Peter Wilhelm: UCT’s shameful Rhodes Scholar Max Price – and more

Bravo Peter Wilhelm. This week the thinking person's satirist recalls his run-in with Mangosuthu Buthelezi; the shame of UCT's Rhodes Scholar Max Price; how South African English translates into Mandarin and so much more. Chuckle away. – Alec Hogg 

By Peter Wilhelm

I have a warning for all satirists. Whatever you write – no matter how absurd – will be taken seriously by someone. I once took sarky sideswipes at Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi for invading Lesotho in the few seconds during which (in the absence of bigger bosses) he sent in the army. A total disaster! We had to retreat to the land of no casinos.

The Chief accused me at immense length of treachery, simony, selling indulgences, or whatever demonic offences he could think of. I got documents, appendices, plans of action, briefing papers and secret files – including those relating to our imaginary nuclear potential should Lesotho resist our plodders – that it was like reading Pliny the Elder in Etruscan before he perished at Pompeii.

Less volcanic was my humble suggestion that SpongeBob SquarePants would make a good president. A male troll wanted to get in the act – and duly scribbled that since all his friends called him SpongeBob, I should mount his campaign for the alpha porcine filcher. I informed him that he needed cash to register – but not that SpongeBob was a gay icon.

What did he look like? A slab of degenerate Emmenthal cheese who lives in a pineapple, has a pet snail that meows — and whose bromance revolves around a pink blob of slime called Patrick? I think he's still out there.

Now I read an April 1 post by my old frog-marching mentor Peter Horn, to the effect that UCT's Dr. Max Price is so ashamed of being a former Rhodes Scholar that he's taken to wearing a brown paper bag over his head when venturing onto the campus. John Kane-Berman would be wise to follow suit.

Obviously, since I personally laid down the template that nothing in the obscene, cavernous Internet can actually be believed, I recognise that all those factoids are presumably inserted by mad North Korean hackers to befuddle the West. So that was what I surmised when I read the following online absurdity:

"Mandarin has been added to the curriculum as a subject choice for pupils in Grades 4 to 9 as a non-official language. Other language choices in the same category include German, Serbian, Latin, Portuguese, Spanish, Tamil, Telegu and Urdu."

Telegu, it seems, is spoke in Andaman, Nicobar, Chhattisgarh, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Odisha, Tamil Nadu, Puducherry – and by the Sri Lankan Gypsy people. I never knew that; you might just as well have informed that it was a native tongue of Kakamas or Yzerfontein.

I grasp the need to learn Mandarin. China is our largest trading partner (my standard breakfast is boiled noodles).

But when Jake Zooma decrees by example that our noblest constitutional model is safeguarded by gluttony, the refurbished hydrogen bombs left by the Nats, zero press freedom — and banishment to the gulags of Death Alley or watering the ancient welwitschias in the Namib – we will somehow need to chatter with the drones that keep us under perpetual surveillance, scaring them off.

Telegu won't do. Nor apparently will English, Afrikaans, Ndebele, Northern Sotho, Sotho, Swazi, Tsonga, Tswana, Venda. Xhosa, or Zulu. So an extra half-dozen or so languages cannot do any harm. Maybe we should add the gabble spoken by Trevor Noah (the new national comic after Al Debbo).

What we must avoid is the kind of bungled mistranslation that the Chinese are so adept at. Here are some of the cock-ups perpetrated by Chinese-speakers who want to sell food to English-speakers. (This section, like the movies that teens hunger for, is rated PG-13 so lock up your children in the freezer for the duration.)

• "Grab me now! Cock zero $2.90. Cock light $3.00)";
• "Slip and fall down carefully";
• "Roasted husband."
• "The wild germ hates soup."
• "Beware of missing foot."
• "Wang had to burn."
• "Meat-fried cat ears."
• "Whisky and pole dancer."

And so on.

But how will English translate into Mandarin? When it dribbles from the maws of politicos it often actually needs translation into English. Take this delightful 2012 aperçu from Zooma: "Sorry, we have more rights here because we are a majority. You have fewer rights because you are a minority. Absolutely, that's how democracy works. So, it is a question of accepting the rules within democracy and you must operate within them."

Huddled together in the spectator's gallery, the Chinese commissars (the de facto rulers of the former provinces) scratched their pates in puzzlement. "What was that? 'Meat-fried cat ears'. 'The wild germ hates soup'. 'Whisky and pole dancer'? Which ones do we send to the gulag?"

A kindly Mandarin-speaking Islamic State delegate leaned over: "Pardon me, Milords. His Excellency is actually saying: 'My philosophy is simple: abolish all private property except mine.' "

A wizened commissar reflected: "Yes – but still, which ones do we send to the gulag?"