POOR Steve Hofmeyr. It's true the singer has largely been the architect of his own misfortune, but just lately you've had to feel sorry for the guy. In a country absolutely brimful with thoughtless and unhinged bigots, he alone gets to be singled out as a racist idiot and humiliated by the media and - what's worse - a psycho showbiz dummy.

It all started with that awful tweet: "Sorry to offend but in my book blacks were the architects of apartheid. Go figure." 

Go figure? Well, we certainly tried, here at the Mahogany Ridge, but we could only presume that Hofmeyr was having some sort of very public nervous breakdown, one that had been months, if not years in the making.

The fresh-faced entertainer who once melted the teenaged hearts of Afrikaans girls up and down the platteland with his anodyne drivel and pointless good looks and then gave them babies had long since vanished from the national stage. 

In his place there emerged a goggle-eyed monster with a silly beard and even sillier opinions who, far from being apologetic about it, seemed to relish whatever outrage he caused and claimed he was merely enjoying his right to freedom of expression.

It was uncharacteristic of him to then take legal action against ventriloquist Conrad Koch in a bid to stop him bothering sponsors into cancelling lucrative contracts with the singer.

Well, that backfired horribly. An interim order protecting Hofmeyr against Koch and his dummy, Chester Missing, was overturned on Thursday. Randburg magistrate Naren Sewnarain said, "Mr Hofmeyr has exposed himself to criticism, satire, ridicule and the court is not satisfied that he should be accorded the protection."

Thus a massive publicity coup for Koch - who, incidentally, has his own career to further - and his loathsome creation. They're now everywhere this weekend. Newspapers lapped it up as Koch and dummy confronted Dan Roodt, the famously persecuted right-winger who had represented Hofmeyr in court, and demanded to know why the singer didn't attend the proceedings.

Later, Hofmeyr took to Twitter to suggest the magistrate had been biased and that the court's decision amounted to the "end of freedom of expression" and that the media were the next to be silenced.

Koch then responded with a jeering and rather childish social media campaign in which he mocked the singer as "Racist Boy." 

It was, on the whole, not very gracious or sophisticated - but then ventriloquism is a rather unsophisticated business, with origins rooted in deception.

The name comes from the Latin for "to speak from the stomach" - venter (belly) and loqui (speak). The ancient Greeks, though, called it "gastromancy", and it was all the rage at the Delphic Oracle where sounds produced deep within one's belly were thought to be the voices of the undead from the spirit world. 

These voices would then be "reinterpreted" by the William Smiths and Rod Suskins of the day as they pulled the wool over the eyes of the lame-brained and the horoscopic of tendency. As a means of forecasting the future, ventriloquy had a lot more going for it - obviously - than the methods used by the Roman augurs, which was to muck about with the guts of a dead fish.

Its association with the "spirit world" continued through the Middle Ages, when it was associated with witchcraft, and on to the beginning of the 19th century, when it shed its mystical and religious trappings, and it found new life as a performance art.

But back to Hofmeyr, who must now suffer the ignominy of having a lesser artist piggy back to fame and fortune on his illustrious name. 

Arguing on the singer's behalf, Roodt told the court that, in addition to the financial losses from cancelled contracts, Koch's campaign had caused Hofmeyr a certain amount of mental grief. 

This could well be a classic case of automatonophobia - the fear (it says here) of "anything that falsely represents a sentient being" and this includes ventriloquist dummies, animatronic creatures, mannequins, and wax statues. It's a deep-rooted phobia that manifests itself in numerous ways; every individual who suffers from it being different. Given the creepiness of dummies, this fear drives a common trope in horror films. Think of the demonic Chucky in the Child's Play movies.

So, does Hofmeyr fear the dummy as much as he fears his fellow South Africans, and if so, how can we help him? 

Frankly, I don't know and don't care. It's not much in the way of consolation, but here's a thought the Boer Bono may wish to dwell on: there aren't many kids out there who call Chester Missing "Papa."

This article first appeared in the Weekend Argus.

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