Reptiles and Eagles in High Noon

In the August of the year of Our Lord two important politicians found themselves in South Africa facing two different but equally grave protocols. One faced serious medical protocols after ingesting a substance that triggered other sleeping conditions in the body, a body that had travelled life and carried its own deadly signatures of the world. A failure in the delicate medical protocols would consign the concerned to the cemetery. So it seemed and therefore it was.

The other one was confronted with torturous legal and diplomatic protocols after a violent attack on a perceived enemy, an offence that if taken to the open courts would have forced her to disclose explosive family and national details that had for long remained concealed in the thick forest of political secrecy. A failure in the legal and diplomatic protocols would send her to jail at best and at worst to lasting shame.

Both these politicians were central and critical players in the politics of their country and did not only know of but were afraid of the dangers that the political struggles of their troubled organisation carried. One of them had in his life taken command of armies, militias and secret agents that he severally ordered to carry out assaults, massacres and covert assassinations, and like all known merchants of death that are "trained to kill" and have had the power to "shorten" the lives of others, as he used to boast, he feared death so much. The way killers fear death can be the true stuff of legend, and so was his own love of dear life that the thought of death trembled his weak body and shook his fragile health in ways that were deadly on their own. This was a material man of substance that was known to be richer than his country and was connected to dark personalities and organisations in the global underworld, a Mafioso of a kind.

The different but grave protocols that the two gladiators, blood enemies of each other, faced symbolised the state of politics in their country, a state that had escalated to a bloody condition and degenerated to a deathly decay.Whilst the other one did not command armies she enjoyed and even suffered proximity to power. She had intimate knowledge of hits and strikes, assassinations by the use of staged accidents, poisons and other instruments of death, and so did she fear for herself and family. She was party to a power regime that was frightened as much as it was frightening, gold and silver were hers in abundance, the singular thought of losing power and the diamonds drove her insane, she slept with one big eye open.

Her fear of attacks and the assassination of easy targets in form of her children turned into an artless rage that led her into the muddy legal and diplomatic waters in South Africa, to avoid danger she had chosen to be dangerous herself, knowing full well that her opponents had Lucifer himself uploaded in their hearts. She had their full curriculum vitae in the field of assassinations and covert eliminations over the decades, she was not going to be eaten with her big eyes open like a fish. As they were holed up in South Africa they separately took the opportunity to think deeply and plan survival. On their separate hide outs in South Africa they met friends, political consultants, runners, allies, international spies and important diplomats from other countries. Tellingly, one of the two seriously contemplated exile and total escape from the hot political pot. After formal resignation was refused by greater powers, a resignation in politics being a declaration of war, escape was an important option. The smallness of the world, the multitude of hostile regimes and enemies in the bigger world, and need to secure massive ill-gotten wealth made the contemplated exile an option as bad as death itself. Because of his massive wealth, flatterers, psychopaths, thoughtless praise poets and cunning opportunists surrounded him and were they generous with advice and views. All sorts of healers, prophets and magicians, claimants to dark powers were part of his court.Their long post-poned fight, after a prolonged jostle of the opposites was quickly drawing to an explosive boil and for both parties loss and surrender was not an option. She kept the solid political company of dangerous spies, foxy political thinkers, calculating Machiavellians and dribbling wizards of the game were her allies, seven eyed princes, and there were so many big money types, sly merchants and launderers around her. A daring queen of an invisible world Empire she was; and so was she dangerous.If he was a dangerous reptile she was a lethal eagle, both of them were contractors to the 'savage kingdom' and the proverbial chips were down, to blink was to die.

The Madness of Little Royals
The boys cast away all royal and courtly pretences. Theygot possessed of an insanity, a madness that made them urinate in public and dance to inaudible music. They took in more alcohol than oxygen. As if bewitched, they sold themselves cheap to a fast life of bohemia, debauchery and licentiousness. Like the proverbial duck takes to water they took to strong substances delivered by nak*d harlots upon whose thighs they signed away what was left of their persons. The boys were seized of a maddening death drive and lived their days as if to mock death and dare fate, forcing their protectors to drive them to the darkest and most dingiest allies of Johannesburg for the sport, adventure and the exotica of shabeen binges and orgies. The cash, they carried it in obscene, not amounts, but sizes and quantities of bricks of dead American Presidents, the Benjamins! South Africa is the land of flowers in women of shape and size and the boys were to be the busy bees after all types and tastes of the nectar. They chased the skirt with the energy of those who unconsciously wish to return to the womb.

It is that mad German philosopher, Old Friedrich Nietzsche who asked of Hamlet, "what must a person have suffered if he needs to be a clown that badly!" We can ask exactly what condition the little royals suffered to be mad that badly, it cannot just be the shortage of Jesus and the abundance of Lucifer, something much more should be at play.Verily it is not because the boys were a problem that they took to madness, it must be for the reason that they had a problem that they became mad. I decipher fear and uncertainty. When a good looking teenage boy with access to all means of life posts a video on Facebook announcing that he is living his life and is not afraid, and asks everyone who is listening to do the same, he really has a problem. He is afraid and is not living any life. He is screaming at the whole world for rescue and help. Sex and intoxication become an available sensual escape from consuming fear and uncertainty. The fear of loss of power and prestige, fear of lurking dangers and knowledge that the bigger world hates and holds one in contempt drives a fragile soul to real festivals of insanity. When everyone thought the boys had everything to guard and protect, every reason to be cautious and guarded, even to be royal and courtly, that is when the boys decided to live as if they had everything to lose and urgently wanted to lose it and die young same day. The blind and mad pursuit of joy that they gave body to was a dramatisation of the fear of pain, death and suffering. The search for sensual pleasure and experience of exaggerated joy is the facility of cowards and those who have a sense that their days might be numbered. We may think people are so happy and are drowning themselves in joy when they are angry at the very act of having been born, and the very maddening pursuit of sex is a request to be swallowed and be born again differently by a different mother under different circumstances. The wild chase after random girls can be a pathetic search for another mother. In that different way the boys had become true by-products of the tragic politics of the land of their birth, some kind of exiles that were sentenced to looking for re-birth, safety and peace between the legs of foreign escorts, in clouds of smoke, in the noise of music and the ecstasies fuelled by strong narcotics. They lived their life in risky experiment and trial. That way they haunted the enraged and enraging Mother.

The Reptile on His Own Venom
The uncircumcised were fooled. All his political life was made of staging attacks against himself so that his attack on others were understood as due revenge. The massacres of multitudes of minorities he masterminded were all carried out as justice when they were injustices. He created thieves that stole and his own theft was covered under the guise of policing.

Here an accident missed him, there his high offices and domiciles were invaded by elusive intruders, his life was always threatened with poisons and all sorts of dangerous weapons fashioned against him. All these carefully choreographed threats covered the injuries he distributed with generosity against political enemies and rival suitors that he callously punished. He killed with bullets and roasted the bodies of his victims. Many lay in mass graves and shallow graves in his names. Hired foreign assassins from the east and the west were in his employ. Those immediate political enemies he could not immediately eliminate lest it became obvious that it was by his hand he punished by sending hired spies and pretenders to stalk their wives and children, pretending to be friends, to be suitors and then poisoning them to kill them innocent and dead. This reptile had Lucifer himself downloaded and uploaded in him, he ordered killings with a smile in the face and sheepishly shy and slightly closed eyes. He was known to joke even in funerals and to laugh when angry to conceal vengeance. He made of himself a clown and always avoided serious conversation on anything.By his cruelty he created death enemies, among them foxes and wolves, eagles and other snakes that resolved to meet him half way, to pay him with their own currency or his own. The politics of the land did not only have power and money at stake only, but also blood and souls. If the battles were once covert and concealed, time had come for the battles to achieve their clinical clarity. Politics had become a true war by other means in the land where one was either a good friend or a terrible enemy and nothing in between. As if in laughter and advance punishment, the gods had denied him wit and the charisma his ambitions needed, as if the blood of the innocents smelt all over him he became an object of contempt and hatred, if it was not for his money and power, power held and aspired for, he would not have had friends at all.Haunted and surrounded, the battle lines drawn after a failed attempt to jump the ship, an attempt that became a declaration of war upon a dangerous principal, poisoning himself a little and performing grave illness could be the only excuse to retreat. A few tots of a carefully designed beverage ingested at an opportune moment to dramatise violent sickness and escape for emergency meetings with allies and connections in a foreign land became the latest ploy. The snake took his own venom that day, some public sympathy was mobilised and some wild public celebrations were witnessed, he was a man who triggered seriously mixed feelings. The stakes were high and deep, even death he wished for it, he was between a hot rock and a very hard place, and so was he dangerous and endangered.

The flight of Mother Chicken
No one knows yet whether she was told a story or she just put figures together. Or was it the proverbial maternal instinct, I think it was a combination of available intelligence and her political imagination. After all she had publicly exclaimed previously that there were evil plans to assassinate her children. Like Mother chicken realising that a hungry cobra had immediate plans to visit the nest with her eggs, she took an enraged and scared flight. She knew the tricks and stratagems of the reptiles, their ability to send agents that would come in short skirts, with intoxicating gifts that the little royals are unable to resist, yet they will deliver death. The little royals led vulnerable and exposed lives and the reptiles would know how to easily cross the protective lines using the allure of easy sex and substances for the mad boys. What Mother Chicken found in the nest was a collection of traders of the flesh and the substances, but in her knowing and enraged mind the collective was that of killers armed with poisons, not to titillate the needs of the boys, but to murder them.So when she punched and pummelled, with the ferocity of the superior bird of prey, the eagle, she was not dealing with a supplier of pleasures for her boys but a dealer in death. She was punching a reptile and is she an able pugilist, a dealer in designer blows. The little salacious thing rolled itself into a ball to protect vital organs, and she punched. She cursed and punched, punched herself into serious political, legal and diplomatic trouble. She is still to punch. This is only a beginning of the real season of political blows. The eagles and reptiles are in high noon in the land. Esizakubona lonyaka Batayi! We are living in a season of the politics of politics.

Dinizulu Mbikokayise Macaphulana is a Zimbabwean Political Scientist and Semiotician: dinizulumacaphulana@yahoo.com.