Tarantella Dancers

Ever heard of Tarantella Dancers? They seat in caves, with backs against the African culture, throwing invisible gossamers of neo-political whining. They're mostly fingernail monitors and provocateurs of the Chattering Class. According to them, everything the government does is wrong, or motivated by corruption. They have mania for seeing a deluge of corruption whenever a mouse runs out of the government wainscot.
The tarantella dancers see themselves as harbingers of enlightenment, an embankment against the coming deluge of barbarians. They've self-styled themselves as spokesmen of enlightenment who feel duty bound to carp the atavistic yearnings and arrest tribalism and perversions of nationalism in our politics. Anyone who agrees with the government to the tarantella dancers is wagging the tail. To be enlightened you must be cynical and anti-ANC government.

Their perpetual demurrable scouting for weakness on the ruling party is not consistent though. They cried grafter and rogue when it was rumoured that the ruling party, within its rights, was planning to change the constitution to accommodate president’s Mbeki’s third term. But with the same breath they were egging it on with demands to change the constitution for the reinstatement of the death penalty. That's the tarantula for you.

There’s telling hypocrisy in most things the tarantella dancers does. They pass themselves as purveyors of unassailable integrity but their conspiracy mongering often serves as an excuse for avoiding the task of real political analysis. Their writings are usually intellectual pretensions culled from Occidental nests. They are mostly tedious exculpations sustained by subtle racism of Kliping’s colonialist ‘burden of the white man.’ Theirs is not the usual rumble of good old racists but a rise of imperialistic mind disguised in humanist language.

This new racism is in a way much more brutal than the previous one, because it’s implicit legitimisation is not naturalist—the superiority of the white race—but culturalist. It wants to preserve Western cultural identity at the expense of all else. In the tarantella dancers then we are more dealing with unabashed cultural egotism and dented egoes of the colonialist mind masquerading as enlightenement. They project liberal fears, anxieties, rumours, and secret desires for intellectual prominence. Their shrill unreflective ramblings have become more like a poor slop of original tea bag in its fifth wash of hot water.

When their unreflective ramblings eludes them they target the no-loose topics like Zimbabwe to talk our ear off them. Despite all their hype about democratic values though the tarantalle dancers give their support only to government endorsed by Western enlightement, not the ones elected by an overwhelming support of the constituencies, as seen in Palestine. This is because they define progress as an adoption of neo-liberal democracy and market capitalsim.

What the tarantula abhors is most is BEEs. Unlike those who argue against it with clotted tones, the tarantula vehemently see it as reverse apartheid. They see BEE as cronysm disguised as affirmative. But the uncomfortable fact they won't admit is that affirmative action makes them imagine themselves in the same shoes previously reserved for black people, victims of discrimination with active support of the state. Affirmative action prods their silent fears.

It really is the measure of our freedom that we still keep the brass-necked sterile tarantella dancers in our mist, and even give them platform in our newspapers despite their sour attitude and reality concealing boomer humour on issues some feel should allow no room for irony. “Here, where the tarantula's cave is, there rises up the ruins of an old temple – just look at it with enlightened eyes!” Thus Spoke Zarathustra.