It was a typically violent weekend in the Cape and the newspaper which landed on my doorstep on Monday morning was practically oozing blood and gore.
I lost track of the body count after the first paragraph of the front-page story, which simply referred to “some of the dead”.
Two bodies were found in Belhar and another four were allegedly dumped in the river near Driftsands.
Police divers struggled to recover the dumped bodies but were rewarded with another apparently unrelated, body.
Four men were gunned down in a shack in Wellington and the mother of one of them apparently decided not to report her son’s death because she said she knew he was a criminal and, anyway, she couldn’t afford the funeral costs.
The list goes on and on.
Hey-ho, another exciting week in the Cape. What’s for tea?
One can’t help feeling the inhabitants of this Fairest Cape are not the sort of people you’d invite home for a social drink.
I am regularly irritated by a beer advertisement on TV that seems to typify the Cape’s aggressive attitude.
A weedy looking chap orders a beer in a bar and asks for a slice of lime with it.
Now, as far as I know, once you’ve paid for a beer you’re entitled to put whatever you like in it.
Chuck in a worm if it makes you happy. But no!
Suddenly the whole mob decides to butt in.
The head dude seated at the bar says, “hey, you don’t need a lime in that”.
They then order the poor little chap to drink the beer without a lime, which he obviously does, because he would probably be beaten to a pulp if he didn’t, and wisely he says he’s okay with that.
No wonder the Cape is littered with bodies.
Those victims probably drank the wrong brand of beer, or added Worcester sauce to it or committed some other heinous offence.
Drag him round the back and pump a few bullets into him.
He certainly won’t do THAT to his beer again. Not in this pub.
I don’t suppose we can be surprised by all this lawlessness.
We read every day of high profile people committing billion-rand frauds and sometimes even being arrested, but we seldom read of them actually being sentenced to long prison terms.
The law is a complicated game in which the players make the rules and the courts are playing fields without touch-lines.
And when a referee blows a whistle she’s hunted and shot.
Fairest Cape, indeed.
Last Laugh
Annual leave is management’s regular reminder to employees that the company can get along perfectly well without them.
* "Tavern of the Seas" is a column written in the Cape Argus by David Biggs. Biggs can be contacted at [email protected]
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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