Posts Tagged ‘racism

06
Oct
11

The Irony Of Esterhuysen

765719829It’s been over a week since Mark Esterhuysen, a former newsreader for 702’s Eyewitness News, released the Hiroshima equivalent of F-bombs during a live news broadcast at 1am on a random Tuesday and catapulted himself to instant internet fame.

In case you missed it, here’s a transcription of what he said, verbatim, right before they cut to a convenient ad break:

Good morning. I’m Mark Esterhuysen. Fuck racism, fuck the pigs who killed Andries Tatane, fuck the AWB, fuck racism. We are all wild animals here, meant to live free. Fuck capitalism, fuck fascism. Fuck this fucking wage slavery graveyard shit. Fuck domestication, fuck Julius Malema, fuck the state. Fuck perpetual economic growth on a finite planet. This is the only fucking planet we have…”

Right after that he proceeded to direct anyone who disagreed with him to his Twitter profile, Facebook page and blog http://markesterhuysen.blogspot.com/.

Can you believe the balls on this guy?! Hahahaha! What a legend! Here’s the original:

 

 

Naturally the first thing I did was to try and find out if anyone at work had hit the guy’s site so I could get the address (I kept misspelling “Esterhuysen”) and was told in no uncertain terms that this guy is COOKED!

FUCK YEAH! I thought. I love crazies!

 

 

But reading his site I soon realised that the poor guy isn’t crazy at all. Misguided, maybe, but outright shit-your-pants-mad? I don’t think so.

His site consists of about 10 posts, at least 5 of which are long, sprawling diatribes about his dissatisfaction with modern civilisation and this desperate need he feels deep down to get as far away from it as humanly possible.

I’d be lying outright if I said I’ve never thought that. In fact, for a long time when I was younger I entertained the idea of falling off the grid completely. Finding some remote desert island somewhere and living out the rest of my days spear fishing, climbing coconut trees and living in an A-frame hut on the beach.

Esterhuysen’s need to get the hell away from it all was calcified by an article he read on the Men’s Health website that was posted in October last year which, to be perfectly frank, stated some pretty obvious facts about how being exposed to the great outdoors is one of the best ways to sharpen the mind and senses and how modern society has all but cut us off from nature completely, to our detriment.

 

 

In fact, all of Esterhuysen’s posts seem to be pretty obvious at face value. Civilisation is tyrannical, agriculture is the root of all human evil, the abhorrent ecocide we are committing on a daily basis isn’t receiving the level of attention it should be, the sooner we go back to the Stone Age way of life, the better.

They’re all arguments I used to believe fervently. It’s a FACT that we are, by all definitions of the word, insane. All of us. Every living person on this planet, because we are systematically destroying the very thing upon which we rely for our existence as a species.

So the guy took a stand for what he believed in. He used the medium of commercial radio to stick it to the man in a 25th Hour inspired tirade, such was the strength of his convictions.

But here’s the kicker – what did his passionate outburst result in?

One Time Airlines recording an Esterhuysen-inspired ad that rips off his F-bombing and turns his entire outcry into a big fucking joke so that they can sell more flights.

 

 

Let’s just pause and reflect on the irony of that.

A guy who is so concerned with the way we’re destroying the planet voices his vehemence on radio only to be made fun of by an airline so that they can sell more flights, burn more jet fuel and stamp their carbon footprint firmly on the face of our planet.

 

 

Esterhuysen may be an ideological fool, but I admire what he did, and if that makes me an ideological fool as well, then so be it.

This weekend, J-Rab and I are going to (finally!) sign up with a recycling service in an effort to try and make some positive change. Sure, it won’t stop cars from driving or planes from flying or BP from fouling up our oceans, but it will make a difference, even if it’s a tiny one.

My old man goes to church on Sundays, which I found pretty bizarre when he first started going because he’s never been religious at all, but he never spoke about it or got all weird and preachy so I just let it be.

After returning one Sunday, he left a pamphlet on the entrance hall table that told the following story:

Two friends were walking along a beach one afternoon when they noticed that the spring tide had washed hundreds of starfish up onto the beach that were drying out in the sun and dying.

As they walked, the one friend randomly picked up starfish and threw them back into the sea.

 

 

Irritated with the futility of this gesture, the other friend eventually snaps.

“There must be a thousand starfish on this beach! Would you just give it a rest, you’re not making a difference!”

To which his buddy simply picks up another starfish, throws it into the sea and says, “I made a difference to that one.”

Mark Esterhuysen might have become the butt of everyone’s jokes, but at least he’s trying to make a difference in some way.

Which is a damn side more than I can say for me.

-ST

23
Aug
11

The Excite Taxi Driver Who Lost His Mind

Excite-taxiInitially I thought it would be best if I didn’t write this post because it’s a very sensitive issue and it could potentially get Excite Taxis into a lot of trouble, but unfortunately I haven’t been able to forget what happened to us on Friday night and I think my readers have a right to know that there’s an Excite Taxis driver out there who is a very sad and fucked up person.

Around 8.30pm on Friday night, J-Rab, Jennyjen and myself called Excite Taxis to be collected from our flat in Vredehoek and climbed into a taxi shortly thereafter with a guy who, right from the get go, I got a very weird feeling about.

We went through the usual routine of telling him where to take us after which Jennyjen asked the guy if we could put on the radio, to which he abruptly replied, “No.”

We’d had a few glasses of wine at the flat (hence the reason why we weren’t driving) and so, on hearing that there was no music we broke out in spontaneous song and belted out what I felt was a rousing version of “Karma Chameleon”.

 

 

The taxi driver didn’t seem to share this opinion however, and I watched out the corner of my eye as his knuckles slowly turned whiter and whiter while he gripped the steering wheel, his eyes trained like crosshairs on the street in front of him.

We were driving to Long Street, a trip that probably takes about 10 minutes with traffic so it’s hardly as if we were droning on in this poor guy’s ear for 30 minutes. In fact, all we managed were two songs really, before things turned nasty.

This guy had a pasta salad on his dashboard which started sliding all over the place as he drove faster and faster, eventually almost klapping 100km/h as he came around Buitensingel to the tuneful accompaniment of the Bowie classic “Ground Control To Major Tom”.

It was at this time that the pasta salad slid right off the dashboard and almost into the guy’s lap, but he managed to grab it at the last  minute and throw it with all the force he could muster out his driver’s side window where it hit the road in a shower of elbow macaroni and mayonnaise.

 

 

Our singing had provoked what can only be described as a murderous rage in our taxi driver and the whole scene very quickly turned nasty.

He ran straight through a red light at the Buitensingel / Long street intersection and then shortly after that, grabbed his two-way radio and shouted, “Control I can’t hear what you’re saying until these people get out the car!”

“Excuse me!” J-Rab replied, indignant, “but if you want us to stop singing you can just ask us instead of driving like a maniac!”

“You people are bloody inconsiderate!” he shouted back at us.

“We’re just enjoying ourselves, there’s no need to behave like that! You could just have asked us to please be quiet!” J-Rab said, starting to get angry.

“You are inconsiderate! You have no respect!” he repeated, before dropping the bomb that blew everything out of proportion, “We forgave you for what you did!”

“WHAT?!” Jennyjen replied, shocked, “DON’T YOU DARE BRING RACE INTO THIS! RACE HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THIS!”

“YES IT DOES!” he shouted back at us, “WE FORGAVE YOU FOR WHAT YOU DID AND NOW YOU THINK YOU CAN CARRY ON LIKE THIS!”

“WE’RE IN OUR FUCKING 20s! WE HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH WHAT HAPPENED IN THIS COUNTRY, WE WERE CHILDREN WHEN THAT WAS ALL GOING ON!” J-Rab replied.

“YOU’RE STILL CHILDREN!” he shouted, “YOU THINK YOU CAN TREAT US HOWEVER YOU WANT!”

“Oh my God, stop this taxi, I want to get out,” J-Rab replied.

“No, this isn’t where we want to be. I’m not paying for him to just drop us anywhere,” Jennyjen said.

And so we turned back up onto Loop street so we could go another lap, much to my delight.

 

 

“If we were upsetting you, you should have just asked us to please be quiet and we would have,” Jennyjen said.

“No you wouldn’t!” he replied, still fuming.

“Yes, we would have,” I said, trying to placate the situation, “and you also just threw a perfectly good pasta salad out the window man, what the hell was that all about?!”

“You all think you can just behave any way you want, but you’ll see, you’ll see,” he said, darkly.

“Why? Are you planning some kind of rebellion or riot or something?” Jennyjen asked pragmatically.

“You’ll see,” he repeated mysteriously.

A few seconds later we all piled out, the girls adamant that they weren’t going to pay him a cent. Of course I paid the man his money in full.

I felt sorry for him. I just got the idea that he’s been through and seen some horrible, horrible things in his life that have left him extremely bitter and furious at the world and from what I could gather, white South Africans in particular.

Which begs the question, why be a taxi driver in the first place? He must have picked up another 10 car loads of young white people that night 50 times more inebriated than we were, how did he handle them? By speeding around the streets maniacally, hurling pasta salad bombs out his window like Molotov Cocktails whilst making vague threats alluding to some form of catastrophic retribution he wants to inflict on taxi-singers throughout the country?

 

 

I’m not saying we weren’t to blame for what went down. We were behaving like idiots because we were happy, not because we were deliberately trying to piss the guy off, but his reaction was just so ugly and nasty and uncalled for.

Sure, tell us to shut the fuck up, not everyone’s a Bowie fan, I’m fine with that, but don’t turn the whole thing into a race issue, that’s not what it was at all.

I guess what shocked me the most is the fact that my generation (mostly) is so sheltered from racism like that, it’s actually really shocking watching it rear it’s ugly head like some fucking creature from the bottom of the black lagoon.

Despite all the awesome taxi rides I’ve taken with drivers of all races in this city who I’ve chatted to, laughed with and swapped stories with, from now on I’m riding in silence.

It’s just not worth the risk of ending up with one that jumps red lights instead of simply asking you to pipe down and treats a perfectly good pasta salad with such irrational contempt.

That just ain’t right man.

It just ain’t right.

-ST

19
Nov
09

Death By Ayoba!

What I dig about South Africa is that every year when summer rolls around, the cell phone network providers all ramp up their advertising and bombard us from all sides with ‘Summer this’ and ‘Summer that’ and shots of mixed racial groups partying on beaches, having the time of their lives.

And all the while, I look at these ad campaigns and think to myself, How come I don’t hang out in mixed racial groups? Why do I only have whites for friends pretty much with the exception of some Indians and one or two peripheral blacks? What the hell is wrong with me? Christ, I’m a racist bastard!

 

 

Then to make matters worse, they choose some random word in a black language I don’t understand and shove it in my face every opportunity they get.

This year it’s ‘Ayoba’ (thanks MTN), I’ve probably read that word about 50 times in the last week alone and there’s still essentially two months of summer holiday advertising to go.

By the end of it all, the word will probably be burned into my retina. I’ll wake up, pouring sweat in the middle of the night, wide-eyed, screaming ‘AYOBA! AYOBA! AAAYYYOOOOOBBBBBAAAAA!’

 

 

I think what gets to me is the fact that they attach all this meaning to a word that they know non-black people won’t understand. Why do they do that? It doesn’t seem like the smartest way to encourage racial unity in SA.

‘Hey guys!’

‘What!’

‘I’ve got a GREAT idea for our new campaign!’

‘YOU’RE INCREDIBLE! Cutmeanotherlineofcocaineandtellusallaboutit!’

‘OK! Check it out! There are WAAAAAAAYYYYY more blacks than whites in this country right?’

‘YA!’

‘Cool! Let’s make an advertising campaign that ONLY black people will understand!’

SCHNARF!

‘THAT’S AMAZING!’

‘Yeah, we’ll create a sense of unity amongst the black community while ostracising the whites and making them feel completely unhip, uncool and sidelined!’

‘FUCK YEAH! BRILLIANT IDEA! STUPID WHITES, SERVES THEM RIGHT! MAKE THEM FEEL MORE GUILTY FOR BEING WHITE, THOSE APARTHEID-ENFORCING BIGOTTED FUCKERS!’

‘HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHA!’

‘…umm guys…’

‘WHAT?!?’

‘We’re white…’

‘Whatever! Shuttup! MORE COCAINE!’

 

 

To make things worse, you’ll probably find that the meaning of Ayoba is something completely arbitrary.

After I typed that last sentence I did a little Ugoogle-ising and found the following gem posted on the Jacaranda FM website:

“Ayoba – the word for 2010.

The word for excitement, cool,

fun… pride… joy… football… winning!!!”

Fuck, no wonder they chose that word for their campaign, it means EVERYTHING. Wait, it gets better:

“MTN is celebrating summer by adding ‘Ayoba-ness’ to everything it does”

Well that’s just fucking great. Expect to have this word screamed at you from billboards, TVs, newspapers, radios and magazines at FULL volume.

Ayoba! Ayoba! Ayoba!

And all over the country, whites, indians, coloureds, hell even the Chinese, will be scratching their heads in unison, all thinking exactly the same thing, ‘What the fuck does that mean?’

And as is the case with pretty much everything that gets regurgitated into mainstream media these days, the answer is simple.

It means nothing.

The more people that don’t know the meaning of it the better because it means nothing, it’s just a worm dangling off the hook of the happy holiday summer consumer spendasmuchmoneyasyoucan idea that they want you to swallow.

I’ve got a better idea. Here’s my fist. Let’s see you swallow that.

-ST