Gogol Bordello

I have a new favourite band called Gogol Bordello. They are roughly labelled as a Gypsy Punk Rock outfit with a Ukranian lead singer, 2 Russian fiddlers, Israeli accordian player, an American drummer and 2 eastern women that prance around the stage in striped stockings with fire buckets on their feet...thats right, fire buckets on their feet!

So catchy is their music that it had a bunch of crazy drunk South Africans trying to cosack dance on rickety tables in a little Lesotho mountain lodge where I inadvertantly introduced it at 4am one morning. They are massively cheesy and they rock! Check them out on:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_81l4DXlwM

Hey, hey, hey, lalalalaaaaaa

Lion man answers the call

Not one day after my hunting post, I received this youtube link...it kinda highlights what true bravery bordering on stupidity is all about! Lets see you get on your bellies and wiggle towards that with your hunting knife you big men you...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7GadUhRFyk

grrrrr.

Get stuffed

On my way back from an amazing weekend of riding my mountain bike in the Tuli block on the SA/Zim/Botswana border, I passed a number of hunting farms on the endless straight road to Alldays. It got me thinking about the old debate about the merits of hunting, its role in conservation and the kind of people that want to pay big money to hammer a chunk of lead into a fellow being.

At the outset, let me say that I am fully aware that to hunt for food is perhaps many times more noble than the cowardly purchasing of that trimmed and packed beef fillet from your nearest Woolies. When you hunt for your meat, you cannot hide from the death that is required and that we are so perfectly shielded from in our modern lives of convenience. I will not dig further into this aspect except to say that even a sense of pleasure from the kill could be justified when the result is food on the table. We are predators, as evidenced by our teeth and the fact that our eyes are on the front of our face and not the sides - we stalk prey looking straight ahead.

My beef, so to speak, is with hunters that hunt to put trophies on their wall. Presumably, this means that they wish to make a statement about their courage, their cunning and their power over all beasts. They will tell you that it requires many hours of walking, lying still and sometimes coming home empty handed...doesn't sound like a whole bag of awful suffering to me! Sounds a lot like a game of golf to be honest.

Once this justification of the hardship of the hunt has been shown up as weak at best, the trump card is usually to highlight how dangerous a wounded animal can be thereby implying the courage of the hunter to be out there pitting his wits against the savage beast with nothing but a 458 with high quality telescopic sights allowing accurate kill shots from hundreds of meters away. To this epic display of knightly bravery I would like to propose the following - if this is all about proving your courage, why not leave the gun at home, leave the professional hunter and the backup guns, leave the telescopic sights, pick up a knife and go out there pick a fight with a grumpy lion. Not so keen any more? No doubt that is because the chance of you winning the fight have dropped from roughly 99.99% to about 25% assuming you are an ace with a knife and don't flinch when that 250kg beast launches itself at you. Can you then really claim that shooting something like an elephant or a lion is an act of courage? I think not. The Masai kill lion with spears and the pygmies in the Congo attack and disembowel elephants with sharp blades by running underneath their bellies and cutting them open. They do this to protect their flocks and feed the village respectively and it doubles as a display of manliness.

So, by my estimate, if I was giving awards for the lion hunter of the year, it would go to a young Masai who walked out on his own to face an angry lion with nothing but his toothpick of a spear, his courage and his conviction. I don't see wealthy American and European hunters lining up to try and win my fictional award this way. Yet they insist on running the old courage line past us to justify their barbaric 'sport'. Shoot lions if you must, you insecure children, it adds money to the overall conservation effort, but please spare me the photos of you posing on the body of the culled animal, smiling like a triumphant buffoon who thinks he has proven his courage. All you have proven is your lack thereof. Congratulations, what a man, get stuffed!

Its because I'm 'black', yo!

I am determined at some point in the next year to apply for an Affirmative Action job in South Africa as a 'black' male. Now this might be a strange thing for a 'white' guy to do but I have been having quirky little daydreams in which, sitting in the interview, I get to put the onus of proof onto the interviewer and his panel of race-conscious, eager, bright-eyed social engineers. Let us make it clear that I probably will not want, or get, the job I apply for and it will probably end up being more awkward than funny as these things often are but there is a sense of comedy stalking the whole enterprise of AA and BEE and the ongoing racial classification in South Africa.

In the old days, the NAT's, architects of apartheid were suddenly faced with the same dilemma...what do we do with those who claim to be white and are coloured, Indian and are black, coloured and are black and so on. Teams of race 'officials' looked at hair, noses, fingernails and other arbitrary bits of body and made pronouncements that sometimes even split families into two distinct racial groups, the consequence of which, in apartheid South Africa, can only be imagined. The Apartheid Museum has a page from the national race records stating in the given year how many whites officially became coloured, how many coloureds officially became white and so, laughably, on.

We now know from DNA studies that there is fundamentally no inherent difference between humans beyond the obvious physical and cultural ones and since no too members even of the same race have the same appearance reading anything into this would seem silly. In one extremely amusing recent addition to the debate, a local TV show had local celebrities tested to find out which geographical area of the world their ancestors came from, something which DNA can tell us. Some 'white' people turned out to have African and Khoi DNA and in one case a stunned Tim Modise was told he had Germanic as well as Khoi roots- he seemed very perturbed to be a black part of the 'master race'!

Back to my mildly odd, somewhat satisfying musings about claiming 'black' status. I figure that if, by modern science, Tim Modise is germanic, I could very well be Khoi or African and since all humans, by current thinking and archaeological discovery, come from Africa, I could very well be 'black' by our current definitions. I could have been overlooked by the apartheid government, a lucky escapee into the 'white' camp and now I could come 'out of the closet' so to speak and declare my true nature, a proud 'black' man in every way. Since compulsory DNA testing is not yet required for job applications in our beloved little country, I would ostensibly be within my rights to claim 'blackness' and be entitled to all of the privileges it now entails. I could put my name down for an RDP house, join government departments, get Telkom shares at a discount and enroll at all those cool exclusive clubs for black people like the Black Lawyer's Association, The Black Management Forum and so on. I could go undercover at the AWB or the Boeremag, treading carefully since I would be be in for a pretty hard time if they found out I was actually 'black'.

Oh, and I could apply for the position of President of SARFU, DNA test Jake White and should he also prove to be black like me, I could entice him back to coach our Springboks to 2011 victory.

Surely its time to move on from all these childish clubby, clubby games we play now? 'White' and 'black' pretty much have no meaning any more, yet a country that fought against racial classification and WON is doggedly hanging onto the concept. I think we need to move on but maybe its just because I am 'black'... ;)