They shot Jimmy Mohlala dead.
This isn't the start of more quasi-philosophising; no, this is news. Jimmy Mohlala, a senior South African politican, was murdered by a bullet or bullets because he dared to reveal the corruption inherent in the building of the stadium at Nelspruit for the 2010 World Cup.
Mohlala had the courage to speak out, and he fell where the treacherer's gun cut him down. Those who love South Africa, those who love football, those who grimace when great, heavy lives far more worthy than our own unbalance and fall back to earth with the rest of us, we will never let your memory fade. Right-thinking people the world over join me in condemning the drinkers of his blood.
Yet this awful eventuality should not be used to condemn South Africa itself, or the continent upon which she sleeps. I know already, though, that the rest of the world, its media in particular, will have an absolute field day writing about the African savages and their thirst for violence. You do not do so in my name.
The South Africa of your minds, with its undercurrent of dissonance, and fractured irreperably, is not the South Africa that drugged me when I slept in order that I woke up in love with it. It is not the terrible pendulum of sun over Mpumalanga that I knew, it is not the woman frying up fat koek for the incredulous tourist, it is not the smiling acceptance of a million little power cuts that I experienced.
Rational South Africans castigate without end those who did for Jimmy Mohlala, and this grief is more representative of a nation than his killer or killers. It doesn't stop the hard-of-thinking from rushing in and tipping a whole landmass and its inhabitants into the sea, though. Faulty Popperians see a single example of something and declare it representative of its class.
You can do this, like L and I did with romantic ideas, because ideas are fair game. Nations and groups of people, are not, and their obliteration from the realm of humanity by the realm of humanity - intentionally or not - is something that must be avoided at all costs.
