If I were an alien that landed on Earth, I’d douse SA in a potent serum to combat empathy and humour deficiency

4 Aug 2023

South Africa suffered a humour fail this week in response to a satirical takedown of the controversial old anti-apartheid song Dubul’ ibhunu.

Dear DM168 reader,

I was excused from my newspaper duty last week to attend MBA classes and do some strategic work with my Daily Maverick colleagues from different departments in the Western Cape. So, like many of you when you are focusing on important stuff like family, friends, work, study and community involvement, some bits of the news passed me by.

DM168 is one way of catching up with the important contextual, insightful and entertaining soul food stuff you might have missed in your daily grind. Another way I keep in touch, I must admit, is through my regular “Did you know?” TikTok reports from my 12-year-old son.

With these reports, I instinctively put on my journalist truth-detection armour. I ask, “What’s the source behind that? Have you checked the facts?” As you can imagine, this drives my son to distraction.

One of the incredible stories he alerted me to was that the US government is hiding evidence of UFOs. On further investigation in the research-based, academic-journalistic platform The Conversation, I learnt that David Grusch, a retired US Air Force intelligence officer, claimed in a congressional subcommittee meeting on 26 July 2023 that crashed UFOs, or unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs), had yielded biological material of non-human origin, and that the US government had embarked on a crash-retrieval and reverse-engineering programme to which he was denied access.

So, have the aliens made first contact? Are we being invaded or researched by civilisations from galaxies far, far away? No, we don’t know for sure, not unless there is actual physical evidence of crashed UAPs and non-human, non-Earth species’ DNA, cautions astronomer Chris Impey, who sits on an advisory council for an international group that strategises how to communicate with an extraterrestrial civilisation if the need occurs.

The possibility of first contact with civilisations from another part of the universe excites and intrigues me, because I’m admittedly a sci-fi geek who has been obsessed with this possibility ever since, as a four-year-old, I saw pictures of the first landing on the moon.

Wake-up call

It also intrigues me because I am confronted daily by the reality that we humans are torn apart by narrow nationalism; ignorance; battles for power and control over resources; hatred; greed; misunderstanding; and fear of each other. I often wonder whether being confronted by another – superior – apex species will be our final wake-up call to consider the greater good of all who inhabit this planet. Or will we continue to turn against each other in a mad version of survival of the fittest?

A recent example of misunderstanding and fear based neither on facts nor evidence in our beloved country (which may or may not have been captured by malevolent aliens having fun turning us against each other) is the furore over Julius Malema’s singing of the old anti-apartheid song Dubul’ ibhunu at the EFF’s 10th anniversary rally.

Now, please don’t get me wrong: singing “Kill the boer, kill the farmer” in a democratic South Africa, where farmers of all hue literally provide our daily bread, meat, fruit and vegetables and, in doing so, provide jobs for 888,000 people is just plain populist, rabble-rousing bullshit.

As my colleague Richard Poplak cleverly puts it: Singing ‘Kill the Boer’ while wearing Gucci loafers is just cosplay by a racketeer masquerading as a politician.

But still, many wary and anxious white South Africans on the platform formerly known as Twitter, led by its owner, South African-born Elon Musk, view Malema’s singing the song as a portent of imminent white genocide.

In his column on TimesLive, Jonathan Jansen reminds us that neither before, during nor after apartheid has there ever been white genocide in South Africa. Even after Janusz Waluś, a white immigrant from Poland, killed the popular black leader Chris Hani in 1993, there was no genocide in retaliation. Not like there was in Rwanda or Nazi Germany. Jansen exhorts us all to calm down:

“There will not be any white genocide; that is a hysterical overreaction to an old and troubled song. In the same vein, drawing parallels to Hitler’s extermination policies or Mussolini’s fascism is just bad social science. The history, culture and politics of this country is overwhelmingly one of racial accommodation, even in the face of the extreme provocation of apartheid.”

Wicked humour

Poplak’s reaction to the genocidal fear furore on social media was typical of his wicked humour, which anyone who reads his writing would recognise as his brand of satire. He wrote: “What wine pairs best with white genocide?”, to which one of Daily Maverick’s contributors, law professor Pierre de Vos, responded: “Allesverloren blanc de blanc.”

A tweeter, or Xer, by the name of Renaldo Gouws mistakenly assumed editor-at-large Poplak was actually editor-in-chief and called on followers to spam our info@dailymaverick inbox. This in an effort to get our board of directors, which comprises our real editor-in-chief Branko Brkic and CEO Styli Charalambous, to deal with Poplak as “there should be no place for such terrible comments in South Africa”.

The spamming has taken on a life of its own, but it has also become ominous. Here is one threatening example from one Herman Coetser:

“If you think this is appropriate in a country where racial tensions is [sic] running high, then let me be the first to say the violence that’s about to erupt will start at your offices. Sort your people out or we will!”

Is Mr Coetser going to find Poplak and donder him? Is he going to line up every one of us at Daily Maverick and smack us over the heads with a pap snoek or kudu biltong? Or maybe he is threatening to commit the world’s first genocide against the 150 people who work for a South African media company?

Poplak has responded to the furore and explained the context of his tweet in an excellent article. I doubt many of those who were angered by his humour will bother to read it, but as you are thinking people, I would encourage you to do so. It’s brilliant and it will let you know that we at Daily Maverick are not in the business of advocating the killing of anyone for any reason whatsoever.

If I were a visitor from a more advanced civilisation in outer space, the first thing I would do on Earth is spray a potent serum in the atmosphere. This would result in the mass genocide of truth deficiency, fact deficiency, empathy deficiency, understanding deficiency and, dare I say, a sense of humour deficiency – without a single human life being lost.

Sadly, I am just a human editor, and my only serum is the stories we write. So, for those suffering from humour deficiency, I strongly recommend you read our inimitable Mr Styles’ hilarious satire on the competition between Fikile Mbalula and Juju to create a spectacle on cranes.

On a more serious note, our front-page story by Rebecca Davis helps us understand the multitude of circumstances that led to the New Zealand trial of a South African woman dubbed “killer mum” because she tragically murdered her three daughters. It’s a must-read analysis that delves into the alienation and isolation of migrating to another country, as well as postpartum depression, blame, judgement and sexist stereotypes of parenting.

Please write to me at [email protected] about whatever is on your mind, and I will share it on our letters page.

Yours in defence of ever more empathy and understanding,

Heather

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R29.

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