The Russians who came to London in the early 2000s never shot a Malawian gardener, despite leaving a trail of bodies all the way back to the Kremlin. Neither Jeffrey Dahmer, nor Fred or Rose West, nor Norman Afzal Simons (the Station Strangler) shot Malawian gardeners.
There are no accounts of Malawian gardeners being shot in the Crusades, Spanish Inquisition or Hammer of Witches. The guys who committed the Porajmos – or devouring – of the Romani (Gypsy) peoples would have probably exercised restraint upon discovering a Malawian gardener in one of their victims’ temporary plots and let him go. (They would have nailed the family, though, and possibly subjected those gypsies to even more horror on the basis that they suspected the Malawian gardener wasn’t being paid).
It should be hard to grasp, as you sit in a fetid cell, that you’ve done something that not even South Africa’s worst monster Gert van Rooyen did. Then again, perhaps not – if you’re Bellarmine Mugabe, charged earlier this week in a Johannesburg court with shooting a Malawian gardener twice – twice – in the back. In. The. Back.
That’s because they possibly don’t think like normal people. Soon scholars will produce scientific literature on theories that “Mugabe” wasn’t a surname but an alien pathogen, that it entered the shuttle of an early space discovery voyage, remained undetected as the craft returned to earth then contaminated the entire planet. From that we got Robert, we got Grace, then we got two small bastards.
It should have been abundantly clear in the late 1990s that the pathogen was doing bad stuff. Some years ago, I imagined what the scene looked like the day Mugabe received a fax from Clare Short, the UK Secretary of State for International Development, explaining to him that the UK government wasn’t going to fork out compensation (this was the event that triggered illegal land invasions in Zimbabwe). Even by the standards of the insufferably right-on, New Labour emerging class, that letter beggared belief: I’m just like you, Robert, Clare remarked with words to the effect of … I was born in Northern Ireland, I hate these bastards as well, c’mon Robert, we’re in this together, man.
The madness would arrive later
At this point, I said, Robert went mad, but in hindsight, he probably just lifted a beautiful silk handkerchief to his lips and vomited a little. The madness would arrive later, when he was told that he would no longer be welcome in Europe, or that his late wife Sally’s Ghanaian family had spaffed all the money he had originally stolen. In something of a protest later in the year of Short’s letter (1997), he christened the continuation of what many will consider the Mugabe pathogen “Bellarmine”, perhaps to show the upper-class English that he too possessed the faculty to attach buffoonish names to his offspring.
And it was to England where this bastard and his bastard brother were supposed to go. PPE at Oxbridge – where the maximum scandal would have been a Brideshead Revisited-esque encounter involving other, possibly gender-vulnerable men with similarly funny names on a riverbank. Robert wouldn’t have fancied this – wasn’t mad about the gays, you see, but he would have beaten the young bastards into gentlemen’s club memberships, then partnerships at magic- circle law firms or silk – Mugabe bros Q or KC. Robert wanted them to become English gentlemen, to live vicariously through his feral thugs, having suffered miserable failure in his own pursuit of the same.
In 2010, shortly after the murder of Cape gangland enforcer Cyril Beeka, reporter Sam Sole wrote an article for the Mail & Guardian lamenting that the detritus of the Balkan wars in the 1990s had washed up in South Africa. Adjacent to the crew loitering at the time of Beeka’s assassination were the likes of the Czech one-man crimewave Radovan Krejcir and other Eastern Europeans, whom Krejcir then started knocking off one by one. As visitors behaving appallingly, these guys swiped all the attention, but there were also Africans of extreme, corrupt privilege causing trouble.
The longtime dictator (Ali Bongo) of Gabon’s son, Eric*, being one example. Useless as the family spare (his older brother was educated at Eton), Eric started beating up patrons at Kong nightclub in Rosebank, incidents the owner’s militia of Nigerian and Angolan bouncers were unwilling to prevent. Paul Biya, President of Cameroon and now the world’s oldest leader at a sprightly 92, purchased a mansion in Hyde Park where he too stashed a wayward child for extended periods. Cape Town also had the pleasure of accommodating the son of Equatorial Guinea’s psychopath, Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, and the only thing this idiot succeeded in doing while here was getting all his assets attached.
Too scared
Only by the stupidity of then Foreign Minister Maita Nkoana-Mashabane did Grace Mugabe flee South Africa in 2017, having struck with a cord, throttled, stamped on, punched and kicked in the face a local model lured to an upmarket Sandton hotel by her two little bastards. Ever the real victim of everything, Grace is reportedly too scared to return to South Africa to support Bellarmine; however cowardly, these are most acceptable terms.
South Africa became a dumping ground for humanity’s worst: Bulgarian scammers (allegedly including the Crypto Queen “Dr” Ruja Ignatova, suspected by German intelligence of presently kicking back in Constantia), war crime suspects, Al-Shabab operatives, ISIS and Al-Qaeda recruiters and the UK’s contribution to our litany of cosmopolitan fugitives – the odd paedo, or 17.
Ideas on how to prevent this happening unnerves the LOL-betarians, so to stop them panicking we should agree that South Africa, as one of the world’s most beautiful countries, should be visited, and at the same time start reserving some key admission rights i.e no bastard scions of former or present dictators.
Because the risk is that if we continue to welcome people like Bellarmine, we’ll end up with a Prince Yormie Johnson of Liberia incident in a Sea Point flat, whereby someone will be castrated with a kitchen knife, someone else will eat what has been castrated, and another someone will be filmed sipping a Budweiser watching the whole thing play out.
Also, it’s okay that the Cape explodes with British swallows in summer – boomers who avoid that awful winter – but we could do without their Norovirus that brings cartel-ish scenes of stomach terrorism to the Cape’s loos in its busiest months – where locals plead to trade Bitcoin for a single Kantrexil tablet.
Gentle spirits
Examined as a collective existence, Malawian gardeners are, like our Gogos and the vast majority of moderate, humble, God-fearing South Africans, gentle spirits who do not loot countries, scam taxpayers, fight in nightclubs. The little they make in their efforts to beautify other, wealthier people’s lives, they send home.
So when the envelope containing the names of the inheritors of the Kingdom of Heaven is opened one day, you feel that Malawian gardeners will be among the leading candidates. Bellarmine Mugabe, on the other hand, will you, must suspect, get to share a hot cell with his dad – if he’s lucky. Peter Mandelson if he’s not.
*Not his real name
[Image: Panashe Wakatama on Unsplash]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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