TOM EATON: One week to go till Angus Buchan's deluge fills Cape Town's dams
'Buchan’s critics – or as I refer to them, people who’ve read more than one book – have been aghast for years'
EXTRACT:
Buchan’s critics – or as I refer to them, people who’ve read more than one book – have been aghast for years. His homophobia is a matter of public record and he takes pride in an attitude to women that has been copied and pasted directly out of a Taliban recruitment poster.
“It is very hard for a husband to love his wife when she insists on wearing the trousers and refusing to submit,” he infamously wrote in 2004. “The children become traumatised when the wife belittles the so-called head of the house, or he beats up his wife because she will not submit.”
Yep, nothing like traumatising the kids because you’ve had to do your husbandly duty by assaulting your uppity wife to put her back in the place assigned to her by the God of Love.
Despite this medieval barbarism, however, Buchan pulls in vast, fairly affluent crowds. And to understand why, you need look no further than his hat.
Four months ago I wrote a column that had to be retracted. Misreading a news report, I claimed that Mmusi Maimane had attended a prayer day at parliament featuring the alleged preacher, Angus Buchan. Mr Maimane had, in fact, not been present – it was his wife, Natalie, who had attended the event – and the column was rightly retracted and deleted from all Tiso Blackstar platforms. I was sorry for that mistake. As I told my readers on Facebook in an apology later that day, I have only one job as a commentator – to get the facts right – and I had let them down. But I was also sorry for another reason. My blunder had required the piece to be deleted from public view, which meant my impressions of Buchan had also disappeared.Fortunately, when Odin shuts a door he sometimes hacks open a window, and this week I have a perfectly legitimate reason to write about Buchan again. And because I still stand by every word I wrote about him in November, I am going to take the liberty of resurrecting...
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