WHERE LIFE JUST GOES ON
Every Tom, Julius and Cyril has had something to say. But sometimes all you need to celebrate complexity is a beer and a platter of meat
We all have our views about Winnie Madikizela-mandela and the past few weeks of hagiography. It’s been very educational. In fact, it has underlined my long-held belief that politicians will say one thing through the left side of their mouths and contradict themselves with the other side.
For two weeks every Tom, Siphokazi and Nomcebo who never had a nice word to say about Madikizela-mandela was rushing off to Orlando West to prostrate themselves in front of a camera and tell us how amazing she was. Those who dared to open their mouths and say the verboten name Mandela United Football Club (for my younger readers, that’s the violent gang that surrounded Madikizela-mandela in the late 1980s and which the ANC in exile and the United Democratic Front ordered her to disband) were branded apartheid spies.
The cherry on top was the sight of the great peacetime revolutionary Julius Malema telling us that the UDF’S 1980s leaders were “sell-outs” and that Madikizela-mandela was some sort of uncomplicated saint. Bless him — it’s always nice to judge people’s actions when you were in nappies at the time.
Even Cyril Ramaphosa played politics. At the funeral he told us that he had failed to take up Madikizelamandela’s offer to go with him to Marikana and apologise to the families of the 34 mineworkers killed in 2012. Then he said he would go there with Malema. Eh? Ramaphosa needs
Malema to legitimise himself?
Poor Winnie. She was an incredible woman. The apartheid monster did horrible things to her. The damage to her and her family is astounding. Many of us lesser humans would have given up. She didn’t. She deserves better than these intolerant hagiographers. They do her a disservice.
For she was human, strong and weak, brilliant and sometimes dumb, beautiful and ugly. What food did she like? Did she enjoy a little libation?
So off I went with my good friend Mondli Makhanya to the Meat Lounge to celebrate this complex, beautiful woman leader and human being. The Meat Lounge is a shisanyama on steroids. First, it is a shisanyama in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg — which means it is not cheap.
Second, the clientele is rather top end. Not working class. Not middle class. Elite. If you try to book a seat in the cigar lounge you will realise very quickly that everything has its price: to reserve a place you have to buy two bottles of an expensive whisky or vodka.
When we entered a football mogul offered a sip of his Johnnie Walker Blue. A prominent lawyer offered us a 20something-year-old bottle of whisky. I am a man of simple tastes. I demurred. Of course, you can sit in the general area, where beer flows and the meat arrives on platters. It gets loud and packed — it is a restaurant and a nightclub and a bar and maybe even a classic shebeen all in one.
A DJ spins some very cool music on the decks.
I have been asked what’s so great about the Meat Lounge. It is this: it is life. It is a place where people live, sometimes with excess and sometimes with restraint, without judgment. It is mostly rich and also poor. It tells us a bit about now and about our past, and maybe even the future. It is just people enjoying their lives and their moment, without being too hypocritical about it.
It was so good we left at 5 am. We were sad to leave.
Madikizelamandela was human, strong and weak, brilliant and sometimes dumb, beautiful and ugly. What food did she like?
Meat Lounge ★★★★
18 Thecore Shopping Centre Leeuwkoproad, Sunninghill Tel: (011) 234-4624
★★★★★ Thandeka Gqubule ★★★★ Excellent ★★★ Good ★★ Poor ★ Julius Malema