THAT LAST-GASP GUTTURAL EXPRESSION

There comes a time when you can’t hold the exasperation back, writes Jonathan Jansen

How and why does a clumsy 19year-old who rides her bike into a rugby post become an instant celebrity?

Ever since Vernon Koekemoer (actually, Cassie Booyse) became an internet sensation in 2008, the question of overnight celebrity has fascinated me; Koekemoer was the muscular man dressed in short-and-torn clothes standing alone at a rave party in Boksburg and whose image went on to produce some of the most memorable online memes of that time.

Now more than a decade later there’s the accident-prone Marelize Horn who circles her bike on a rugby field and hits a rugby pole.

What happens next breaks the internet. In a voice of sheer exasperation her mother utters the unforgettable words, “My f*k Marelize” and the recorded video fires up the internet.

A South African in Italy obviously set up a number of business people to participate in his hilarious scheme telling us viewers of his online video that he is searching for Italians who might speak Afrikaans.

With each shop Andrew Tunstall enters he asks the Italian whether he speaks the language and the person replies in heavily accented Afrikaans, “My f*k Marelize.”

Marelize, in the meantime, was brought down from her Namibian home to last weekend’s Cape Town Cycle Tour to fire the starting pistol, thankfully in the right direction. All good fun.

I have a theory about why this ridiculous video went viral – the mother’s reaction. It was a guttural expression of sheer exasperation, “My f*k Marelize” (MFM).

It was raw, real, spontaneous and authentic. “Good grief Melissa” would never cut it; it is too English polite and far too reserved.

Here in one of our own languages and devoid of any pretense is an earthy release of frustration that resonated deeply with an exasperated public. In other words, we have for a while now all had our MFM moments and it was as if Mrs Horn said it for all of us.

This clumsy government could not plan our long-term electricity needs and every time the lights went out all of us in our hearts said something like, MFM.

Then the suited but corrupt Vice-President had the audacity to say in parliament that “the shortage of electricity is a sign of growth” and you could almost hear long-suffering citizens express their own version of MFM.

You dutifully pay your TV licence and now you hear the state broadcaster might not meet its payroll obligations this month. And to beggar belief, we have just been told in a new report that state intelligence might have been using their resources under the former president to spy on imagined enemies from the affable Thuli Madonsela, the former public protector, to the innocuous journalist-turned-academic, Anton Harber of Wits University. MFM!

My education version of such utter exasperation is the relentless showboating of the nakedly ambitious MEC for Education in Gauteng. The man has made several breathtaking announcements, usefully just before the elections, that he has removed the feeder-zone policy that requires the families of learners to apply to the school nearest to their home. A learner can now apply to any school in Gauteng province regardless of where they live. What a good idea, actually, to open access to privileged schools to all our learners. Except the MEC is misleading the public.

To begin with, there are at least eight policy instruments that a school governing body wields that keeps the racial and class privileges of the elite schools from Cape Town to Johannesburg perfectly intact.

In fact, many schools in our studies no longer need a zoning policy because the sticker price (sometimes in excess of R100,000 per child per annum) is sufficient to scare off a parent from Orange Farm or Khayelitsha before they even consider applying. The elite public and private schools would take anyone who can pay tens of thousands of rands in school fees; there is in the estimation of the school a correspondence between the ability to pay such high fees and the “quality” of the learner the school seeks to enroll. And that is just the fees structure of the school quite apart from academic readiness tests (yes, they happen despite the fact that tests for admission are not allowed), sibling and sometimes also heritage policies, and then something much more insidious and that is what my research team calls “social selection”– the many invisible ways in which elite schools choose learners from desirable families.

In short, what the MEC is promising is a load of nonsense. And by the way, even if every one of the former privileged schools replaced the middleclass and wealthy children with poor and working class children, the vast majority of our schools would still be dysfunctional and disadvantaged. What can one say? My f*k Lesufi!

It was a guttural expression of sheer exasperation. It was authentic