We coined a word, suffered with disaster victims and said farewell to a statesman, writes Tony Jackman.
Cape Town - This article should be read in sign. If you don’t happen to have sign language, just gesticulate randomly. The year was all over the place.
Seriously, what a forking year that was. For one thing, just as the year was edging to a grunting, wincing close, the ANC Youth League’s Mzwandile Masina gave us a word that’s right up there with Boris Becker having given us “bonking” in the ’80s. Suddenly, back then, we no longer had to be coy about words like ****, ****ed and ****ing, or even “**********”. Thanks to Bonking Boris, we could just say “bonk” or “bonking”. Even in front of the snickering kids.
Now, thanks to Masina having told Numsa’s Irvin Jim to “fork off” and not indeed to “**** off”, as we had all believed he had said, we can pepper, even salt, our newspapers with the word from one end to the other and from top to bottom, without our editors getting their forking knickers in a twist. It was the youth league’s Christmas gift to the nation.
But there are many things about 2013 which we would rather had just forked off. The league’s erstwhile friend Julius Malema for one. Then again, what would we do without JuJu? He’s enlivened our politics for years and as much as we love to hate him, there’d be a great big hole in our lives if he were no longer there. In an odd sort of a roundabout kind of a way, we love him, in the way that the black sheep in the family (if one may put it that way) is actually rather endearing. Never mind the ANC or the forking EFF, you should be welcome at any party, JuJu dear. We’d like to prop you in a corner with a silly hat on your head (a red one if you like) and drink a toast to you every time anyone says something stupid. Just as long as the electorate doesn’t EFF things up at the polling booth in a few months time.
Jokes aside, there were some horrifyingly dire moments in 2013, not least the morning we awoke to news of the Nairobi mall massacre, and those unforgettable images of “white widow” Samantha Lewthwaite grinning with cunning from the supposedly pious confines of her burka. Months earlier, we were collectively winded by the attack by two brothers on the Boston Marathon, and wondered at how indefinable the face of terrorism was. The younger brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who survived, was considered such a cutie that he became a Rolling Stone magazine coverboy.
Meanwhile in North Korea, the evil little Smurfman Kim Jong-un rattled cages everywhere with his missile mission, and ended the year by executing his own uncle. Darker yet was the confirmation from his democratic nemesis in the South, Seoul, of reports that the bloodthirsty little troll had had the four-woman Unhasu Orchestra executed by firing squad. His own ex-girlfriend, Hyong Song-wol, was one of the four. As I write, his own wife, Ri Sol-ju, once a member of Unhasu, had not been seen in public since October.
Great human tragedies abounded – Typhoon Haiyan and an almighty earthquake (Philippines), Typhoon Phailin (India), tornadoes in the US, even a rather large storm in the UK. Buildings collapsed in Bangladesh, India, Philadelphia, Dar es Salaam, even a little one in Cape Town. But careers and lives collapsed too, while others bounced back (including Robert Mugabe, for fork’s sake).
We like whistleblowers. Don’t we? Certainly, we knew that US President Barack Obama did, until one Edward Snowden, a US computer specialist for the CIA, exposed a mammoth spying scandal, his life quickly evolving into a Hollywood movie as he went on the run and ended up – as if in a nod to the old Cold War – in Moscow. But one of the most poignant stories of the year was the fate of Bradley Manning, convicted in July of violations of the US Espionage Act after releasing reams of classified documents. Gobsmackingly, “Bradley” suddenly emerged as Chelsea Manning, a trans woman. Considering that the raft of information she released is widely believed to have inspired the Arab Spring, and that she is seen by some as a “21st century Tiananmen Square Tank Man” (a hero, like the image of a lone man in front of an approaching tank during the 1989 siege in Beijing), many feel Manning should be celebrated, not left to rot in prison.
The Obama administration was also preoccupied with the matter of getting more weapons out of the hands of the gun-toting masses in the wake of the Sandy Hook school massacre in Connecticut a year ago. A year later, the US gun lobby’s might and determination is clearer than ever. In the interim, we watched aghast as neighbourhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman got off the hook in July for the death of teenager Trayvon Martin. In a year that was later to mark the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s seminal I Have a Dream speech in August 1963, the story brought back searing memories of US civil rights atrocities, resonating with South Africans as well as Americans.
Talking of Americans behaving badly, Republicans hobbled Obama’s administration by using their Congressional might to force a government shutdown from October 1 to 16, but most observers say the GOP did more harm to itself. There was even a porn industry shutdown, briefly. Oh, and Obamacare.
If you can explain all that, answers on a postcard please to: [email protected]
Further north, Toronto mayor Rob Ford admitted to a crack habit before going on to disparage his wife in public and knock over a councillor. Those of us in more civilised nations could only shake our heads and tut-tut.
Much further south, US foodie Paula Deen admitted to using the N-word. This is America’s K-word, the “k” being silent in the States. Even Oprah – Oprah! – found herself mired in controversy when she accused a store clerk in Switzerland of racially profiling her by suggesting she buy a cheaper handbag. Oprah had to apologise.
We thought Matters America had reached an all-time low when Beyoncé lipsynched the US national anthem, but then Justin Bieber drooled all over his drooling fans – from several storeys high – leaving it to a former child star, Miley Cyrus, to invent something that would take the world’s attention off all of that. It twerked. (Oh, and then Justin retired. Bye-bye.) And all this from the country that gave us Sharknado, the daftest movie plot since Revenge of the Killer Tomatoes.
Britain scrambled to compete. The extended PR exercise surrounding the Royal Baby had all the world mewling and puking as we heralded the arrival of His Royal Highness Prince George Alexander Louis of Cambridge. We learnt that domestic goddess Nigella Lawson’s elderly hubby had choked her at a Mayfair restaurant. That was shocking enough, until a spurned Charles Saatchi wrought a sour revenge by having her alleged coke habit exposed in a London court.
How could South Africa possibly compete? Enter the Gupta family with their links to people in high places, not least President Jacob Zuma.
The clan booked out Sun City for the four-day nuptials of Vega Gupta to Aakash Jahajgarhia, scion of a wealthy family from India. The piece de resistance of the showy spectacle, which cost more than many South Africans battle to amass in a lifetime, was not the tying of the knot so much as the Guptas having commandeered use of the Waterkloof air base for the landing of a chartered flight carrying 270 wedding guests.
Earlier in the year, in Manhattan, I had sauntered from the hotel to Times Square and looked up at the gaudy billboard above ABC’s Good Morning America studio. An electronic news stream tickered across and I nearly fell over when I read: “Oscar Pistorius arrested on murder charge”. Nothing could have been less likely. We watched as the incredible drama unfolded, saw images of the beautiful Reeva Steenkamp burned into TV screens everywhere, shook our heads bewildered as it sunk in: could he have done that?
In a year in which the Gupta extravagance and the Pistorius shocker had been hurled at us, we were perfectly primed to handle what came next: poo. Chucked at us from all sides. By “poo protesters” forked off with DA service delivery in the Western Cape (even as the ANC battles with service delivery in provinces it runs). And by Jacob Zuma from his vantage point in Nkandla, a name that has seared itself into our psyche and our history. It seemed Zuma would get away without paying anything of the R208m upgrades to his Nkandla spread in KwaZulu-Natal, not even the “fire pool” which (unlike other people’s swimming pools, generally used for swimming in) is in fact a security measure so that in the event of a fire, people can drown in the pool instead of burning alive. As for families next door ostensibly being “moved” for fear they might be a security threat, can this facility not be extended to all citizens?
The headboard-banging at all hours from the newlyweds at Number 7 is affecting our sleep very badly, and we’re sick and tired of the smell of badly seasoned stew from Number 2.
But it fell to elsewhere in Africa to wipe the smiles off our faces. Uganda’s “Kill the Gays Bill” (actually the Anti-Homosexuality Bill) was passed in mid-December, making this story an early contender to become one of the big stories of the new year.
We close, of course, with thoughts of the story of 2013 that we would have done anything to have avoided, while knowing that we’re relieved his suffering is over. Madiba left us, as we long knew he would, and the world mourned with us, and we with them.
And the hours and minutes tick away until we put the year behind us. And Madiba way on high, on the ninth cloud to the left as you pass through the Pearly Gates, a trimmed French poodle licking his toes and a blue-eyed Chinchilla buffing his cheek, looking down and watching to see how we’ll all do in 2014, our first year without him.
Weekend Argus