S.O.B... Caster Semenya: ‘The mind boggles; the soul reels; the ANC blunders on'

Having been a (very happy) nicotine addict for about 40 years, I gave up smoking on 8 August, which was four days after what would have been my mother's 99th birthday - if she hadn't died seven years ago.

I mention my mother because I once discussed with her the various methods for ending smoking (Smokenders, Nicorettes, etc) - and she responded irritatedly: "Oh, for heaven's sake. Are you a man or a mouse? If you want to stop smoking, just stop." She was then about 65 and had stopped smoking about five years previously.

Anyway, I stopped, in a manly fashion, two-and-half months ago because - you guessed it - my quackette, having disagnosed me with diabetes type 2 at the beginning of August, had then proceeded to scare the living daylights out of me with stories about my system "shutting down", needing to "change my lifestyle" (pass the sick bag, Bullfinch), and blah-blah. My doctor, the gorgeous Sharoni, did not , however, say anything about the deleterious effects on my health of cocaine, whiskey, and column writing, so I did not say a word either.

But I must tell you that I have not ever been so unwell as I have been for the last two months and 10 days. I think it is my nicotine-deprived body crying out for the healing and soothing effects of the weed and of course all the additives. This might not be a scientifically correct view but, as we shall discuss in a few paragraphs' time, science is for the proverbial birds. What counts, baby, is how the ANC feels.

Anyway, besides the debilitating effects of going cold turkey, I have also been deeply horrified at the appalling effect that smoking for all those years has had on my memory. In the readers' comments on my last column (see here) - about the Independent group and the Venda Nostra - I was told a number of remarkable things about myself - of which I knew absolutely nothing! I feel like Neil Young looking back on the seventies. Obviously, as I said, this is the result of too much nicotine during those years.

Moving right along, however: there is yet another painful deprivation to which I have subjected myself during the last three weeks.

Here's the hard truth. Three Sundays ago, the powers that be at Avusa stopped delivering The Sunday Times to my home. I wanted to go out and buy one, I really did. But, to tell you truth, ever since my retrenchment, my wife's been edgy about money.

"Geezus, Jeremy," she would ask, angrily and rhetorically, "don't we have enough paper and newsprint in this house? You get The Sunday Independent and The Star, do you have to spend money on The Sunday Times as well? And then there's all that manuscript from that silly book of yours, that took forever to write, about Zuma.

"By the way, I notice that Zuma, your buddy, hasn't offered you a job in his dream team, along with Vusi Mona, or even an ambassadorship - those have all gone to the DA dorks. Prague, even Buenos Aires, would have been a pleasant berth, you know. And I suppose that all that Moe Shaik will offer you, if anything, is the spook slot in Pyongyang ..."

It was painful stuff for me, I must tell you. I really missed my weekly tough love from Mondli Makhanya, Andrew Donaldson, et al. Could I make it to Monday, or to any day, without having read the The Sunday Times?

On the first two Sundays, I broke down. By 11am I was out, leopard-crawling through the park opposite St Columba's to avoid my wife, and buying my newspaper.

But the day before yesterday I was strong. I listened to Ry Cooder, the re-tooled Beatles, Steve Earle and Under Milkwood by Dylan Thomas - and eschewed with disdain the printed word. I even watched Justice "for all" Malala's TV show - on which some oke explained that eTV's new Africa service will "allow African journalists on the continent to tell their own stories about their own countries" - i.e. Marcel Golding is too mean to open bureaus.

But then I cracked. At about noon, I snuck out of the house, daintily bypassing the land mines my wife had buried in the garden, and drove straight to Vida, where I knew there'd be a Sunday Times nestled hard by the coffee machines and muffins.

Shite and onions! Did you see Sunday's lead? It was some stuff about the best five girls in the country being girls' schools, Afrikaans girls' schools, and that girls are cleverer than boys.

Duh. Where have you been living, Mondli? In Pyongyang? In Cape Town? In Pretoria? Everyone knows that females are cleverer than males. Keerist, buddy - the idea, if you're going to destroy hundreds of trees and bring out a major Sunday newspaper, is to tell the people something they don't know, especially if they have been dodging land mines to lay their hands on your publication.

Crumbs, so to find some news, I had to go back a day - and there in the Saturday Star was the news story you have all been waiting so patiently for me to reach.

Now, look, I know that many of you think I'm a dwarf, a proctologist, a drama school graduate, bitter, and various other things. But please write and tell me that you don't think I have lost it completely when I started wailing and gnashing my teeth after having read what the findings were of the ANC's Caster Semenya task team.

Think about it.

This young woman/mixture/whatever - but let's think of her as an Intersexed person, because apparently that is what she is - goes off to a major athletics meeting in Germany. If I remember correctly, she gets sex tested before leaving South Africa. In fact, this is what her own coach said, right? But the head of the local athletics body - that creature Leonard Chuene - doesn't tell anyone, least of all Semenya herself.

She does extremely well, wins a gold medal in the 800m, and is all set to return home as a conquering heroine - when either someone leaks the results of her sex tests or the IAAF (International Association of Athletics Federations) asks for another test or a confirmatory test or whatever. The implication is that she ain't exactly what she seems to be - which is quite clear from her aspect and manner. Pace the feminists, you didn't need a PhD in feminism or biology to see that something was a little different from usual.

Seffrica and Seffricans go bananas. It is racism. It is chauvinism. It is jealousy at our sporting prowess. It is our male chauvinist inability to appreciate that not all women are Barbie dolls. It is the world picking on a poor little black Seffrican.

Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, that font of all motherly warmth and kindness, speaks out; Little Julie Malema speaks out; Semenya's family and neighbours speak out; and so on. If South Africa had been able to do so, it would have mobilized the defence force.

Then some Aussie journalist, with an inside track at the IAAF, lets the world know that, to cut a long story short, the results of those tests show that Semenya is intersexed. Chuene admits that he's a liar, not that this admission - this being Seffrica after all - affects his standing with anyone.

At this point - I think - the ANC appointed a Caster Semenya Support Task Team. Fair enough. It is difficult even to begin to imagine what that young person went through, especially given who her "role models" were. She was doubtless in a state of shock - which is not too strong a word.

So Semenya (and her family) did need support, explanation, and counselling; and the whole issue needed to be diverted from Malema-like rhetoric and stupidity to rationality and such scientific understanding as it is possible to achieve in the public domain. In short, a little gentleness, common sense, and balance.

But who does the ANC appoint to the task team? There's Gwede Mantashe, a bull in a china shop (and that's putting it gently); and then there are those two beacons of rationality, kindness and probity - Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and the former minister of ill-health, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang. The mind boggles; the soul reels; the ANC blunders on.

Then this task team issues a statement last week - which is the news story to which I have been referring. The team says it has requested an urgent meeting with the IAAF, This is pretty funny, really: ever tried to arrange an "urgent" meeting with anyone from the ANC hierarchy or the government? I wish you luck.

At this proposed meeting, the task team intends to express its "outrage" about the manner in which the IAAF handled the Caster Semenya manner, Well, okay, the IAAF could have kept the matter under wraps - and of course there were those horrible leaks. But that's hardly the issue, is it?

The issue is that the unfortunate young person was found wanting in terms of an internationally-accepted sex test and, secondly, that she was used, abused and lied about by her South African handlers for reasons of (their) fame and fortune.

But the task team doesn't give a shit about that. It will "advise" the IAAF to apologise not only to Caster Semenya (which might not be a bad thing for the IAAF to do - for the leaks) but also to the honourable Jacob Zuma and the entire nation "for the violation of Caster's rights".

What rights did the IAAF violate (other than a right to confidentiality)? The IAAF asked that a sex test be done - as they presumably ask that such a test be done when it comes to other athletes as well. What has that to do with Zuma - or anyone else in the country? What is this pompous, absurd posturing? Are they trying to make us even more of a laughing stock than Malema has made us already?

The task team also indicated that it would "advise" the IAAF that it should declare the sex tests results "null and void". Why? Because, according to the task team, "they were not conducted in keeping with [the IAAF's] own stated gender verification policies and rules". Well, if so, tell us how they were in violation of the policies and rules. Don't just tell us that this has been decided on by Mantashe, Madikizela-Mandela, and Tshabalala-Msimang - because that won't cut any mustard.

What are we doing now? Trying to bully the IAAF - just as we tried/try to bully the TRC, the media, the MDC in Zimbabwe, and the local opposition parties?

"We will also make the point to the IAAF that Caster Semenya is an exceptional woman athlete and a world champ," said the task team.

I don't know about that, guys. She/he is certainly an exceptional athlete, but she does not appear to be "a woman" in terms of the IAAF's rules.

Recently in The Times [the local one] the editorial read as follows: "The decision, therefore, by the ANC to set up a task team to provide practical support to Semenya and her family should be welcomed. At last, at least someone out there realises the trauma that the athlete and her family are likely to be experiencing ...

"[But] as it is, the task team - led by ANC secretary-general Gwede Mantashe and including controversial figures such as Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and Manto Tshabalala- Msimang - appears to be no more than yet another attempt to score cheap political points using the athlete's misfortune."

Given that I am close to speechless as a result of having just re-read the task team's press release, I leave it there.

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