Publication: The Witness
Issued:
Date: 2008-03-19
Reporter: Ben Trovato
| Publication |
The Witness
|
| Date |
2008-03-19
|
|
Reporter |
Ben Trovato |
|
Web Link
|
www.witness.co.za
|
Right now I have more pressing matters to attend to. There is a crisis of
terrible proportions unfolding in the Deep South and nobody is doing anything
about it. Let me be blunt. Germany has invaded Simon's
Town. *1
Ted and I discovered this on Thursday night when we tried to get a drink
at the Seaforth Hotel. The usually empty verandah was jammed with burly
cropped-haired brutes braying and barking in a harsh guttural tongue. A
fast-moving pack of Aryans beat us to the last free table.
"This isn't Poland, you herrenvolk bastards," shouted Ted. I dragged him back to
the parking lot and explained that the German navy had
been invited to come over and play with our navy for a bit.
Hungry for revenge, we returned to Simon's Town on Saturday with the aim of
sinking one of their frigates. Ted carried a concealed hammer and I lashed a
small screwdriver to my thigh. What we hadn't bargained on was getting caught in
the middle of the South African Navy Festival.
We approached the gates to the base expecting to be strip- searched. Instead, a
surly knave thrust a programme into my hands. It warned us not to bring any
weapons into the area. From where I stood, I could see two 35 mm twin-barrelled
guns, four 20 mm Oerlikon cannons and eight Exocet surface-to-surface missiles.
Damned if I was going to surrender my screwdriver.
Some festival it was. Boerewors rolls and battleships. A bagpipe band and a
couple of tatty submarines up on bricks. Lots of screaming children.
Millions of blowflies swarming around the ThyssenKrupp
signs. *2
But we weren't there to have fun. We were there to deal a crippling blow
to the German navy. Ted asked a black man in a waiter's uniform to bring us two
cold beers but he claimed to be some sort of high-ranking officer on the SAS
Isandlwana and threatened to report us to the military police.
We came across dozens of people queuing to get on board the SAS Amatola and
tried in vain to get them to protest. "Don't you understand," I shouted. "You
helped to pay for this monstrosity. Wouldn't you rather the government had
bought you a house?"
Apparently not. All they wanted to do was see the guns up close.
They deserve to be poor.
Eventually we found it. A big humourless gray hulk. The
Einsatzgruppenversorger. "Catchy name," said Ted. At the foot of the gangplank
was a mat. The progeny of one of Josef Mengele's less successful experiments
told us to wipe our feet before boarding. I expect the ship would have to be
quarantined if a speck of African dirt found its way on board.
There were too many slack-jawed gawkers around for us to scuttle the ship and in
the end I had to settle for scraping my car key along one of the metal doors.
We hurried off to catch an event billed as Dry Dock Flooding but it turned out
to be nothing more than water pouring into a big hole with none of the screaming
and drowning that usually accompanies a good flooding.
After that I wanted to see something called Tug Ballet but Ted said that if the
Germans were involved it was probably a euphemism for synchronised masturbation.
Thoroughly miserable, we went back to the main street and holed up in a bar
called The Nelson where we were joined by two women with no front teeth, three
young girls with five toy handguns between them and a two-year-old who said:
"F...ing cops", when she heard a police siren outside.
With acknowledgements to Ben Trovato and The Witness.
*1 Normally its the dozens of German
engineers and technicians maintaining and servicing our MEKO 200AS frigates and
Type 209 coastal submarines at 500 Euro per hour.
*2 These are actually bluebottle flies - they like shit.