ON Tuesday, the Mahogany Ridge regulars celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Purple Rain protest that took place on a rather damp Saturday afternoon on Cape Town's Greenmarket Square.
There were plenty of confrontations with authority in those emergency days, but this one was quite unique in how spectacularly it backfired for the security forces.
Though we didn't realise it at the time, apartheid was in the throes of a grand mal seizure and the thousands of Mass Democratic Movement supporters who'd poured into the city on September 2, 1989, to march on Parliament to protest the next week's elections were nevertheless expecting the worst from the security forces.
The police, it must be said, were looking forward to the clash. They had - clever clogs that they were - a powerful new water cannon which was loaded with purple dye to stain protestors for later identification and arrest, and couldn't wait to try it out on those who ignored their orders to disperse.
The fun and games started soon after the spraying began. A lone protestor leapt onto the vehicle on which the cannon was mounted and attempted to redirect its blasts away from the fleeing crowds and back towards the police.
But it was like wrestling an angry firehose or an anaconda, and the stuff went everywhere else instead with the result that most of the surrounding buildings, including the National Party's offices in Burg Street, were given a vibrant purple rinse.
Within days, a memorable graffito appeared on walls across the country - "The purple shall govern!" - and the rest, as they say, was history.
Tuesday's anniversary is quite apposite now that the ruling party - puce with rage at the temerity with which disrespect is flung their way - is also considering the use of the mailed fist to deal with political opponents who don't know their place and who persist with the lippy with regard to President Jacob Zuma.
According to Defence Minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nquakula, the unruly disruption by Economic Freedom Fighters MPs of Zuma's question and answer session last Thursday posed a threat to national security and a whole lot more besides.
As she put it to journalists on Tuesday: "It posed a threat to everybody inside that chamber but also to the institution. It undermined the institution of Parliament, it undermined our Constitution and everything which we are representing here."
As was the case with the Nationalists before them, the ANC's definition of what constitutes a threat to national security remains elusive, vague and apparently very broad. Thanks, however, to revelations about developments at the Zuma family homestead in Nkandla, we were aware that chicken runs and spaza shops featured prominently in such considerations.
Now, according to Mapisa-Nqakula, the security clusters ministers have called for recommendations on how to deal with the EFF and Police Minister Nathi Nhleko has announced measures that would make it easy for police to arrest and remove from the Parliamentary precinct any person who disrupts a sitting of the National Assembly or a parliamentary committee.
Gee, and just when it was all getting to be heaps of fun.
As for the President, well, he suffered a further political setback in his fight to prevent criminal charges against him being reinstated when the Supreme Court of Appeal ruled on Thursday that the National Prosecuting Authority must release the so-called "spy tapes" by Tuesday - which now really should be known as National Purple Day.
There are those who believe that Zuma should be worried, particularly as the reasons for dropping the fraud and corruption charges against him in 2009 now appear very flimsy indeed.
However, some Ridge regulars will tell you that Zuma probably has nothing to fear - and point to his unexpected visit to Russia.
True, it was puzzling that no ministers from the economic cluster were present on a trip that was ostensibly about trade, and International Relations and Co-operation Deputy Minister Nomaindia Mfeketo and - curiously - State Security Minister David Mahlobo accompanied the President instead. And there's the fact that Zuma and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, have become rather close in recent months.
They have a lot in common. For example, both are fond of displaying their nipples in public - Putin when he hunts bears or bothers Siberian wolves, and Zuma when he dances at his weddings.
And, of course, both have what are euphemistically known as "backgrounds in intelligence". Putin served with the KGB under the Soviets, and who knows what Zuma got up to in the ANC detention camps. Both men, presumably, know their way around a thumbscrew, an important accessory in the survival business.
Maybe the purple should be a little worried.
This article first appeared in the Weekend Argus.
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