Getting the fox to guard the hen house

The Trump campaign has pledged to nominate a hunter to lead the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, aggressively fight lawsuits by anti-hunting groups and control predators like wolves.

Guess who is top of the list. That’s right. None other than Donald Junior. Here’s a letter I wrote to Trump’s delightful boys not too long ago.

Hey boys!

Just wanted to congratulate you on your successful hunting trip to Zimbabwe. Our papers have been full of pictures of you guys holding up dead leopards in a pink mist of vapourised waterbuck. You’re real heroes in these parts, let me tell you. There has been a bit of criticism, but it’s coming mainly from white bunny-hugging do-gooders who think wild animals are there to be photographed instead of destroyed like the vermin they are.

Bloody liberals.

I see you managed to bag three of the Big Five. Well done! But what stopped you from going for a full house? You got the buffalo, elephant and leopard, but missed the rhino and lion. And you call yourselves Trumps? Just kidding. I’m sure it’s not your fault. I bet the organisers of the hunt failed to tether them securely and they escaped before you could drive up and shoot them in the face.

Donald Junior, I particularly enjoyed the picture of you holding an elephant’s tail in one hand and a knife in the other. You can even see the legs of the elephant lying on the ground to prove that you got it off the animal and not from a curio shop. I bet you also cut off its trunk and poked it through your zipper and pretended you had a giant willy. I certainly would have.

I liked the shot of you guys posing next to a crocodile strung up from a tree. It reminded me of those old pictures from your Deep South. Now that the darkies are off-limits, croc-lynching could be the next big thing in Alabama. Wanna be partners? You gun ’em down, I string ’em up.

By the way, did you know that we also have a Small Five that are tremendous fun to kill? Meerkats are my best. If you’re quick, you can run up and kick them before they bolt for cover. Your brother, Eric, could have waited in an imaginary end zone to catch the flying ‘kat. Touchdown! American football, Africa style. What’s not to love?

Another of my favourites is the tortoise. Hunting tortoises is usually done when you have a hangover. I’m sure you had lots of those on your trip because the only way to survive in Africa is to drink heavily while firing blindly into the night.

So what you do is set up your chair within shouting distance of a reliable servant – you don’t want to run out of Bloody Marys – and wait for a tortoise to come along. Put your foot on his back to stop him from getting away. This is where it gets tricky. He will have retracted himself, making a clean head shot impossible. Don’t shoot him in the shell if you plan on using him as a paper-weight. They shatter easily. Rather take a leaf out of your father’s book. Cut off his lights and water and starve him out.

You said the local villagers were overjoyed at getting the meat from your hunt. And why wouldn’t they be? Leopard carpaccio garnished with a sprinkling of civet cat and drizzled with crocodile jus doesn’t appear on the menu in the Matetsi area all that often.

When I read that the hunt organisers were called Hunting Legends, I thought they were offering legends like President Robert Mugabe. Now there’s a trophy you should have on your wall. But I suppose he would put up too much of a fight. Not that you lads aren’t bok for a fight. Far from it. A kudu is a hell of an adversary. You were just fortunate to come across one that was drugged. To be honest, a lot of the game in southern Africa is on drugs these days. They also lack any real work ethic and spend most of the day sleeping. Smelly freeloaders. No wonder we kill them.

You were also lucky to have survived shooting a tusker. Many elephants, particularly in Zimbabwe, are known to explode without warning and, even from a distance of 300 metres, you could easily have lost a leg. Or worse, had your hair messed up. Gel is hard to come by in the bush.

I’m not much of a hunter myself, but I think I know why you boys enjoy it. For a start, Eric is a girl’s name and he has a lot to prove. And your name is Donald Junior, and yet it is Eric who looks more like your father. No wonder you’re angry.

You said the money you paid for the hunt will be used to fund nature conservation in Zimbabwe. I presume by “fund nature conservation” you mean “arm Zanu-PF veterans”. That’s okay. We understand code in these parts. No names, no pack-drill. Whatever the hell that means.

My wife says you’re both latent homosexuals. But as my Uncle Pervy used to say, “Better latent than never.” Anyway, you’ll be happy to know that I beat her soundly for her insolence.

I must say, though, Eric, you do look pretty damn sexy with that leopard draped over your shoulders. It brings out your eyes. And Donald Junior, seeing you straddling that dead buffalo makes doggie style seem positively Christian.

Y’all come back again, ya hear!

A buffet called Africa

China, eh? Funny old business. I had one of them Chinese in the back of my car once. Well, he was in the boot, actually. Come to think of it, that wasn’t a Chinese at all – it was a spare tyre. Probably made in China, though. It’s a slippery slope. Starts with tyres and next thing you know you’re marching in lockstep and quoting from Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book.

As a precaution I am learning Mandarin. I have learnt how to say, “Please don’t eat me.” This is all the Mandarin anyone needs. They are very big eaters, the Chinese. Well, they’re small eaters, but with big appetites. When Chinese babies are teething, they are given rocks to chew on. This is why there are almost no rocks left in China today. We export a lot of our rocks to Beijing. The Drakensberg will be gone in a few years. Good riddance, I say. It blocks the view and does nothing to help feed the poor.

Did you hear about the Chinese fishing fleet sailing under the radar off our coast? Apparently they snuck in under cover of darkness in the hope of pillaging our sardines. Well done to them, I say. Sardines are the work of the devil. They are slippery customers who will betray you the moment your back is turned. The only honourable member of their family is the anchovy, a humble little fish who is happiest when neatly arranged on a pizza.

Countries are meant to report to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, the agency that keeps track of global fisheries catches. For instance, Spain might report having caught five million tons in foreign waters in any given year, while the Chinese government is more likely to tell the FAO that its 3 400 vessels operating in the coastal waters of 94 countries caught three swordfish, two mackerel and a snoek. This is nothing more than creative accounting and, in my book, any form of creativity is to be applauded.

Greenpeace, that ragtag bunch of neo-liberal jumper-wearing do-gooders, says that sub-Saharan Africa is the only region on earth where per capita fish consumption is falling as a result of foreign fishing fleets nicking all the aquatic edibles. I don’t know about that. I was at John Dory’s a couple of nights ago and watched a Cro-Magnon family from the hinterland stuffing so much fish into their fat prehensile faces that the only thing in danger of falling was the toddler choking on a giant piece of hake.

A few weeks ago Argentina’s coast guard opened fire on a Chinese trawler fishing illegally in its waters. The trawler sank. Maybe we should bring out the Corvettes. I’m not talking about the patrol boats we bought in our squeaky-clean arms deal, obviously. Those are up on bricks at the moment. I’m talking about the Chevrolet Corvettes I saw driving around Simonstown last time I was there. They could park down by the waters edge, facing the Chinese, and frighten them off with a display of synchronised hooting and revving.

Meanwhile, China appears to have eaten everything in Zimbabwe and gone home. Our appalling neighbour’s annual international trade fair ended this week in Bulawayo. Hall 1 was always China’s turf. You wanted to flog a rhino horn or buy a second-hand Shenyang J-31 fighter jet, you went to Hall 1. Not this year. This year the Russians had occupied Hall 1. I won’t say anything more about this lest Vlad the Impaler calls in an airstrike on my house.

On a more positive note, Zanu-PF commandeered Hall 5 where officials tried to encourage people to join the party. Because no trade fair is really complete until men in dark glasses start rabbit-punching visitors in the kidneys.

Anyway, let’s not be churlish. There aren’t many international trade fairs that can boast of being officially opened by the likes of Togo’s President Faure Essozimna Gnassingbé. There were no Togolese exhibitors at the fair. Perhaps he took the country’s only plane. Either that or the Chinese have eaten Togo.

Deputy President Squirrel Ramaphosa said last year he wanted to see more South African companies expand into China. Distell has already established a presence. This is good news because alcohol lowers inhibitions and if there’s one thing this world needs, it’s more Chinese people.

The Queen of England was caught on camera this week saying she thought the Chinese were “very rude”. That’s rich. Do you know what’s rude? Hogging the throne while your son is desperate to have a go. And having your daughter-in-law whacked. That’s way ruder than the Chinese. On the other hand, stealing Tibet and harvesting the organs of political prisoners is also quite rude.

Right. Enough about the Chinese. Moving on to Oupa Bodibe, a man who sounds more like someone’s avuncular grandfather than a raving jingoistic loyalist. To be fair, he is only the spokespuppet for Gauteng’s education department, so the idea of having South Africa’s coat of arms on every school uniform by 2017 is probably not his. Why stop there? Why not make the uniforms from South African flags? While we’re at it, let’s make sure the kids’ gardens feature nothing but the national flower and they eat nothing but the national fish. Boiled galjoen for breakfast. Yum. They should also have nothing but the national anthem on their iPods and they must replace their pets with the national animal. Council bylaws might have to be amended to accommodate the influx of springboks – a small price to pay if we hope to raise a nation of ANC-voting superpatriots.

Speaking of which, Defence Minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula said last week that the defence force was “making progress” in recruiting young white people. There were 103 white recruits in the 2016 intake. This might not sound like progress, but we’re talking about 103 of the best and brightest the white tribe of Africa can offer. Absolute cream of the crop. Don’t for one minute think the army is the only place that would have them. We should all sleep easier at night knowing that they are out there.

And not here.

Ben Trovato takes a leaf out of China’s little red recipe book and eats anything that moves.

Tap-dancing gorillas and tenants from hell

Did you know that gorillas make up “food songs” while they eat? A German scientist discovered this “fun new fact” while working with the primates in the Congo. I don’t think it’s a fun fact at all. I can’t think of anything more terrifying than coming across a silverback gyrating its hips and singing Purple Rain with a mouth full of bamboo shoots.

Oh, look. Here’s another fun fact. Come November, Donald Trump could well be the 45th president of the United States of America.

While we’re on the subject of fun facts, did you know that 42% of Americans continue to believe that God created humans less than 10 000 years ago? Understand this and you’ll find it easier to understand why that orange maniac is the Republican Party’s presidential nominee.

I read somewhere that the world has experienced five mass extinctions over the last half a billion years and is on the brink of the sixth. Quite frankly, it can’t happen soon enough for me.

I don’t know what the hell this year thinks it’s doing. I went to Cape Town for Christmas and stumbled out three months later. I made an overnight stop in Jeffreys Bay and went to St Francis for lunch. Lunch lasted a month. Then, on my way back to Durban a few days ago, my biological GPS had a nervous breakdown and instead of driving past Rhodes University I found myself outside the University of Fort Hare in that glittering jewel of a town called Alice. Alice? Who the fuck is Alice?

I’m exhausted. If that’s what holidays do to you, then I need a proper job – one that restricts me to 21 days leave a year. It’s for my own good. Even heroin addicts live longer than freelance journalists. They at least have to move around to find money and drugs. We just need a laptop, a comfy chair and a running tab.

Some idiot once said that with great freedom comes great responsibility. This is absolute rubbish. With great freedom comes great freedom. That’s all there is to it.

Freedom is great. I would venture to say that freedom is greater than God because freedom doesn’t threaten to consign your soul to the eternal hellfires of damnation if you covet your neighbour’s ass. But it can be tiring.

So anyway, after eight hours of dodging Transkei road-kill and bent cops, I get home to find my refuge trashed. Not by burglars, but by the people who stayed here last. The thing with Airbnb is that you’re allowing complete strangers to abuse your house in return for nothing more than money. It’s a form of prostitution, really. It’s also a devilishly easy way to make money. This is something that speaks to me. Whoring my home comes naturally to me. I am a property pimp. There are worse things to be. At least I’m not a member of parliament.

Usually there is a domestic worker who gets dropped off by helicopter after a guest leaves, but this time she had been called away on urgent business in the Bahamas and failed to turn up. This meant I had to deal with the situation with no backup whatsoever.

I pulled in to the driveway saturated in road rage, the Land Rover bucking and snorting, and bellied up to the front door with my key in one hand and a Balinese fighting sword in the other. That’s my weapon of choice when I traverse the Transkei. Chopping off an arm here and there sends a clear signal to the local banditry. I learnt this from my Saudi Arabian friends.

The guests, luckily for them, had departed. Less luckily for me, they had left a mound of soiled cutlery and crockery in the sink, three pots of semi-cooked gunk on the stove and bits of half-eaten food in the fridge. I also found a packet of King Size Rizlas and an empty eyedropper of something called Ruthless. I don’t know what it is. The print on the bottle is too small to read. And my bedroom looks like Charlie Sheen was here. This guest from hell was an Afrikaner currently living overseas. He brought his girlfriend, his baby and his mother. It sounds like a sitcom written by the Marquis de Sade.

I suspect this is why Berlin has introduced a law banning homeowners from renting out their properties on Airbnb, although a more plausible reason might be that the city wants to keep random acts of cannibalism under control. Germans like nothing more than getting together on a Saturday night and eating bits of one another over a bottle or two of chianti. The new legislation is called Zweckentfremdungsverbot. Such a mellifluous language.

I returned to not only terrible scenes in my home, but also in parliament. A debate on the Presidency budget vote? That’s not what I saw. I saw a bunch of pot-bellied revolutionaries getting their arses handed to them by a plainclothes posse from the parking lot. Surely the whole point of wearing red is that you don’t care about getting blood on your clothes? I want to see some real fighters in the EFF. I want to see Mikey Schultz and Radovan Krecjir sitting behind Julius Malema and Floyd Shivambu. Then we’ll see who gets thrown out of parliament.

Finally, let us not even speak of Matthew Theunissen, Cape Town’s latest contender for a Darwin award. After posting an ill-conceived anti-government diatribe on Facebook that would have made a Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan blush, he said he “didn’t intend to say those words”. Fair enough. I didn’t intend to drink a dozen beers while writing this column either, but it happened nevertheless. Evil forces are clearly at work. Matthew has a Masters from Stellenbosch University, that shining beacon of progressive thought. I wasn’t aware that Maties offered post-graduate degrees in white supremacy. Maybe he thought you needed a Masters to be a fully-fledged member of the master race.

Matthew insisted that he wasn’t a racist; that he had “friends of colour”. By colour, I imagine he means the different shades of red his white friends turned when they realised what an utter fuckwit he is.

Bring on the sixth extinction.

 

 

 

An open letter to Sports Minister Fikile Mbalula

BEN TROVATO – Durban Poison

Dear Comrade Fiks,

Well done on cracking down on sports that don’t have enough darkies in their teams. This is Africa, not Scandinavia. Did you know that in some parts of Norway you aren’t even allowed to be black without permission from the government? Of course you did. You are one of the few Cabinet ministers who know things they aren’t paid to know ­– like Beyoncé’s bra size. Or paid to not know – like whether bribes helped us secure the 2010 Soccer World Cup.

Last week you decided that our rugby, cricket, athletics and netball federations would no longer be allowed to pitch for international tournaments because they had failed to meet their transformation targets. I don’t think you went far enough and I hope you’re not going soft on us. The people running these sports should be charged with treason and shot. I have my own AK-47…

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An open letter to Sports Minister Fikile Mbalula

Dear Comrade Fiks,

Well done on cracking down on sports that don’t have enough darkies in their teams. This is Africa, not Scandinavia. Did you know that in some parts of Norway you aren’t even allowed to be black without permission from the government? Of course you did. You are one of the few Cabinet ministers who know things they aren’t paid to know ­– like Beyoncé’s bra size. Or paid to not know – like whether bribes helped us secure the 2010 Soccer World Cup.

Last week you decided that our rugby, cricket, athletics and netball federations would no longer be allowed to pitch for international tournaments because they had failed to meet their transformation targets. I don’t think you went far enough and I hope you’re not going soft on us. The people running these sports should be charged with treason and shot. I have my own AK-47 and I’m prepared to do the dirty work. All I need are bullets and a business card introducing me as The Transformer.

Like you, I have had it with white people and their Volvo-driving, child-rearing, dog-patting ways. Yes, we win a lot of games, but celebrating a victory perpetrated by a predominantly white team is like celebrating Germany winning the Kristallnacht Cup in 1938.

Quite frankly, I am astounded that netball is still a sport in this country. There are hardly any fatalities or crowd stampedes and the rules make absolutely no sense. No running with the ball? What the hell kind of sport is that? Why even bother with a ball? I watched a netball game when I was a teenager and at half-time, crazed with adolescent lust, I ran home and locked myself in my room for two days. I almost died.

Netball in South Africa is not only a racist sport but it is also deeply sexist. I have never seen men playing netball. Are they not allowed to? This is unacceptable. I should point out that if men do, in fact, play netball, I have no wish to watch them. Please do not send me any literature on this.

Your decision to ban our national netball team from competing against other countries does not go far enough. The players must be charged with treason and shot.

Cricket, too, is well deserving of your wrath. How dare they? I mean, really, how very dare they? Not only are they all white, apart from whatshisname with the face, but their uniforms are also all white. Sometimes they wear green, but it’s an open secret that green is the new white. And they call themselves the Proteas after a particularly unlovely flower that lives in Cape Town, the final refuge of white people. It is clearly a conspiracy.

Cricket is not a game that should be played by people, period. It should be played by animals. Dogs, particularly golden retrievers, would be brilliant at fielding but their batting might need work. The higher order simians would also make the game far more entertaining and I, for one, would certainly buy a ticket to watch the Jakarta Gibbons take on the Durban Vervets. Chimpanzees, too, are equipped with deadly bowling arms and it makes no sense that the likes of Dale Steyn and Hansie Cronje are allowed to play while they aren’t. The entire team should be charged with treason and shot.

I was delighted to see that you included athletics as one of the sports that needed kicking to the curb. Black people spent years jumping through hoops and running from the cops. They are natural athletes. White people can’t jump for shit and they only ever run when they’re late for their flight to Perth. I don’t even know what athletics is. Or, for that matter, are. I turned to the electronic oracle that dupes stupid people into thinking they’re smarter than they are and apparently athletics is “an exclusive collection of sporting events that involve running, jumping, throwing and walking”. Walking is a sport? I do it all the time. Well, on Friday afternoons, anyway. To the bottle store, mostly. Does this make me an athlete? Of course it does. Would I want to represent my country? Of course not. White people are only good for representing everything that is wrong with this country. This is the way it should be. Let us not even speak of the fact that when foreigners hear the term ‘South African athlete’ they automatically think of a trigger-happy psycho on stumps.

The athletics team must be charged with treason and shot.

And you’re going after rugby, too? You’re a braver man than I am, Gunga Din. I’m paraphrasing here. Unless, of course, your codename in the struggle actually was Gunga Din. It seems unlikely, though. Maybe it was Ganga Dim. I apologise. That’s the medication talking.

To be honest, I don’t think you should have blackballed rugby for being too white. Many of us only watch rugby in the hope that the game will degenerate into a bloodbath. If you take away the Afrikaners – a tribe that invented the bloodbath – we’d be left with Beast Matawaririua (is he Maori?) and the other one. I don’t remember his name. The one with the teeth. I’m just not convinced that black people should play rugby. They are inclined to stick to the rules and rarely try to murder anyone. Well, not on the pitch, anyway. Obviously all bets are off once they’re back in the township.

I urge you, then, to exempt rugby from transformation and instead target tennis and golf. You don’t get sports whiter than these. There is no reason why our top tennis teams aren’t all black. Well, apart from the white lie that black people have terrible hand-eye coordination. This is disproved by our very own President Jacob Zuma who is brilliant at seeing opportunities and grabbing them with both hands. It doesn’t matter whether it’s avoiding trial, making money or winning three straight sets, the man has talent. So if you agree that tennis is little more than a white-collar crime, you need to charge the team with treason and have them shot.

As for golf, the less said the better. Whiteys think darkies are only interested in joining golf clubs so they can meet women, drink the bar dry, steal the silverware and take home an Egyptian snow goose for the braai.

I can’t think of any high-profile black golfers apart from Squirrel Ramaphosa. As far as I know, the deputy president has never been seen washing his clothes in the water hazard, urinating openly on the fairway or using a machete to settle an argument over the interpretation of Rule 27. Then again, he is more a politician than a golfer.

Well done on leaving our soccer team alone. Even though you called them a bunch of losers two years ago, Bafana Bafana are a model of transformation. Well, they would be if it weren’t for Dean Furman and his white tendencies. You might want to charge him with treason and have him shot. It’s up to you. Meanwhile, the South African Football Association continues to set the benchmark for excellence and they stand as a shining example of … I’m sorry. I have to go and lie down for a bit.

 BEN TROVATO has offered to help Sports Minister Fikile Mbalula enforce transformation through the barrel of a gun.