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By Peter Wilhelm
I once knew someone who (before he cracked the acting trade) was compelled to work as a lowly hospital orderly. The kind who has to bring coffee to the sweepers. The hospital spoke only Afrikaans, the subtleties of which he was ignorant. Once in the middle of some ghastly procedure – possibly attaching an anus to a urethra – a quack whirled on him and commanded: “Gaan haal die monster! “ (“Go and fetch the sample!”)
Baffled, lost, wandering through those alienating corridors with flickering strobes – my “someone” staggered to the room he thought best – a species of lab in which horrible misshapen creatures floated forever in formaldehyde. He gasped at the entryway: “I’ve come for the monster!”
Unilingual hospitals are a curse. They are residues from the era when we didn’t have 11 official languages, and now Mandarin – yet less than 2% speaks a first language other than an official one. Time to declare ONE universal tongue so that all will not go scampering after monsters?
Maybe. Since I mingle with liberal discards and former SACP muppets (ask them when they stopping worshipping Stalin) the most blurted suggestion is English. Not Ndebele or Venda. Yet English is a squirmy language, changing every day and not (looking ahead) the most versatile form of communication since it now encodes such digital acronyms as LOL and MILF. Don’t ask.
So Chinese might be an option. ?ñHa?? is not a word in common use, nor is it actually Chinese (although to me it might just as well be). Still, it opens another rabbit hole: we could always invent a language to share, although not with the millions of migrants who clamber through razor-wire and electrified soccer nets to attain the bliss of our upmarket, if falling-down, RDP hovels plus DStv.
It wouldn’t be long (say two or three generations) before our citizens were all able to explain their urgent need for a bank card, or how many litres of petrol they needed, or whether some blonde chick (© Anthony Fridjhon) would like a tequila sunrise.
There would no longer be fist-fights over interpretation or wars that lasted 2 000 years over who should be the next chief of the tribe. If everyone carried a new-speak dictionary, so much time would be wasted looking up some “word” there simply wouldn’t be time. If you don’t like it, buy a one-way ticket to Alpha Centauri and huddle together in the – 272 temperature and breathe nitrogen.
But would a common tongue be enough? As I have noted in the past, sport is the single most unifying national tic. Furthermore, it has to be open to the LBGTI (and vampire) community. Fortuitously, the international Olympic committee has just declared Frisbee an Olympic sport.
Anyone can throw one of these little plastic flying saucers. You do it all the time on the beach and your shaggy mutt retrieves it out of misguided loyalty. Leave the mutt at home and wing your way to Rio where you can fling to your utter delight if you dodge the guns, coke snorts, algae, and free alcohol of the native homicidal maniacs.
Back here we will all huddle around our steam-driven TV sets cheering for the multicultural Frisbee tossers. I see only one roiling mass of cloud on the horizon.
This is that we share 99% of our DNA with chimpanzees – which have been discovered waging internecine war for some 7 000 years. What if we declare war on a phony referee’s call of a dropped Frisbee? That would make us as murderous and conflict-driven as chimps!
Sport would then become yet another raison d’être for warfare. There has already been one: the La Guerra del fútbol or 100-hours war between El Salvador and Honduras in 1969 over the disputed outcome of a World Cup soccer qualifier.
Maybe Frisbee won’t arouse such rabid passions as that, though I can see our champion (Siouxie van der Pomp) striding over to smash his/her opponent in the chops for falling in the sun-soaked sand of Rio. Best to keep an ICU on site.
When the time comes for our nation to host the Olympics (if they can afford it after our descendants have finished paying the R1 trillion bill for unworkable nukes) it could be arranged that the famous firepool at Nkandla could be suborned for use as a swimming competition. Jake Zuma won’t mind – he will be sitting with Bob Mugabe shaking the dry peas in his head.
Chad le Clos should walk it – provided Zuma doesn’t mistake him for Jesus and flee to Libya.
We share our DNA with great Frisbee and swimming champs. From hovel to mansion, unanimous cheers will raise the roof, although they can be replaced when the roofers come off strike. Thus united we can then invade Lesotho.
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