Flooded Covid Informal Settlement near Old Faure Rd in Mfuleni. Alex Tabisher writes that a whole catalogue of disasters is overtaking this country. Picture: Ayanda Ndamane/African News Agency(ANA)
So much is happening these days, and the events are disseminated so rapidly, that one cannot help but develop a dreadful sense of ambivalence.
In support of which, I offer this week’s celebrations. Ambivalence is the simultaneous existence in a person’s mind of mutually conflicting feelings or thoughts about someone or something.
The definition itself is broad and far-reaching but it saves me from trying to be definitive or totally correct about what I write or say. A columnist merely starts a process or two and then hopes for productive, proactive responses from his reader.
A classic example was my prediction that the Irish would beat the Boks. My friends were horrified, especially in this sensitive period of heritage conscientisation. And yet, when the score was finally published, I was proved to be correct.
But it held no satisfaction for me. Questions about my loyalty, patriotism, the almost political composition of the Springbok, that legendary icon of white nationalism that was once feared across the rugby-playing world, thudded about me as if I had engineered the defeat.
The truth is, the writing has been on the wall for a long time. I was sent a clip of crashing waves pummelling the pier at Kalk Bay. In my childhood days, we swam and fished there, and the seas seemed friendly. The fury of the waves in the clip was accompanied by the question: Who is responsible for this clip? My good Lord, I intoned, who gives a hoot.
That was visible evidence of nature’s refusal to be abused any longer. She is hitting back. And we asked who took the clip and published it. As if that is the issue. Unbelievable.
I had another riveting clip, one of the waterfalls in Du Toit’s Kloof being blown back up the face of the mountain. A young friend, who grew up in front of me and is now a doctor, was the only one to agree with me that only God can literally change or reverse the flow of a river.
Kudos to you, Ferhardt Yasien, for seeing with me the clear portents that matters are coming to a head because we have forgotten to care. Or worse, we have lost our religion. And we are paying for it big time. Poems are made by fools like me, but only God can make a tree. Remember?
And what about gusts of wind that upend buses on innocent bystanders? Whence this fury, this carnage that a placid South Africa was spared over even the bad racist years? Roofs get ripped off buildings with no warning. Holes appear without consideration for the unfortunate who might be engulfed in choking soil.
A whole catalogue of disasters is overtaking this country which never knew earthquakes, hurricanes, eruptions, earth fissures or other cataclysms which made up the news from overseas during my boyhood days.
Now it seems that the wheel is turning or has turned, and we are part of the natural fragility and vicissitudes of life to which the flesh is heir.
There is no more point to the blame game. All the miscreants have been named, yet not shamed. All those miserable purveyors of inefficiency and lack of expertise are walking about freely, waiting patiently to be voted back into power by a nation that itself is as clueless as they.
I offer some consolation in the joy of creating your own relevances and realities to which you can escape, like Alice, into your own rabbit hole and find the sense that is in you. The erosion of the self-belief of every human being has almost gone beyond the reach of reparation.
We say with Oscar Wilde: In the old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by no one.
Please do not see my column as a cry of despair. A sense of wit and humour is still available to save our crashing egos.
There’s much left that can be rescued and healed. And we still produce the best oranges in the world.
* Alex Tabisher.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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