PERHAPS South Africa needs a lustration – an institutional bloodletting in which the last of the Verenka Pashkas are abandoned along with the hemline of the past? In fact isn’t it safe to say that we all have a Verenka Pashka sitting somewhere in the family tree — an apartheid skeleton that refuses to go away?
The problem with apartheid is that it produced a terrible clique of bureaucrats – an educated and nebulous elite that still continues to cling to power, and which expects a special status quotient no matter what the outcome. In their uxorious demands for our supposed loyalty and taxes they stigmatise ordinary South Africans who would get along fine if it weren’t for the sneaking suspicion that party affiliations are no longer what they once were.
If Madiba can hang out with PW Botha’s maternal grandchild, then what’s to stop us ordinary folk from hanging out with the children of bloodthirsty Slobodon Milosovic, or playing with the offspring of killer Mengistu or the dictator of Uganda, Idi Amin? Are we such suckers for reconciliation that we are prepared to give-up on what used to be a politically-correct fixation with well-mannered progressive identity: In effect, to be castrated by ideology and disabused of power?
“Oh, not those kind of people, I hear parents muttering – they’re ex-nazis or worse,”
Now what we have is some kind of painting excursion — fascism by numbers in which the ghost of PW Botha is resurrected like a kind of evil fairy godfather along with Verenka Pashka’s wardrobe.
How much do those art lessons cost anyway?
I know a lot of people, including my own mother, who would throw in tutelage and instruction for free, with far less baggage
If you were part of the old cabinet under PW Botha, then you shouldn’t be seen, nevermind heard of as a Madiba fashion accessory.
The scent of freedom, the smell of betrayal