Bare bottom protests are not exclusive to South Africa, and we probably have not seen the back of them, writes Andrew Donaldson.
The ANC Women’s League has fingered the usual suspects behind the bare-bummed protest, if we may put it that way, at the ruling party’s Tshwane offices earlier this week.
“The demonstration was in bad taste,” the league said on Wednesday, “and displays a moral decay that emanates from foreign tendencies within the ANC such as factionalism and clique politics.”
Here at the Mahogany Ridge we’d seen the photographs and had to conclude, whoever was responsible for them and whatever the provenance, the display by these women of their moral decay was quite alarming – and perhaps counterproductive, given the league’s frothy about “unethical acts of indecent exposure” and their urging women to “always carry themselves in an exemplary manner”.
Marx was most instructive on the matter: “Somebody once said it’s what you don’t see you’re interested in and this is true.” That’s Groucho, by the way, not the other Marx.
But, for all their displeasure at such behaviour, the league must concede that in recent years the naked backside has come to feature prominently in our public life.
And they are right about the foreign tendencies. Like all good things – or bad, depending on your education and politics – this manner of showing disapproval and insulting one’s opponents was a colonial practice and an old one at that.
The first century historian Titus Flavius Josephus recorded an incident in Judea in which a Roman soldier bared his bum to an audience of Jews celebrating Passover, thereby starting a riot that left an estimated 30 000 dead.
Read: ANC women bare bottoms in protest
That figure does seem rather excessive. But no matter. There was no doubting the potency of the gesture, and two millennia later, everyone had had a crack at it.
The Byzantines did it to the Crusaders after a failed attempt to take Constantinople. It featured prominently in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. The English did it to the Scots on the battlefields and the Scots repaid the compliment just as readily. It turned up in the America in the 16th century and in the early 1800s in New Zealand.
In our neck of the woods, it was Julius Malema’s supporters who did much to pioneer the gesture at the 2008 Bloemfontein conference that resulted in the election of Jacob Zuma’s former number one fan as the president of the ANC Youth League and it wasn’t long before spontaneous outbreaks of bared backsides became a feature of some township protests.
In July 2014, for example, police used rubber bullets to disperse bare-bottomed demonstrators in Soweto.
In September that year, Water and Sanitation Minister Nomvula Mokonyane – an unfortunate or perhaps appropriate portfolio, given the circumstances – declared that ANC members and cabinet ministers would defend the president with their own backsides.
Redoubtable as such a defence may have been, exact details weren’t immediately forthcoming. Mokonyane had made the comment at the launch of a water project in Mpumalanga and she may have been referring to criticism of the Nkandla upgrades.
Sowetan quoted her as saying: “The attack is not on Zuma, but it is on the ANC. Re tlo thiba ka dibono (We will defend with our buttocks). Like it or not, Zuma is ours. He will finish the term because we want water.”
But Mokonyane’s spokeswoman, Brenda Mpotsang, quickly explained the “buttocks” comment was not literal. “She had been using a figure of speech.
“She was just showing to what extent we would go to protect the president. There is no literal meaning to what she said.”
If it was a figure of speech, it certainly wasn’t one we were familiar with. So we had to take her word for it. Arse not to reason why, etc.
Those non-literal buttocks may however yet be called up for action on the ramparts. The president remains very much under siege, what with menacing billboards in Cape Town and the blizzard of bad news from Davos.
Most of the onslaught appears to be self-inflicted, though.
Last week, Zuma once again reminded us of his natural leadership, saying if he listened to his critics he would have “that disease white people call stress but I don’t have it because I know better”.
Well now. If only he did listen to his critics…
Meantime, the news that Zuma was looking forward to eventual retirement and the opportunity to write his memoirs has excited many of the Ridge regulars, some of whom have even suggested a possible title: Long Walk to Greedom.
* Andrew Donaldson’s A Famous Grouse column appears in the Weekend Argus every Saturday.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Newspapers.
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