Every now-and-then South Africa is treated to a delicious collective cringing sensation when someone throws out the rulebook of decorous behaviour. Here are a few people, events and things from the darkest recesses of our national psyche which we probably do not wish to remember.

Who’s Your Daddy

Let us begin with our first citizen, Jacob Zuma, who has no peer when it comes to causing us to drop our heads in despair. This has happened so many times that I will limit myself to his most recent escapade.

In January the Sunday Times broke the story that Zuma had fathered his 20^th child with someone who was not one of his wives. To make matters worse, the woman, Sonono Khoza, was the daughter of one of his closest friends.

As Zapiro noted in a cartoon after an earlier bedroom scandal involving our president: ‘Before casual unprotected sex, remove brain and place on bedside table.’

Bottom-feeders

Zuma is ably supported in his role as the country’s first embarrassment by a worthy cast. Not a day goes by without another revelation being splashed across the front pages of our newspapers. Tendertrepreneurs, a bent chief of police, a premier bribing journalists, and a past minister of health with a drinking problem and a habit of filching hospital patients’ valuables.

As playwright Mbongeni Ngema said about the storm that erupted when he accepted government money for Sarafina 11: ‘At first I had regrets, but my attitude changed. I began to look at it with a political eye.’

The stories of hogs at the trough and politicians stealing us blind do not even raise an eyebrow any longer. But, believe me, this is all a very good thing. Politicians love pomp (no pun intended, Mr President) and pomposity to give them a sense they are ordained by God, rather than merely the elected servants of the people.

The problem all over the world is that people take their political representatives far too seriously and give them a standing way beyond their station. So when they show themselves up as the greedy, thieving, cheating fools they are they diminish their grandiosity in the eyes of the people. This is healthy because the rightful place of politicians in the ecosystem is as bottom-feeding scavengers.

The Last Bunch    

Do not for a second think I am only having a go at the current bunch, who are nonetheless doing all in their power to rub away the sparkle of the Struggle for Freedom, because the previous thugs make them look positively saintly. They plundered the national treasury to virtual bankruptcy and pomped across the colour line with gay abandon, even though they had legislated this as a crime.

The irony in the following 1971 statement was completely lost on National Party MP and later cabinet minister, Chris Heunis: ‘I find it very difficult to imagine a more important factor in the destruction of human relations between white and brown than in fact sexual intercourse over the colour line.’

Piet Promises

‘I’ve never been concerned about race,’ declared 67-year-old apartheid era cabinet minister and ambassador Dr ‘Piet Promises’ Koornhof when news broke in 1992 of his affair with the pregnant Marcelle Adams, his coloured 25-year-old Cape Town ‘secretary’.

So much for his statement at a National Party meeting in Vryheid in 1970 while minister of Bantu administration: ‘We don’t allow Bantu typists and so on working with white women in the same office and I’m going to stop it.’

Koornhof admitted he was the father of the child, but it later transpired that he was not. This brings me neatly to the question of love and fidelity.

Looking for Love

Before Internet dating, newspaper classifieds were the place to find love. Here is a selection of some of the better ones:

• I am a 23-year-old gentleman, star sign Scorpio. I would like to meet a cultured, Catholic and well-mannered Swazi lady aged 17 to 21. She should come from an academic family, be a down-to-earth person and a non-drinker and non-smoker. My hobbies are bodybuilding, road running, reading, videos, fusion and ballads, and cultural exchanges. No chancers and Johannesburg ladies need not reply.
• Boring, unattractive gent seeks lady for long, dull evenings and awkward silences.
• Sixty-two-year-old Muslim gent desperately requires a sincere female friend. Should be attractive, between 40 and 50 years old. No chancers. Would like to have a good lasting friendship. I am also very emotionally disturbed.

Love is in the Air

And when we find it…

‘Marry me,’ cajoled Nina Olver of Oudtshoorn, a she pushed a revolver into her divorce lawyer’s back in 1992.

‘He managed to stay calm,’ wrote Elza Pople in You. ‘He told her how beautiful she was, at the same time trying to count the bullets in the revolver. After two frustrating hours trying to placate her he was very thirsty. He went to the sink to fill a glass of water. She came up behind him, put her hand down his tracksuit pants and caressed him. He resolved that if he got out of this alive he would phone the police right away.’

And just before Christmas, 2000, old hippie Big Ben Dekker was arrested for public indecency in Port St Johns when he was caught in a passionate embrace with an equally naked woman in a lagoon. He claimed in his defence that he was rescuing her from drowning. Only problem, though, was that they were in ankle-deep shallows.

When the Music Stops

But it can be fickle and cruel…

‘I really believed we could make a go of it,’ mused Lilian Parker, who left her husband five hours after their wedding in 1970. ‘But then I realised it was a big mistake. I thought: “Why get deeper involved?” The logical way out was to make a break there and then. I feel affection and friendship for Isak, but that is all. But what made me marry him I just can’t explain.’

Timing is everything, as former state president FW de Klerk showed when he announced on Valentine’s Day, 1998, that he wanted to divorce his wife, Marika, as he was in love with the wife of his best friend. And what about poor newsreader, Colin Fluxman, who broke down on Good Morning South Africa when it dawned that the woman in the piece who was caught in a compromising situation at the Peninsula Hotel in Cape Town with high profile priest and political activist, Allan Boesak, was his estranged wife.

While the music did not stop for Primrose and Theunis Crous, the orchestra missed a beat as socialite and self-made celebrity Khanyi Mbau came waltzing into their lives. Claiming his family was important to him, the 50-something millionaire Crous eventually got rid of Mbau, saying, ‘If she were a better person she could have walked a path with me. But now there will be no more fast cars, fast planes or fast cash.’

Lighten Up

Remember how we cringed when Zola Budd tripped up favourite Mary Decker in the 3000 metre event at the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles; or when the tearful national cricket captain Hansie Cronje blamed Satan for making him take bribes; or how we hold our breath whenever rugby coach Pieter de Villiers opens his mouth; or how we wished the earth would open and swallow us when ANC Youth League leader Julius Malema entered the fray over Caster Semenya.

Well, we got over it and now belly-laugh when we think back. Cringe, after the blush of embarrassment has worn off, can be a wonderful tonic for giving a country a sense of humour. It is part of our colour and teaches us to lighten up.