assimilated. Or, if time was short, killed. Some fancied the Transkei so they went there and became the Xhosa nation. The rest fancied everything north of the Kei River and called themselves the Zulu nation. They had their differences but these
were solved in traditional South African fashion – first dialogue, then machetes.
At some point the Dutch arrived. It was okay at first. They built stuff, got high and grew vegetables. Jan van Riebeeck was a full-on hippy. Then, through some kind of weird reverse-evolution, some of them turned into Boers and went to the Transkei because it had the best grass. Still does. Since they couldn’t speak isiXhosa, they skipped dialogue and proceeded directly to violence.
Then the British arrived and occupied Cape Town to prevent it from falling under the control of the French. I’m starting to get a headache. From what I can make out, the Boers hated the British, the Zulus hated the British and the Boers, the Xhosas hated everyone and the British hated themselves.
Right. That’s enough history. We all know the rest. The Boers won. Then, in 1994, they lost. They spent a helluva long time at the top of the log, though. Then again, even Arsenal would dominate if they had an actual arsenal at their disposal.
So here we go. From a parliament of white people passing the Natives Land Act in 1913 to a parliament of black people in 2018 agreeing to take back the land. It’s a very complicated issue that gets a lot simpler the more you drink. Try it.
Firstly, you can’t confiscate all of it – all 1.2-million square kilometres – and give it to the state. King Goodwill Zwelithini would have a hissy fit and announce a unilateral declaration of independence. I don’t so much mind being a citizen of the People’s Republic of KwaZulu, but I really don’t want to have to go to Nongoma every time I need permission to travel outside the province.
Secondly, there’s a possibility that Julius Malema is pushing expropriation without compensation simply because he wants to get his cabbage farm back. It was auctioned off by the asset forfeiture unit in 2013 to pay his tax debt. Pouring salt in the wound, a white Afrikaner snapped it up.
In 20 years’ time, we will look back at the smouldering wreck that was once our economy, shake our heads sadly and say, “Bloody cabbages.”
THE MAN WHO IMAGINED THERE WAS NO HEAVEN
The death of physicist Stephen Hawking in 2018 sparked an avalanche of tributes, not all of which were riddled with spelling and grammatical errors. It’s Stephen with a Ph. No, not Phteven. And Hawking. No s. He was a cosmologist, not a cosmonaut. Also, he didn’t write a book about herbs called A Brief History of Thyme.
I suppose it’s reassuring in some small way that even the hard-of-thinking can appreciate the loss of someone whose IQ was higher than Ziggy Marley on a Friday night.
When I heard Hawking had died, I went straight to the fridge and got a beer. When the world loses someone who has contributed to the advancement of humanity, it’s important to celebrate their lives with a drink. It was 7.30am but we don’t get to choose when other people die. I wish I did. The streets would be littered with corpses.
I went outside, looked up into the cloudless sky, raised my bottle, mumbled a few words and drank deeply to his memory. Then I had to apologise and do it again with a fresh beer because looking up into the sky seemed to suggest that he was up there somewhere in a mythical place called heaven.
Like many very intelligent people, Hawking was an atheist. He once said, “I believe the simplest explanation is, there is no god. No one created the universe and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realisation that there probably is no heaven and no afterlife either.”
If you are deeply religious, you’re probably washing your eyes out with holy water right now while shouting, “What did he know? He was in a wheelchair for most of his life!” I know what you mean. It’s hard not to look at a handicapped person and think they’re probably not very bright. Hell, it’s hard enough to look at a person in a wheelchair at the best of times. It’s not too bad when you’re sitting down and they’re at eye level, but it gets a bit tricky when you’re standing next to them like some kind of lord of the universe capable of jogging and even jumping over things.
I’m six-foot-four. I look down on everyone. My god complex is out of control.
So Twitter was awash in RIP tweets. One man pointed out that Hawking was born on the 300th anniversary of Galileo’s death and died on the anniversary of Einstein’s birth. “Time is circular – no beginning, no end,” he said. A bright lad, no doubt. Possibly stoned, though.
After several beers in the scientist’s honour, it seemed cruel not to share my spontaneous wake with a fellow intellectual. Nobody was available so I called Ted and he arrived 10 minutes later with five crates of beer and a Malawian to help offload them.
“So who’s this Hawkins oke, then?” he said, dispatching the Malawian with a promise not to report him to Home Affairs. I pointed out that he appeared to be suffering a malfunction in the hippocampus area. He started telling me about the time he registered at the University of Zululand but dropped out when he woke up one morning to find an actual hippo on the campus but got distracted by my lighting candles for the wake. Except I had no candles, so I was setting random household items alight. It’s amazing how much stuff you don’t need.
“Excuse me,” said Ted, “I’m sitting here.” I apologised and made as if I was about to wee on his chair to put it out. He seemed to think this was inappropriate behaviour for a wake. Not if you’re Irish, I said. Ted correctly pointed out that the only Irish thing about us was our ability to hold our drink. The moment was ruined when he dropped his beer.
I had to concede that I was using the Irish as an excuse to ramp up the festivities and that Stephen Hawking’s mother was in fact Scottish.
“And his father?” I gave Ted the Gallic shrug, implying that nobody really knows anything about their fathers and it’s best not to ask. Ted is one of those men who believes the only way to get the measure of a man is to know about his father. He’s a bit like a Zulu in that way.
I suggested it might be appropriate to read some of the pearls of wisdom Stephen Hawking had dropped during his journey from birth in Oxford to death in Cambridge.
Ted raised his hand, accidentally dropping another beer. “Not much of a journey, really,” he said, his feet foaming like two giant salt-coated slugs. “It’s only two and a half hours on the M40.” I couldn’t resist pointing out that it’s quicker on the A421, even though it reinforced his stupid point. Anyway. The man had been in a wheelchair since 1969, for heaven’s sake. Not that there is a heaven. He did all his travelling in his brain.
I told Ted about the weird Galileo/Einstein synchronicity, tossing in the little-known fact that it was also Pi Day. He perked up considerably, wanting to know if I had any of them damn fine mutton curry numbers in the fridge. I smacked him across the head and tried to explain how the 14th day of the third month relates to the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter but something got lost in translation and it wasn’t long before I had to punch him repeatedly in the mouth to stop him going on about Bitcoin.
I asked him if he agreed that the human brain was a computer that would stop working if its components failed. His so-called head wobbled in what I took to be agreement so I rewarded him with another beer and a Hawking quote. “There is no heaven or afterlife for broken-down computers. That is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.” Ted scrunched up his face and started crying. Something about Windows 10. I couldn’t help him. I work on a Mac.
To cheer him up, I hit him with another quote. “Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist.” Ted stopped snivelling and looked down at his feet. He wiggled his toes. The more he wiggled the more he giggled. It set me off. I imagine cardiologists would recommend avoiding hilarity of such magnitude. You won’t laugh like that looking up at the stars, I can tell you.
“Hold on,” said Ted. “Stephen Hawking. Wasn’t he on The Simpsons?”
I need new friends.
GETTING BANNED FROM FACEBOOK IS A BADGE OF HONOUR
Now and then I hear of someone who has been banned from Facebook for a period
of time and I try to imagine what heinous filth they must have been disseminating for such harsh action to be taken.
Were they trying to get the Gestapo back together? Lower the age of consent to seven? Show us the Trump pee-pee tape?
I have now discovered that you needn’t do any of these things to get banned. All it took was a letter to Australian Home Affairs minister Peter Dutton in 2018 and for one person to be offended. Am I bitter? Of course not. I deserve to be punished. I don’t know exactly what it is I did wrong, but it’s important that I be disciplined.
We need to be sensitive to the demands of the offended, even if it is only one in 250 others who liked, loved or laughed at the post. The easily upset have so few options open to them. Yes, they could stop reading my posts when they start to feel themselves becoming infuriated and go for a beer. But what if they are tied to a chair and someone insists on reading it to them, ignoring their cries while deliberately repeating passages that cause them the most distress, then laughing openly at their anguish?
The other option they have – the most popular one, by all accounts – is to keep reading. Turn up the heat and let the outrage build to boiling point. When they can stand no more of it – and there is no more only because they have read all the way to the end – they want retribution and they want it now. Burning my house down is not an option simply because they don’t know where I live. Slumped on the couch, reeking of anger and cheap brandy, they report me to Facebook. I say “they” even though it’s almost certainly just one person who did it. Man, woman or maybe even some kid who found Dad’s drugs, I can’t be sure. Facebook protects the identity of those who snitch on others.
The post had to do with Australia’s offer to fast-track visas for our white farmers before they are all wiped out in the genocide. Amid the deluge of likes, loves and laughter, three of my more emotional male Facebook “friends” voiced their displeasure at the piece.
