The Iron King

First published in November 2005.

The Iron King

‘Grandpa! Grandpa! I’m back from school! Mummy’s still at work! So I’ve come here! Can I have a Fanta?’

‘Yawrauagha!’ I replied, trying to rouse myself from the sofa, where I had fallen into a coma, sunk by the hot afternoon. Back she came dancing from the kitchen, skinny little legs sticking out of a dusty blue uniform, all bright and breezy. I still lay there unconscious, like a corpse in a coffin.

‘You’re so energetic, Grandpa,’ she laughed. ‘You must have been working so hard all day that you needed this little rest. You’re so lucky that you’re still young, and with the strength to work so hard.’

I sat up slowly, painfully and suspiciously. ‘Thoko,’ I said, ‘what were you learning about at school today?’

‘Irony,’ she said. ‘It’s a clever way of talking, where you say something quite different from what you really mean, or even say the complete opposite!’

‘How very helpful!’ I sneered.

‘There you are, Grandpa!’ laughed Thoko, ‘you’re getting the idea! You need to know these things now that you’ve got a job writing in the newspaper!’

‘So was this irony invented by your teacher as a new way of failing exams?’

‘It all began a long time ago, and was named ‘irony’ in honour of the Iron King.’

‘Why was he called the Iron King?’ I wondered.

‘Because he would never listen to anybody. Talking to him was like talking to a lump of iron. People used to say that his head was made of solid iron. He never listened to what people wanted, and he never listened to advice. So he became known as the Iron King.’

‘So did people get into trouble for calling him the Iron King?’

‘People used to bow and say Thank you, O Iron King. And the King took this as a great compliment, thinking that he was being called big, strong, and powerful. But what they really meant was that he was hard, unbending and inhuman.’

‘So they said one thing, while meaning the opposite?’

‘Exactly,’ said Thoko.

‘But did the teacher explain why they couldn’t just say what they meant? Why couldn’t one of his advisers just go to the king and say Look here, Comrade Kingy, if you’re going to govern properly, you must listen to what people are saying, and take advice, otherwise you’ll soon be out on your ear, old chap!’

‘Grandpa!’ laughed Thoko. ‘Didn’t you do History at school? You couldn’t talk to a king like that. And definitely not the Iron King. You had to grovel on the floor and lick his boots, and then praise his ugly face for its beauty, and his iron head for its wisdom. Otherwise the king would have you thrown in jail!’

‘So people learned to praise him ironically?’

‘It became an art form,’ laughed Thoko. ‘People would say things like We are so lucky, O King, that you have God’s guidance in running this country, so there is no need for you to listen to the contradictory and ignorant voices of ordinary mortals like us!’

‘Or they might say How lucky we are, we thin and starving people, to have such a fat and wealthy king, that we may follow your fine example, and become prosperous like you!

 ‘Or they might say O Great Iron King, when you call us dirty and stinking, we do appreciate the elevated university vocabulary with which you describe our inexcusable poverty and our rotten diseases. We promise to work harder to smell sweeter in your most delicate royal nostrils, O Beloved King!’

‘But did the king realise he was being criticised?’ I wondered.

‘Of course not,’ laughed Thoko. ‘He was far too foolish to see through the irony.’

‘So what was the point of all this irony, if it was lost on the king?’

‘Because,’ explained Thoko, ‘it helped people to keep their self-respect. All the nation, except of course the king, was able to enjoy the delicious irony of all this bogus praise!’

‘So people began to realise that the king was a fool?’

‘They began to whisper to each other, firstly in dark corners. Then in the cafes and taverns. Then in the streets. First quietly, then more loudly. The king is foolish! The king is arrogant! Then a terrible thing happened. A newspaper printed what everybody already knew! The king was furious! He couldn’t believe it! The editor was thrown in jail! An example had to be made of him, otherwise the whole country would have had to be thrown in jail!’

‘My God!’ I exclaimed. ‘That couldn’t happen here!’

‘Why do you say that?’ laughed Thoko.

‘Because,’ I said, ‘This is a democracy!’

‘Well done, Grandpa!’ Thoko laughed. ‘You’ve learnt to speak ironically!’

Death Trap

Published in December 2003, this piece looked back at the time, ten years earlier, when our Football Heroes were sent to their deaths by a government that gave them an old rickety aeroplane that wasn’t airworthy…

Death Trap

I scanned the array of empty chairs in the vast sitting room. Nobody there at all. I was just about to leave when I spotted the wrinkled and diminutive Kafupi Kadoli, sitting up like a cocky cockroach in the corner of a huge white leather armchair. ‘Kafupi!’ I said, as I went over to greet him, ‘Where is everybody? Have all your friends deserted you?’

‘Certainly not!’ he laughed, ‘They’re all down at the magistrate’s court, where my case is coming up later this morning. Do excuse me for not standing up to greet you, but it’s such a struggle to climb back up onto this chair.’

‘That’s life,’ I said. ‘Once you slip down, it’s always difficult to climb back up. Maybe you could apply to the Physiotherapy Department at the UTH to be given a little ladder.’

‘Certainly not!’ he snapped. ‘I’ve always been against government assistance for the handicapped. Anyway Kalaki, what brings you here today? To talk about ladders?’

‘Of course not. I came to ask you about the Aeroplane Disaster of 1993.’

‘Hah! Nowadays The Post seems to be entirely preoccupied with resurrecting corpses from ten years ago. Maybe you should change the paper’s name to The Postmortem.’

‘Were you the one responsible for the crash?’

‘Hah! Certainly not! I have a perfect alibi! I was on an official trip to Bujumbura at the time of the disaster. Four thousand kilometres from the scene of the crime!’

‘But you were in Lusaka when the decision was taken to use the ill-fated aircraft. So you must have been implicated.’

‘Certainly not!’ he retorted. ‘That was two days before the crash happened, and two thousand kilometres away from where it happened. So how could I have been involved?’

‘It is claimed that the aircraft was a death trap.’

‘Certainly not! It was a Blundering Bugaboo, made in Canada in 1923.’

‘But were you not the one who took the decision to use this ancient old Bugaboo?’

‘Certainly not! The decision was taken by the officer in charge of all our Blundering Bugaboos, Air Marshall Shaky Shikashiwa.’

‘Perhaps he advised you against using the plane, and you overruled him?’

‘Certainly not! I ruled over him, but I didn’t overrule him.’

‘But you demanded blind loyalty?’

‘Certainly not. I allowed him to open his eyes and have a look at the plane.’

‘He reported that one wing was loose. Wasn’t that dangerous?’

‘Certainly not! I made a point of showing him that there was a perfectly good spare wing on the other side.’

‘Is it true that one engine was getting too hot?’

‘Certainly not! Engines are supposed to get hot.’

‘Since you left earlier for Bujumbura, I wonder why you didn’t use the Blundering Bugaboo? If it was such a nice plane, wasn’t it also suitable for you?’

‘Certainly not. My wife was far too large to fit through the small door of the Bugaboo. So reluctantly we had no choice but to settle for the luxury Boeing 737 with the en suite bathroom.’

‘So the Bugaboo wasn’t a death trap?’

‘Certainly not.’

‘So you don’t feel responsible for the death of the Fallen Heroes.’

‘Certainly not, Kalaki. In fact, that would be logically impossible. You see, it is only possible to become a Fallen Hero after death, so nobody can cause the death of a Fallen Hero. Perhaps you meant to ask whether I should feel responsible for turning these young men into Fallen Heroes.’

‘And do you feel responsible?’

‘Certainly not! It was the outpouring of national grief that turned them into Fallen Heroes. I certainly wouldn’t want to claim any special responsibility for that. Although I was careful to make sure that I wept more than anybody else.’

‘Because you felt responsible?’

‘Because, as a great leader, I had to take the lead.’

‘It was a national tragedy.’

‘Every cloud has a silver lining. It provided a marvellous national re-awakening. It brought us together as a nation after a period of political division and acrimony.’

‘But it was also a time of much murmuring that that our leaders did not care for the people’s heroes, who were negligently sent to their fate in a rickety old death trap. That must have been a great embarrassment to the government.’

‘Certainly not! Simply not true! On the contrary, people understood that it was not the business of government to be providing air transport. They soon understood that government funds were meant only for government leaders, and not ordinary citizens, who should pay for themselves.’

‘To stay alive?’

‘The date of death of each of us is set by the Lord, and it is not the business of the government to try to interfere with the will of God. That is why we declared ourselves to be a Christian Nation.’

‘And the government gave them a Christian burial.’

‘Since the day of the Fallen Heroes, people have now become accustomed to mass funerals. And government has also become more experienced in assisting people to pass quickly through the agonies of life in order to reach Heaven at the earliest opportunity, in order to re-unite with their Fallen Heroes.’

Just then Kadoli’s secretary put his head round the door. ‘The Minister for Shushushu, Air Marshal Shaky Shikashiwa, has sent a limousine for your trip to court. It’s already waiting outside. Shall I tell the driver to wait?

‘Certainly not!’ screamed Kafupi. ‘It might be a death trap!’

The Trough

This piece, first published in July 2002, looks at the corruption in our rotten judiciary…

    The Trough              

             ‘Spectator Kalaki,’ grunted the Judge, ‘you were supposed to appear before this court four weeks ago.  Where have you been?’

             ‘I was taken into psychiatric care, My Lord.  But now I’ve been discharged.’

             ‘Not by this court, you haven’t!’ laughed Justice Pig, squealing with delight at his own remark.  ‘Mr. Judas Musangu, you’re the prosecuting counsel, remind me of the charge on which we intend to find this man guilty.’

             ‘Defamation,’ declared Musangu, as Judge Pig put his long snout into the trough at the front of the bench, pulled out a few dollar bills, rolled them around his mouth, and swallowed them with a loud belch.

             ‘You must address me as My Lord,’ declared the judge sternly.  ‘We must have respect for the judiciary.’

              ‘My profound apologies, My Lord,’ said Musangu, bowing low towards the bench, and slipping a few dollar bills into the judge’s trough to show even further respect.

              ‘That’s more like it,’ declared the Pig, leaning back in his chair and stroking the hairs on his belly with genuine affection.

               ‘This man Kalaki,’ continued Musangu, ‘defamed my respected client, Mupupu Kafupi, the internationally famous thief.  Kalaki misused his column in the Gutter press to declare that the Thief is the President.’

              ‘Not that the President is the Thief?’

              ‘Same thing. My Learned Lord.  If God is King, then King is God.’

              ‘Your argument is based on a very sound constitutional principle,’ agreed the Judge. ‘So proceed with questioning Kalaki, then I’ll sentence him.’

              ‘Spectator Kalaki,’ began Musangu, ‘did you write in your column that the Thief is the President?’

               ‘Even if I did, the question remains of why Kafupi imagined that he was the thief to whom I referred? There are so many thieves to whom I might have been referring.’

               ‘Come off it, Kalaki.  He is the most famous thief in the land.  He is not just any thief, he is our most famous thief. That is why he is famously and affectionately known by his many admirers as The Paramount Thief, or sometimes more informally as The Thief. He rose from stealing tomatoes and school certificates, through to stealing a widow’s inheritance, then government houses, until in the end he stole a whole copper mine.  A capitalist dream of rags to riches.  No den of thieves is complete without a picture of their Paramount Thief on the wall.  When you mention The Thief, everybody knows you mean Kafupi.’

              ‘That is what they may infer, but not necessarily what I imply. But if people think I refer to Kafupi, how have I defamed him by calling him the President? Is it not a great honour to be the President?’

               ‘Really, Spectator Kalaki, don’t get smart with me! You know very well that in the last ten years all our hospitals and schools were destroyed, starvation stalks the land, and millions have died.  A time of bogus trials, false imprisonment, torture, murders and assassinations. You know that if the person responsible for all this can be found, he will certainly be hung. And yet you have suggested that my client, The Popular Thief, our famous Mupupu Kafupi, was actually the one responsible for all this destruction and destitution!’

              ‘But did not little Kafupi prance around in high heels and flashy suits, calling himself President?  Am I the one responsible for that?’

               ‘Mr. Kalaki, really! You know very well that Kafupi was the President of MMD, the Matrix for Money Diversion, an association of common thieves and criminals. He always made it very clear, in word and action, that he was President for only MMD, and not for all Zambia.’

              ‘Perhaps so.  But wasn’t he actually elected as President of Zambia?’

              ‘Really, Kalaki, try to be honest with yourself. You are the very one who has written extensively claiming that the Constitution was hijacked, elections rigged and votes bought. You claimed that the whole of the electoral process was so corrupted that we did not have a President of Zambia, but only a President of Corruption! Now you dare to come here and claim he was duly elected!’

             ‘But everybody else thought that little Kafupi was the President!’

             ‘Half a minute, ‘interrupted Judge Pig, lazily lifting his drooling snout out of the dollar trough, ‘I happened to hear a bit of what you were saying. I was the very judge who presided over the election petition. I can therefore tell you authoritatively that Kafupi was not the man who was elected as President. We never discovered quite who it was, only that it was not Kafupi.’

             So saying, the Judge’s snout fell back into the trough, and rummaged around, soon coming up with another mouthful of dollars. ‘Look at these documents,’ he grunted, as he chewed the dollars thoughtfully. ‘This is the very evidence on which I based my decision.’

              At this point Musangu emptied the contents of a large brown paper bag into the trough. ‘And in view of this further evidence,’ continued the Judge, ‘I find Spectator Kalaki guilty of defamation, and sentence him to be locked up. Locked up! Locked up! …’

_________________________

               ‘Wake up! Wake up!’ I opened my eyes, to find Sara sitting at my bedside in Chainama Hospital. ‘You’ve been discharged! You weren’t insane, after all! Judge Ngulube was on the take, just as you said!’

               ‘I know,’ I replied. ‘I saw his snout in the trough.’