The Chronicles of Vash

Don’t be fooled by Zuma’s jovial façade. The charismatic leader whose warmth and ready smile is seen as an answer to Thabo Mbeki’s ivory tower style of leadership was dubbed Gedleyehlekisa at birth. The middle name is an ominous portent of things to come.

"It means one who laughs with you, whilst endangering you," Zuma told an ABC journalist in an interview last year.

In the frantic build-up to the conference in Polokwane next week to choose the ANC - and thus the country’s next leader, Zuma has been doing the rounds. Addressing a group of working class people from the Cape Flats on crime one week, flying to America to meet with elite business leaders the next, and speaking at a communist rally a few days later... he certainly does manage to fit in just everywhere doesn’t he?

I remember reading an article in some or other Afrikaans glossie, where they organised a braai with a host of Afrikaans luminaries such as Steve Hofmeyer and our very own JZ. They all got on like a house on fire apparently. He can laugh his way through just about anything, including a rape trial and the firing of his financial advisor for corruption.

But like his name says, behind that laugh is something deeply dangerous. His father knew it and the ANC, when they go to vote at the much-hyped conference in Polokwane next week, would do well to heed it.

At the crime summit in Mitchell’s Plain Zuma was all smiles and laughter until I tried to pin him down on actual specifics. His smile broke down in a serious way as he basically told me off for expecting too much from him. The man is genius at saying everything and promising nothing. Which is why he’s such a good politician I guess.

He has the chameleon’s gift to say and do the right thing as occasion demands. But post-Polokwane the real Zuma will stand up, very likely wielding a machine gun and spouting nonsense about HIV-curing showers and gays that should be knocked out. One can only hope that those will be the least of his misdemeanors if he does become president: a prospect that is looking increasingly likely.

The overalled men hang nonchalantly from the back of the flashing truck, expert eyes effortlessly combing the receding road as they speak and laugh.

A shape suddenly detaches himself from the truck's fender, like a gargoyle taking on life. He darts over to a filled black bag, invisible to anyone else until he holds it in his hands. He hoists it over his shoulder and bounds back on to the barely paused truck, using the momentum of his leap to toss the bag into its dark depths.

Hazards flashing the truck continues on its way, its cowboys alert in service in the cold night, while the town eats and sleeps and rests behind high walls assured of clean streets on the morrow. A silent dealing in trash; a heroic service to man.

I thought I'd leave it to bloggers cleverer than I (i.e., the smart blokes on thoughtleader.co.za) to analyse this one. But my search throughout the South African blogging zeitgeist has yielded no results for the one question I had after the Rugby World Cup. No, it's not how Percy gives his hair that particular blonde buoyancy, or even: is Victor Matfield single? (I just checked- he isn't).


My particular puzzle is this: why was our President snubbed so often by the English players at the end?


We all watched with hearts overflowing as our boys waited their turn to get their medals and finally, 12 years later, their hands on the Webb Ellis trophy again.


But first we dutifully sat through Englishman after sullen Englishman running the gauntlet heavy-footed between Prime Ministers and Presidents.


They shook French Prime Minister Nicholas Sakozy's hand. They stared at the floor as their own Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, spoke earnestly to them. Then they proceeded to push pass the winning country's president, Thabo Mbeki's outstretched hand.


That Philistine, Johnny Wilkinson, looked back at it and carried on walking.


Now, working at News24 has thoroughly familiarised me with that particular animal known as the Paranoid South African. Right about now this species of being will no doubt proceed to say something along the lines of: "He deserved it, the corrupt bastard." To you I say:

Tammy-Ann was buzzing. She had A Story to tell about the Latest Development with Her And Rob. "Flip, Jess, I'm SOOOO confused!" she twanged to her friend over a diet coke at the Wimpy in Canal Walk. She tapped her bronze fauz-ballet pump against the steel legs of their table, impatient to get into the meat of her tale.

Jess straightened up, serious in her role as 16-year-old relationship advisor. "What's going on?"

"Like, I'm not sure. I mean, okay- so I didn't want to like, ADD him as a facebook friend, you know?"

"Mmm-hmm," nodded Jess, noisily draining the last of her Schweppes Granadilla.

"Coz that would just look… desperate?" she said, to further nods in the affirmative from Jess.

"So he didn't add me either, which could be coz he's busy coz I checked his wall and he hasn't, like, done anything to anyone else either for the past few days. And his last status update was on, like Monday afternoon.

Jess frowned. "There's been no wall activity since then? You sure he's alive?"

"No no, this was like last week Tuesday, lots has happened since then, let me finish."

Chastised, Jess moved on to her chips to prevent herself from further interruptions.

"So anyway I couldn't poke him obviously,"

Jess shook her head furiously unable to agree strongly enough through her mouthful of chips.

"So then, I had this brilliant idea and decided to group message a bunch of people, like casually about something arb, and just happen to include him in on it."

"Oh! Was that that message about lifts to the Mary J Blige concert?"

"Yes! SO it TOTALLY worked. He added me as a friend the next day."

"Hectic!"

"I know, I'm a genius what can I say," Tammy-Ann tossed her blonde hair, smiling in a fake model pose. Her expression quickly darkened as she moved on to the next part of The Story.

"So it was going well, I left like a few comments, and he replied to most of them,"

"Yeah?! He definitely likes you."

"You think so? Yeah, I mean, there were only like 2 days between my reply and his on some of them..."

"Cool! So what's the problem?"

"Well there's this other chick and she keeps leaving these stupid graffiti wall posts, with like, flowers and crap, like: 'Ooh, I'm so arty'. Whatever," she complained, her charm bracelet jingling as she drummed her fingers on the plastic table.

My sense of humour is having a whimsical Monday. The following excerpts grabbed my eye. I'd understand if you didn't completely understand why...

"The most obvious functional advantage of lighter skin
pigmentation in northerly latitudes is that it facilitates the
synthesis of vitamin D3 in spite of low levels of ultraviolet
radiation exposure," the researchers wrote.

I read the above in an article I edited on "Why Europeans are so colourful", i.e. why they have so much variation in skin, hair and eye colour. After four years of race studies and reading the seminal tract on Whiteness by Richard Dyer that covers every sociological aspect of the race... I now know why White people are white.

next:

'The zebrafish is widely used for studying genetics
because many of its genes are similar to humans'.

This is great. Really. I mean we hear so darn much about how similar our genes are to primates, seemingly proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that we're evolved from them, that I just want to take a moment to celebrate our lesser know relatives: the Zebrafish.

Spot the difference.

The neighbourhood of Mowbray is like an unfortunate extension of Observatory, with all if it's vices and none of it's charms. Trapped between Rondebosch and Observatory it lacks the middle class suburban gloss of the former and the derelict charm of the latter. Mowbray sprawls on either side of an uninspiring stretch of the ubiquitous Main Road that winds through much of Cape Town, cowering beneath the unfortunate back end of Table Mountain.

I'd driven through this stretch many times on my way to other places, flinching at the monstrously yellow Shopright store and Liquor store that dominated an entire corner, with it's assortment of hanger-ons. But this was the first time I was making a stop in this half-way town. (I have an affinity for half-way towns, as some of my previous posts may tell you.)

I was en route to an Indian inspired dinner party, with a number of interesting people I was eager to get to know better. I had even donned part of an Indian outfit from literally a decade earlier: a red embroidered skirt that was a draw string when I was ten and only just fitted me now. Teamed with gold sandals, a chocolate brown top and red beads, I thought I was the epitome of fusion-chic. I'd forgotten to take into account the dozens of little bells that adorned the skirt.

After an entire day of tinkling around the office, inspiring comments like: "Oh look, Christmas has arrived early," and "What IS that sound??" I had grown accustomed to the gentle ringing. But the bergies outside the Shoprite clearly hadn't, as I found out when I stopped to buy some drinks for the dinner.

"Hello angel!!" screeched out one, with the belligerence one would think ill-deserved by any kind of celestial being. I gingerly stepped over him and his compadres, rolled in blankets and propped up outside the Shoprite window side by side, like a row of bent sausage rolls. Their heads and shoulders peeked out their wrappings, watching me jingle my way into the shop.

In the late afternoon sun, through a haze of seaside spray and tall crisscross shadows, a little girl plays an impromptu game of hopskotch on the concrete stretch of the Seapoint promenade. Except the lines of the game exist only in her head. She jumps from sqaure to imaginery square, precariously balancing the wait of her seven-year old self on one foot, as a chubby first clenches the round pebble that is the only real thing about this game.

I navigate myself gingerly around her, unsure of where her world ends and mine begins. The last thing I want to do is infringe on territory that is the sole preserve of her mind. 

The little girl flickers to a shadow behind me as I forge ahead with the million and one chores of my newly adult life. Jogging, shopping, cooking, cleaning. The sole preserve of the monotonous.

I am barely looking up when it happens. Staring at the faded patterns on the promenade as I jog, I watch them disappear under my feet to form a soothing, constant pattern that takes life in the repetitive motion. So when he touched me you'll understand why I recoiled in shock; confused and defensive.

At the behest of fellow writer Luke Reed, I have taken it upon myself to put something (anything!) on this poor excuse for a blog site. Indeed my Mozilla Firefox huffed and wheezed as it navigated away from it's customary position on Facebook.

One can't blame it. The poor creature has grown fat and lazy on the quick fix of multimedia affirmation and over-the-counter bytes of hellos and goodbyes. Blogs were mired in the bygone print tradition of analysis and context and, lets face it, social networking with its multiple modes of communication is just so much easier than slogging away at a blog entry and maybe getting one comment.

Okay, while the sarcasm is real there, it's also an indictment on my sorry self for losing the writing plot and being seduced by the endless opportunities for self-aggrandisation that a simple profile picture change affords one, on the book of faces and the space of my.

According to Luke, it'll be nice to know what I"m doing and where I'm going. It's true, many exciting things have happened in that vast arena of 'my life' of late that are worthy of telling. But I find myself sucked into the journalism trap of: "good news is no news".

Thus you may notice how any accident, break-in or supposed attempts on my life by homicidal flatmates precipitates a flurry of blog activity, whilst being awarded a media fellowship, being sent on an amazing Narrative Journalism course, interviewing great people and having weekend after amazing weekend leaves me quiet as a Health Department spokesperson. Ha.

So I'm not quite up to updating. I'm enjoying this self-created writing confessional booth too much. Which if you think about it, is what blogs really are a lot of the time... the cathartic joys of confession is something the Catholic have kept to themselves for too long. Try it. Shout it out to the world. Your dirty laundry and maybe someone elses, though that might get you into jail as poor Juan Uys found out. (One of my most popular stories that, proving that sex, and not, as one may hope, amazing development projects, sells papers, or in my case, advertising space on 'news' sites).

Ah, I hear you what you're thinking. It's happened, the industry has claimed her and we've lost Verashni to the pervasive cynicism that IS the media. Let me assure you to the contrary. I've always been this cynical.

Okay that WAS a joke. Relax. I still love God and want to be part of his plan to change the world.

And to end off: the eye-candy that no Verashni web-presence is complete without.

Rocking it up at the Rocking the Daisies festival this past weekend, with newly-befriended Alan Rosewall. One of aforementioned epic weekends :) Amazing photo courtesty of amazing friend: Michael Salzwedel.

In the event that my former post conveys sentiments that reek of ungratefulness, don't get me wrong: I am thoroughly blessed to be in a job that pays well in the industry I want to be in. It's just going to take some time before I get to produce the journalism I ideally would like to. Till then I must submit to the tyrannical tabloidisation of news journalism with a grim smile and hammer out headlines like "man crushes woman's head", which are sure to earn my editors' approval. 

But seriously, God has really laid it on my heard to submit in this time and appreciate the VERY LAIDBACK nature of this job. Besides there's lots of things in the pipeline like the amazing media fellowship I've been awarded and the amazing business I'm starting with Mike... hit me for more info if you're interested.