TOM EATON: The bland name given to Sharpeville Day
The trouble with euphemisms and general affirmations is that they make us forget the bloody specifics of their origins
At first glance it looked like columnist gold: President Cyril Ramaphosa stuck on a train for hours, the embodiment of country going nowhere because thieves have stolen everything that works and nobody knows how to fix the stuff they decided wasn’t worth taking. But I didn’t write that column, because I’ve written it 50 times already. Now and then I changed the metaphor. The ANC is a crashing plane! The ANC is the Titanic! The ANC is the Mafia! Ramaphosa is Zuma’s bondage gimp! Ramaphosa is an FBI double agent who’s infiltrated the Mafia! You will be startled to read, given the erudition of those metaphors and the force of my denunciations, that the ANC is still in power and will win the election in May quite comfortably. I can’t imagine why this is the case — some of those columns were properly eviscerating — but I must consider the faint possibility that writing opinion pieces about governments do not cause them to crumble. Which is why, as I start to wonder whether writing about ...
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