NOT since the 2010 World Cup has South Africa been so talked about on the world stage.
Well, maybe that’s a bit of hyperbole, but two ex-compatriots have sure been taking some heat. And it’s not about vuvuzelas. More like foghorns.
First it was the gorgeous Charlize saying only 44 people spoke Afrikaans. Skande! Every member of the diaspora ‒ and, boy, have we spread ‒ let her know they were No 45. And counting.
I’m not sure anyone even saw or heard what she actually said, or where she said it, but the backlash was in sy moer in. The creativity of the language to wrap up and lob the most colourful and rude insults was displayed for the world to watch, learn and steal. “Jou ma se …” featured extensively in a variety of colloquialisms that had Saffers, non-sweary people excluded, howling with laughter and outrage.
It did stimulate some debate about how many, who and why millions of people actually do speak it, and why, to others, it’s the language of the oppressor and shall never pass their lips.
Of course, much of this dialogue happened on social media platforms, which neatly turns to the other headline grabber: Twitter’s new owner and the slash-and-burn actions he’s taken in a very short time span.
The most frightening suggestion by outraged US citizens who see him as a traitor to his new homeland is that he be stripped of that citizenship and returned to sender. We have the “addressee unknown” stamp inked and hovering over his dumb ass.
This son of an emerald mine-owning Pretoria dude who apparently went on to have a child with his step daughter is ‒ at last count anyway ‒ the world’s richest man.
Now shy of $44 billion (mostly Middle East loans, it seems) he sacked most of his staff, reinstated the tweets of the Defeated Former Guy, which US law people are surely screenshotting away, and begged him “like a dog”, as the DFG would say, to start tweeting again. But the DFG says his own private ultra-right-wing radical platform is much better, so no thank you.
So the Chief Twit posted a vile cartoon that seemed to refer to the DFG’s sex life.
Still posting, however, are IT experts. In Europe the axe email has zero effect because the laws are very different there, something the genius-in-chief appears not to have considered.
One IT boffin ‒ in a longer-than-50-part thread ‒ noted a few events that no one appears to be overseeing and could lead to cataclysmic failure. One example is security: if their system fails, it’s open season on credit cards, banking details and identities.
Copyright, too: there were several breaches this week, with whole movies being put online. One can just imagine the glee and lip smacking of litigious legal teams.
The thread was very technical and many techies recounted “flashbacks” of when they faced just one of these events. Even to us non-techie folk it seemed terrifying.
But not as scary as those tweets about sending him “home”. Nee wat? Dink daai mense nie ons het genoeg met ons eie klein probleempies nie? Return to sender, dankie poskantoor.
- Lindsay Slogrove is the news editor
The Independent on Saturday