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Peter Wilhelm – The advancing might of South Africa’s Zumocracy

By Peter Wilhelm

Another first for our stunning nation! Someone has managed to print an artificial hand. Assuming this meant I could print a hand, I placed my paw in the copy tray of my fax and pushed one of the innumerable buttons intended to make us feel washed-up, anti-tech, and in the way of the advancing might of our Zumocracy. The machine whizzed and squeaked, as intended.

However, I learn, the real printed hand is 3-D, just like a Pixar movie, and all that emerged from the copy was a 2-D, meaty, static, blurry facsimile of the type that emerges when someone takes off their panties and sits on a fax machine during a Christmas party. Lots of sniggers succeeded by shame.

I wonder whether the famed genocidaire Omar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir is a plastic printed dictator? He was probably here to get an oil change.

I first learnt of our snaky government’s stance vis-à-vis this well-known thug from my malodorous neighbour, Gatvol van der Pomp. Gatvol – steaming with a whole-body orgasm, such was his serotonin high crept under my nuclear-powered fence to squeal the news: He got away! He got away! He can go back to wiping out Darfur.”

As everyone should know (but doesn’t) the Sudanese president by virtue of a military coup and several fake elections is under indictment by the International Criminal Court. Gatvol enjoys such political thespians prancing on their rotten wooden horses. However, having first looped a Brut-soaked scarf around my nostrils to repel Gatvol’s sulphurous emissions, I tasked him on his evident homo-erotic urge for a man you wouldn’t ask to lick your frying pan.

“Gatvol would you want to live in Sudan?” He sneered: “I’d rather live in a huge gat in the ground into which the rains sluice dead rats and decomposing rubbish – [actually, he does] – But the thing to remember is that a strong ruler can wear the old South African flag on his Hells Angel jacket, and send all the foreigners back from whence they fled to steal our jobs and our women.”

There’s an irony here. Gatvol, you see (and this is a secret I have never before divulged, not even on Twitter) is himself a foreigner. He was born circa 1948 in a country ruled by white men and made a fine living pumping up railway train wheels when a little tap-tap suggested deflation. Now he has no job to steal and his women are so innumerable he holds six-monthly auctions for politicians in need of brides. They scream.

His homeland was known as Die Republiek van Suid Afrika until (to plagiarise The Beatles) he noticed that the lights had changed. But living under the radar and the drones has scrambled his few remaining neurons – he detests living on and on gobbling longevity pills yet fawns at the very shadow of Big Men.

He cannot actually be extradited to any known homeland other than, perhaps, a semi-oxygenated potty on Pluto (average lifespan: 0.001 nanoseconds, courtesy of Elon Musk). It’s a black site where the ICC’s writ does not run.

I said: “I suppose you wouldn’t mind if Hitler came to town?” This unlikely event (Herr Schicklgrüber would now be 126) stirred Gatvol: “Yes! We could check his DNA, give him a resounding welcome with flags and bugles all down Adderley Street, then stuff him and kept as a tourist attraction on the Sea Point beachfront.

We could put him next to a reclining model of Donald Trump.” Gatvol’s proposal was absurd. I pointed out that The Donald had not yet been voted US president and that the sight of such a seafront postmodern art display might repel the Nobel laureates and misguided sun-worshippers who come to encourage melanoma and splurge their drachmas.

  Defiance of the #alBashir arrest warrant was another watershed that made SA less investable. This implication is not well understood

“Trump is a genius,” Gatvol argued further. “He invented the tripartite combover: back-neck fuzz over forwards; both sides swept into a hairy pyramid; then sprayed with yellow paint and glue. If we cannot keep refugees out, we could at least teach them to be television makeup artists for news anchors.”

In my unaccustomed role as a liberal bloviator, I was inclined to return to the issues surrounding Omar al-Bashir and our national penchant for forging all kinds of alliance with wanted criminals or releasing them after a few hours incarceration in the Table Bay Hotel.

In that grim dungeon, subject to every single bouquet on DSTV, room service by runners-up in the Ms Universe contest, free French champagne, and Cuban cigars, it wouldn’t be long before they pleaded to be set free and fly away in their private solar-powered jets to join the hedonistic dwarves in North Korea.

I demanded of Gatvol: “So you want to shelter war criminals?” Serenely he responded: “Education in warfare would be a big plus. We can take care of the crime ourselves.”

See also: High Court explanation on al-Bashir: Another bulwark for SA Democracy

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