W

ITH everything that’s happening on the political landscape, the temptation to draw parallels between South Africa’s current situation and that of the animals in George Orwell’s Animal Farm is irresistible. In the unlikely event that anyone reading this has never read Animal Farm, it’s a tale of an animal uprising on a fictional farm in England. The animals’ storming of the Bastille moment is described by Orwell thus: “They [the humans] were gored, kicked, bitten, trampled on. There was not an animal on the farm that did not take vengeance on them after his own fashion.”

This text sends shivers into the deep recesses of my soul. I hope that no one reading this hallucinates that this column is my own magnum opus, akin to Sipho Pityana’s, at that now-famous ANC