Friday 18 December 2015

King Jacob ZuMa se Poes





The ongoing antics of Jacob Zuma remind me of the Arthurian legend of the Fisher King.
This myth has it that the King is the last in a long line to keep custody of the Holy Grail. He has been wounded, typically in the groin or upper thigh – there are various iterations of the myth – and he becomes increasingly ill and depraved. As he sickens, so his kingdom collapses and decays around him, becoming a barren wasteland (cue TS Eliot). The King whiles away his time by fishing in the river beside his Nkandla, I mean castle, possibly for even more state contracts that involve a kickback, awaiting a cure that his knights have been tasked to find, sustained for the time being only by the Grail itself.
The tale of the Fisher King is one of folly and depravity, and the immediate parallels are obvious. Charged with upholding the principles of the ANC, Zuma, (along with his not insubstantial Spear of the Nation) has instead perverted them – together with his supportive courtiers – to suit his own self-serving agenda. I hardly need to point out the parallel between the state of a country over which Zuma presides, and the failures, past, present and future, which are all simply too depressing to list. Even the current drought and its mismanagement seems to play into the themes of this ancient story. The only lightness (for me anyway) is that the Fisher King’s wound is often interpreted as the result of a punishment for philandering. Too bad the courts never speared The Spear, and instead found its owner not guilty.
But the parallels, as with most parallels, are superficial. An essential difference between the myths of Zuma and the Fisher King is that the King is more or less passive, a victim of his own inaction and errors rather than the active agent of his own undoing. Zuma, we know, has actively taken decisions that build an ever-deeper moat around himself, to the detriment of the country and its citizens, and he is supported by a cohort of courtiers, whom I can only assume protect this idiot for the handouts they are individually afforded.
The original Fisher King wishes to be cured, which suggests some desire for redemption, not to mention a residual sympathy for his subjects. Zuma, however, is not seeking a cure, and so soundly has he lost touch with his voters, those people who embraced what the ANC promised them in 1994, that he is prepared – no, happy – to watch them and their children grow up uneducated and disempowered, if they are not killed in the streets first. And yet, the fingers, deeply tainted from being embedded in our leader’s willingly spread arsehole, are pointed at white privilege. If you, King Jacob, had not misspent, what is it, R300, R500 billion, on things since your tenure that did nothing to lift your people into a position where they could compete with me for my job, fight me economically or intellectually on a level playing field, and therefore for the taxes I pay, you have in a word, failed. You have fucking failed. Failed. There is no other word. If I can sit here on a Friday afternoon on a Mac laptop, connected to the Internet at a tolerable speed, boring anyone who has read this far with my own solipsistic bullshit, why can’t the people who voted for you do the same? Because you never fucking let them, never gave them the opportunity that you’ve allowed me to enjoy since 1994.

We need to understand that Zuma is not stupid, despite his innumeracy, lack of basic geographical knowledge, and tactical buffoonery. Bauernschlau is a German phrase that translates literally as “farmer sly”, and it refers to a cunning that is not learnt from books. Unfortunately, it also seems to suggest a total lack of an ability to foresee consequence. As we watch Zuma storm ahead with his agenda of enriching himself and his cronies, it’s clear that he either does not understand the inevitable outcomes of his actions, sees himself as some kind of Olympian god, or simply doesn’t give a fuck.
         Meanwhile, we sit on our Weylandts couches, gaping and horrified, while our elected leader fishes in his firepool, hoping to land the big one that will get him off the hook. Fishing rod in one hand, the Spear in the other.  Time to go, JZ. Time to fuck off into the nuclear sunset of your own doing, and the sooner the better.
        

No comments:

Post a Comment