BRACE yourselves, but stuff's coming out the box here. Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu has urged South Africans to think before casting their vote in the elections.
Like, you know, who'd have thought?
It is perhaps by far the most radical and subversive thing Tutu has said in a whole lifetime of saying radical and subversive things.
Thinking, as it is, is not easy. It's mostly higher grade, and you have to work stuff out in your head; squeeze the sparky bits from cranial lobes as the neurons fizz and the gears in there grind and crash and Descartes finds itself before the horse. Or something similarly profound, terminal, ingenious and potentially seismic. Much like the invention of the axle. Without which the invention of the wheel wouldn't have amounted to much.
Anyway, here we are, on the eve of the 20th anniversary of our democracy and about to go to the polls for the sixth time as a free nation, and we have been asked to think. For ourselves. Dear God, but can any good come from this?
Tutu has pinned his hopes on it. Speaking to reporters at St George's Cathedral on Wednesday, where he gave his assessment of the country's achievements and failings since 1994, he said there was much to be proud of.