Living for Disco

Today, Living for Disco is going to examine the ridiculous things that get debated in Namibia’s parliament. I was going to post something about this a little while ago, but got sidetracked, thankfully, because over dinner on Saturday night, a friend told me about a parliamentary debate that made me go “whhh? Noooo. Not serious? Really? Really? You’re kidding, right?” until he hit me over the head with his garlic naan.

Namibia’s road accident fatality rate is shockingly high. This is partly because people drive like they’re in the Indie 500, and think that overtaking on a blind bend is permitted in the highway code. However, it is also partly due to the fact that driving in Namibia after dark is a dangerous business, because animals tend to jump out into the roads in front of speeding cars. A warthog at 120km per hour can do a horrific amount of damage, and they are only about a foot high. Kudus, on the other hand, will pulverise your vehicle. For those of you who don’t know what a kudu looks like, this is one:
They are fucking huge.

So one of the members of the Namibian parliament suggested, in all seriousness apparently, that because animals cause so many accidents, then they should all be made to wear signs so that drivers can see them more clearly.

I have no idea how he even thought that this was a workable scheme. What’s he going to do? Send crack teams of animal taggers out into the bush with a lorry full of flourescent cycle jackets and a tranquiliser gun?

There was also some discussion about snakes and the difficulties surrounding fashioning signs for them, but the man who came up with the bright idea said they should be exempt, as they don’t tend to cause accidents. Well, thank the lord for that – the world doesn’t need an industry built around knitting reflective body warmers for spitting cobras.

So in another parliament debate about reducing road accidents recently, another Swapo MP tabled a motion that suggested increasing the speed limit to 160km per hour for people who have big cars. In his opinion, making people who drive top of the range cars stick to the speed limit of 120km per hour is more dangerous, because “if one has experienced driving any of these cars, you will agree that you are likely to fall asleep driving at 120 km/h, because the car does not seem to be moving. This is dangerous because the driver can easily fall asleep under such circumstances, thereby creating a danger to other road users.

So, basically, if you’re rich enough to afford a smart car, then you should be allowed to hit unmarked animals at almost 100 miles per hour.

I suppose at least your family will be able to afford a decent burial.

One of my very good friends is coming to Namibia tomorrow with her Mum, to spend a few days with me, looking at leopards and cheetahs and other wild things. Yes – it’s that time of year again: my annual leopard-wrestling outing.

Actually, we’re going to this marvellous place. Last time I went we did some leopard tracking, and lo, we found a wild leopard, which we all viewed nervously from the comfort of the open landrover. They’re completely terrifying. You can see in its eyes that if you stuck so much as a toe out of the car, it’d have you.

Then we’re going to Etosha, to look at some springbok, and more zebras than you can shake a stick at.

I will be back on Friday, hopefully with all limbs attached.

It’s been a bit wet recently, which means that the mosquitoes are out in full force. I’ve become an expert in feeling mosquito breath on my limbs, particularly after a camping trip a couple of weeks ago, when I woke up in the morning and squashed seventeen of the bastards inside my tent. It looked like the Mosquito Chainsaw Massacre in there.

It’s a bit unfortunate that this should happen now, because I have run out of DOOM, which always puts itself in the ‘forgettable items’ category whenever I am in the supermarket. This means that instead of being able languidly to exterminate crawly bitey things with a squirt of killer aerosol from the comfort of the sofa, I am forced to leap up and chase them around the house with a rolled up copy of Heat. I might add that this is all that the South African version of Heat is good for. It is, as they say in Afrikaans, vol kak.

It’s particularly bad at night. I used to keep a can of DOOM by the bed, in case of midnight mosquito raids, but now I am DOOMless and desperate. Which is why, the other night after a girly evening involving a lot of rose wine and a chicken curry, I found myself standing in the pitch dark in my knickers, holding a bottle of Mr Muscle orange action bathroom cleaner* in one hand, and Little Dorrit in the other, waiting for the whining sound of incoming bloodsuckers to begin again.

Clearly the wine had made me believe that I had batlike powers of hearing and prey-seeking in the dark. It also fucked with my internal clock – I later realized I’d been standing there for about twenty minutes, wrathfully thwacking the wall with Dickens, and squirting Mr Muscle into thin air like a whisky-sodden trigger-happy cowboy. It was all over the floor when I got up and put my bare feet on the tiles – that stuff gets sticky if you don’t wipe it up.

Life without DOOM – it’s miserable. Miserable I tell you. I have to remember to buy some more.

*works a treat on ants but, apparently, not mosquitoes, flies or cockroaches.

Many of you are probably aware of what has been going on in Zimbabwe for the last week. For those of you who are not, the leader of the opposition, and about 50 other protesters were recently taken into custody and badly beaten – the leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, to the extent where he was too ill to go to court because he has a fractured skull.

Mugabe is suggesting that all of the detainees were beaten while resisting arrest, and has threatened that further violence awaits those who try to bring down the government. He has also said that the MDC (the opposition party concerned) has publicly threatened to bring down the government through violence. The MDC, however, have always said that they are committed to defeating the government through the correct democratic channels, and deny any involvement in the recent fireboming of the Zimbabwean police’s Harare base.

SWAPO, Namibia’s ruling party, has always been a supporter of Mugabe, and ties continue, as evidenced by his recent three day visit to Namibia, during which Namibia agreed to a US$40,000,000 investment in Zimbabwe, ostensibly to rehabilitate an old power station to help deal with Zimbabwe’s power crisis. During his visit, Mugabe’s grinning face was plastered all over the city.

Yesterday, opposition leaders here tabled a motion in parliament to try to get the Namibian government to at least acknowledge the gross violation of human rights that occurred this week, and SWAPO members threw the motion out without even listening to it, citing it as an embarassment to the Namibian government.

I can see how SWAPO might feel that turning on their ally now would be an unwise thing to do, particularly as they seem not to be particularly averse to Mugabe’s methods. The land reform programme, for example, hasn’t been dealt with in the same violent way, although there have been talks of following Zimbabwe’s example. There is freedom of speech here, but Sam Nujoma has often threatened the press when criticised, and recently sued The Namibian for reporting his possible involvement in a massive corruption scandal. Homosexuality is also illegal here, and there was recently a debate in parliament over whether rape is possible in a secure marriage, which demonstrates a horrifying lack of awareness of women’s rights, within or outside marriage. A member of parliament also said a couple of days ago that girls should take responsibility for their sexual involvement with figures like teachers, saying that they should know better, and should not blame their elders for their own mistakes, regardless of the fact that sex with someone under 16 is statutory rape, and that young girls are vulnerable precisely because the abusers are their elders.

Surely, however, it must be clear that even without taking into consideration the increasingly repressive and violent regime, Mugabe’s days are numbered – he’s in his 80s, for a start, and the situation in Zimbabwe is becoming completely untenable. Inflation is at 1,700%, and people cannot even buy basic foodstuffs. This is why I’m not a fan of economic sanctions – the only people they hurt are the poor.

It shocks me that the government can just sit back and say nothing about what is going on. Surely that’s more of an embarassment than speaking out against the blatant human rights abuses that are going on. How long can Southern Africa sit and bite their tongues when this is happening under their noses? It’s like hearing your neighbour beating his wife to death, shrugging and saying ‘It’s his business.”

The whole thing is shocking, and shameful, and it’s frightening too. I may be naive, but surely something has to give soon, and if it does, it’s not going to be pretty. Is Namibia going to turn its back then, too?

Since when did St Patrick’s Day become an international festival?

According to the radio this morning, there will be a St Patrick’s day celebration on Saturday, in town. Throughout the week, listeners phone in if they hear something specific in the lyrics of a song, and they get given a gold coin. Then on Saturday, they can go and put the gold coin in a pot (as in ‘gold at the end of the rainbow) at the Gustav Voigts shopping centre. There will be green draught beer, Irish cuisine, and a man dressed up as a leprechaun. The morning DJ attempted to speak in an Irish accent all morning. He is a gigantic twat at the best of times, but this morning he surpassed himself. Every single Irish cliche you can think of came pouring out of his mouth in an accent so bad, I’m convinced I aged 10 years out of sheer embarassment.

My point is, though, that almost every single white Namibian here is of Dutch or German descent. This is why they have a beer festival every year, in which scary large-breasted women dress in pinafores and have a competition to see who can hold the most two-litre beer steins in their enormous teutonic hands. The record is 18. I have never seen anything so frightening.

I don’t understand their need to piggy back a day that celebrates the patron saint of a country over 7,000 miles away that has almost no relevance to the lives of anyone here. It would be just as stupid if they all started dressing up as Knights Templar and slashing papier macher dragons, or wearing leeks and daffodils in their hair.