A lot of people — the decadent amoral bourgeoisie, mostly — have got awfully upset over Jon Qwelane’s latest tirade. Why the fuss? The Sunday Sun is gutter press and Qwelane’s equally contemptible opinions are part and parcel of a paper that believes that stoking xenophobia and perpetuating intolerance is a prerequisite in speaking to the “blue-collar man”.
As the furore rages, let’s not forget that Qwelane is the lovelorn admirer of Mugabe, once describing that despot as a “true revolutionary” who had been made the “villain of the piece” by the “racist” West. In that same Sunday Smut article, Qwelane said that he dreaded Morgan Tsvangirai ever becoming the president of Zimbabwe (despite the nation choosing him in the March election) because:
Zimbabwe will be recolonised all over again, and Tsvangirai will be a latter-day Abel Muzorewa — a bantustan puppet “leader”, with the real puppet masters in Britain and South Africa (read DA, chiefly).
Qwelane is no stranger to controversy — but that’s hardly surprising when his vitriolic rantings, littered with factual inaccuracies and with a paucity of substantive evidence to back his wild arguments, reveal an endless bigotry and prejudiced posturing more in keeping with the previous regime.
The question is whether he’s gone too far on this one. I suppose that all depends on whether Media24 believes its advertising revenues to be threatened through potential boycotts of its various outlets (after all, that was what gave Deon Maas the shove).
Instead of firing him, perhaps the media giant should find the repressed little columnist a therapist — as one can’t help wondering whether his views reflect a certain desire to vent about deeply personal issues that he can’t quite put to bed (literally, it would seem, in the case of his latest column).
But help is surely at hand. Qwelane’s pal, Zuma, has let slip his stance on gays before (fondly reminiscing how, as a youth, he would “strike the unqili”); so perhaps dear old umshini will be the politician that can muster, as Qwelane urges, “the balls to rewrite the Constitution of this country, to excise those sections which give licence to men ‘marrying’ other men, and ditto women”.
Qwelane will never know if Zuma will become his point-man on anti-moffie morality unless he gets together with him. They should have a macho man-to-man shower session and put their heads together to discuss things.
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