Only+Sylvester+Stallone+will+escape,+Andrew+Donaldson,+S+Times

Sunday Times, Johannesburg, 15 April 2007
=Only Sylvester Stallone will escape=


 * Andrew Donaldson: //Eish!//**

In the first exciting months of Jacob Zuma’s presidency they will name airports after Butana Komphela in recognition of the “epical manner” (as a colleague drily remarked) in which he has fulfilled his duties as chairman of Parliament’s committee on Sport.

Such an honour may or may not be without irony — Komphela insists he will continue with plans to lobby the Sports minister to withhold the Springboks’ passports and ban them from travelling to the Rugby World Cup in France if the team do not show more signs of transformation and darkie-up player-wise most pronto.

All week I’ve been waiting for the international condemnation of this nonsense. But there has been none. And with reason. Komphela is right. It is only fitting and proper that white sports stars be prevented from travel if their particular sporting associations are deemed not black enough.

And by black they presumably mean properly black, not just bushie black. (Stationery sales soar as the pencil test returns triumphantly to public life.)

There has, of course, been the usual guff about merit being the only consideration for inclusion in national squads. But this, we’ve been told, is in itself a racist argument, the thin keening sound made by mainly white folk — the sort of pathetic noise a cow makes when it is poked by Tony Yengeni.

And why stop at sport? If Finance Minister Trevor Manuel’s recent comments that white companies are abusing black economic empowerment policies by “fronting” African token partners offer any indication of what’s going down in the marketplace, well, perhaps it’s best their passports were confiscated as well.

After that, it’s the arts. Gangs of eunuchs with sharpened teeth on the Pallo Jordan payroll will pore over works of literature, counting black characters. Eventually, though, they will tire of all the reading and instead demand from publishers lists of dramatis personae so that, after a quick totting up, they may return to loitering at the bowls of plums and the rest of the indolent life.

Books deemed “too white” will be burnt. Nadine Gordimer will form an alliance with a few left-over criminals from the Congress of SA Writers and will, for a while, prosper, before she too is hauled before the beak on charges of “fronting”. Her punishment will be terrible.

All films will be banned unless they star Chris Rock or Eddie Murphy as babe magnets with guns and the sort of sports cars deemed “aspirational” to the township youth.

The more intellectual offerings may feature Morgan Freeman as a wise old man — a Gandalf in negative, if you will — who has to put up with some impetuous youngster who need not necessarily be black.

(//Rocky XIV: Zimmer Frame KO!// will escape the ban on a technicality. Distributors will argue that, due to a chemical reaction brought about by steroid abuse and a malfunctioning sun bed, Sylvester Stallone is no longer a white person, but orange.)

After that, well, music. Don’t pianos have more white keys than black ones? Can’t have that ...

SO LONG, then, to Kurt Vonnegut, the US novelist, journalist and humanist who passed away this week at the age of 84.

As a POW in Dresden, Germany, in 1945, Vonnegut witnessed the Allied fire-bombing raid that destroyed the city. In a 1977 interview, he said that he was the only person who had benefited from the attack.

//Slaughterhouse-Five//, based on Dresden’s destruction, had earned him three dollars, he said, for each of the 135 000 people who burnt to death that terrible day.


 * From: http://www.sundaytimes.co.za/article.aspx?ID=437688**

604 words