Addicted to the Matrix

“Hi, my name is Hajira and I’m addicted to the Internet.”

“Hi Hajira!”

Phew, you say to yourself, that cow is finally getting the help she needs. You might be right about the cow part, but the only problem is that the support group is an online one…

It’s a common problem faced by many of us – we spend so much time on the internet that our relationships, activities and work in the real world come off second best at times.

Remember the real world? The place where you could reach out and grab somebody’s hand, feel the blood pulse beneath the skin? The place where you could be reasonably certain that your friend is actually a young lady and not a middle-aged man who breathes heavily and keeps the Kleenex handy whenever you post a new profile picture of yourself?

I think the only thing that keeps us coming back to the real world is food. When we can eat food on the internet, we won’t ever bother to press the disconnect button.

That sign on the door that says “On lunch - back in 15 minutes!” will be staying up much, much longer than that. Even the prospect of real, sweaty, fumbling sex can be passed up these days in favour of, ahem, “researching” one’s more taboo proclivities in a much more glamorous format.

Recently, a Korean couple who starved their baby to death while they looked after a virtual baby at the internet cafe showed the world how far this thing can go. Just give them a bowl of shark fin soup in their virtual world and they wouldn’t have even resurfaced to find out that they had killed their own kid.

So now there are only three categories of people who still exist in the real world. They are as follows:

1. “Celebrities” – these people have to go into the real world to have pictures taken of them passed out in the gutter with their underwear around their ankles. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be famous for anything. They do occasionally pass their time in cyberspace by having Twitterfeuds with other "celebrities".

2. Politicians – often found running amok (impregnating random women, embezzling taxpayers’ money, running over joggers, etc.) in the real world because everyone else is in cyberspace stalking other people they don’t like and playing Farmville.

3. Poor people – these people don’t have computers so we think their opinion doesn’t really matter until we realise it’s election time again. Can often be found burning tyres in service delivery protests, but still can't be expected to think outside the box when putting a tick in the old ballot box.

On the other hand, living completely in the virtual world might mean that we get to eat whatever we want and still stay virtually thin. If they develop a decent mutton biryani then I’m buying myself a plot of land in Farmville. Hyuk.

Checklist - How Jacob Zuma knows when he's doing it right

Jacob Zuma knows he’s doing it right when:

1. An entire day goes by and Julius Malema is not made fun of in the press
2. The national police commissioner's daughter tells him she is not pregnant after all with his 47th child
3. A new law is passed requiring all men to have a minimum of ten wives
4. The African Christian Democratic Party stops trying to book him into the same rehab clinic as Tiger Woods for sex addiction
5. Helen Zille decides to form an alliance with the ANC to disband the Democratic Alliance in return for a position as Deputy Minister of Environmental Affairs under Marthinus van Schalkwyk
6. Schabir Shaik really does die of a terminal illness so he can say “I told you so!” about letting him out of prison early
7. COSATU and the ANC Youth League agree to go on regular playdates at Zoo Lake so they can bond better.

Freedom fighter extraordinaire

WARNING: this blog post has been written from a sardonic point of view. If you find yourself running low on humour, please visit the SABC’s website and you should be fine after a few minutes.


I have been a veteran in the struggle against apartheid since 1993. Yes, the year I arrived in this country, at the tender age of twelve. As young as I was, I was nobody’s fool. Although I was slightly disappointed to be unable to see any Zulus throwing spears up at the aeroplane on the way to Jan Smuts airport in Johannesburg, I figured that since it was a public holiday, even Zulu warriors needed a break from throwing spears at the whites.

No, you would never catch a bright person like me, brought up in God’s own country (just to make it clear, this would be England), being ignorant about African current affairs. Although I will admit that when I heard the news about Nelson Mandela being released from prison after 27 years, I struggled to understand why everybody was making such a fuss over a convicted criminal. But I was only a pipsqueak of eight back then. To be sure, I knew by the time I moved to South Africa in ’93 that Mandela was a very dangerous man.

Since we were brought over by a white South African family with whom we were living, I had the advantage of being able to learn a lot about South Africa very quickly. Yes, I learnt all about the kaffirs, and how they were all ready to kill us in our beds and take our BMWs.

We had two maids, Pinky and Mabel. They used to speak Afrikaans very oddly, I thought, with all sorts of funny clicking noises and no-one could understand them when they did that. I gathered that it was some kind of secret code. Eugene Terre’blanche will tell you that there are enemies everywhere, and boy, was he ever right.

Since the elections were fast-approaching, there was little to do except instruct the women and children in combat shooting. We stocked up on baked beans and candles, sandbags and ammunition. We kids were told to practice re-loading firearm magazines until our fingers bled, for it was us children who would be relied upon to reload for the adults when the bloodshed began.

The time of the elections was nearly upon us, and we went on what could possibly have been our last holiday. It was a long and weary trek in our air-conditioned BMW down to Richards Bay, and we outspanned when we got to the lobby of the hotel. For some unknown reason I became embroiled in a political discussion with a black man sitting in the lobby. Fancy me, an educated Englishwoman of twelve, imparting my erudite political views to a savage!

Nevertheless, I asked him politely who he would be voting for in the elections, to which he replied he would be voting for the National Party (an old party from the times of apartheid and the last bastion of hope for the whites). I was very pleased with this man’s valour and common sense, and I remarked that the National Party was the ideal party to vote for, because as I put it, “things will stay just exactly as they are”.

I think that from the way the poor man's face dropped in utter horror, that he probably made sure that he was the first person in the line at the polling station on the first day of voting, and I’m almost 100% certain that the tick he made was next to the box that read “African National Congress”.

So you see, I really was doing my bit for freedom even back then, when I had more pimples than common sense.

Through the looking glass

Sometimes when I'm reading news on South Africa, I think I'm reading a post on the satirical news site www.hayibo.com. I laugh away, reading the ridiculous quotes and story. Then, a few paragraphs on, I realise it's actually real. And people have actually said those things.

Julius Malema himself is a walking Hayibo post. Everything that comes out of his mouth is prime fodder for the writers. They don’t even need to change anything.

Take, for instance, the story where he refuses to be nominated as Drama Queen at the Feather Awards, accusing organizers of questioning his sexuality. Or the one where he calls IFP leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi a “factory fault” and the IFP a “terrorist organisation”

Everything that spews forth from the retarded brat’s spittle-flecked mouth is pure hatred. No-one is spared his idiotic vitriol. Today I saw a journalist had used the words “no-one is spared his sharp tongue”. I would hesitate before I said that anything connected with JuJu is sharp. His whole being is blunt, rotund and ignorant. The sharpest part of him is his bald, shiny, vacuous head.

But everything, from Eskom’s tariff hikes to the ANC spending millions on cars for their ministers, makes me feel as though I’m living in some sort of surreal topsy-turvy world where day is night and wrong is right. All it means is that the spin doctors are doing their jobs, I suppose.

The scary part is that the youth of this country support Malema, the government supports the electricity hike and no-one can do anything about the ANC’s spending spree. The dollar has weakened, petrol has gone down and South African stocks have strengthened, but the price of food and basic necessities still goes up and service delivery still goes down. And no-one is going to stop it.