Frog marching into elite killing fields
Durban POISON
IWAS one of the lucky ones who managed to get out of Durban before being utterly incapacitated by the murderous humidity of February.
Friends and family urged me to go. “Save yourself,” they cried weakly. I tried to help them, but it was too late. The heat had melted their bones and they were unable to get off the couch. Their flesh was beginning to sag and pool around their feet. I don’t know if any of them have survived.
Meanwhile, great concern sweeps the country like a monstrous steel-bristled broom shooting sparks of fear into the hearts of men, women and children everywhere.
Rumours of race wars abound at the institutions of learning. Political knife-fights are breaking out in the corridors of power. An invasion of guttural toads is happening in the fields of Noordhoek. It’s all too terrible for words.
Holed up in the more temperate climes of the Cape Peninsula’s deep south, the last thing I anticipated was a toad invasion.
I know how to deal with enraged women, bent cops and recalcitrant children – all involve bribery – but guttural toads are a deadly business and I want no part of it.
I once accidentally licked a toad and saw the face of God. It wasn’t pretty. That’s not the only reason toads are no friends of mine.
Who among us can forget the words of whoever was given the heavy job of writing Exodus?
“Let my people go, so that they may worship me. If you refuse to let them go, I will plague your whole country with frogs. The Nile will teem with frogs. They will come up into your palace and your bedroom and on to your bed, into the houses of your officials and on your people, and into your ovens and kneading troughs. The frogs will go up on you and your people and all your officials.”
Ever since I was a child, I have feared that a frog would one day go up on me. For three years I doubled up on underpants and checked the oven several times a day. I was raised in a house where kneading troughs were conspicuously absent, so that was one less thing to worry about.
I have yet to see the invasion of Noordhoek first-hand, but news of the impending horror reached me through the pages of the Cape Times this week.
The headline read: “Spotting of guttural toads in Noordhoek cause for great concern.”
Noordhoek, for those who don’t know, is a hot-bed of horsery in the grip of a Range Rover-driving cartel headed by sharp-hipped dominatrixes. It’s also home to rival gangbangers who make their own bread and know their way around a yoga mat.
This is not a neighbourhood where outsiders are welcomed with open arms, no matter if you’re human or amphibian.
If you don’t have a middle name or your grandparents weren’t aboard the Duke of Marlborough in 1820, you are an outsider.
The guttural toad fails on both counts. His full name is Amietophrynus gutturalis and his grandparents have no need of boats because they can swim like motherf*****s.
I know this toad. His relatives lived at the bottom of my garden in Durban North and they wouldn’t shut up. On and on and on.
Twice a week my mother would make my father deal with them so we could all get some sleep. Inexplicably, she wouldn’t let him use the World War II flamethrower he inherited from his father.
Instead, he had to go out in the middle of the night with a torch and bucket and collect as many as he could find, then take them to the nature reserve half a kilometre away and release them. They were back a night or two later. Like homing toads.
I don’t know how the gutturals made it all the way from Durban to Cape Town. Some weird things have found their way into my luggage over the years, but I’m fairly sure I’d remember toads. Perhaps they caught the train.
The problem seems to be that Noordhoek is already home to the western leopard toad and allowing the African common toad to take up residence would significantly lower the tone of the area.
It’s bad enough that African gardeners and domestic workers are allowed in, but at least they return to Masiphumelele at night.
Gutturals care little for the enduring benefits of the old Group Areas Act and would simply sleep over once they had finished their daily business of infiltrating ovens, kneading troughs and underpants.
Gutturals are indigenous, so they’re safe from the irrational idiocrats of Home Affairs. For now. But they don’t naturally occur in the Western Cape.
So what? Nor do white people, who only move to this province because most of the municipalities are run by the Democratic Alliance. Does this mean we should sterilise them? Probably.
The crisis has forced mayoral committee member Johan van der Merwe to issue a dire warning. If the gutturals and leopards start hanging in the same hood, there will be rampant toad-on-toad violence, a desperate scramble for food and much wilful spreading of diseases. This is Mad Max: The Toad Warrior.
Van der Merwe said a rapid response unit was needed to get the gutturals out of Noordhoek. Will this be enough? I don’t think so. How about we have infantry brigades moving in after the Gripens have bombed the breeding camps? Bring in the howitzers and rocket launchers and mobilise the parabats.
Maybe it’s just the name, but I reckon in a fight a leopard toad would whip a guttural toad’s ass with one hand tied behind his back.
So I can’t really see what the problem is. Just let them hang out together. Okay, sure, you might not want them breeding, what with being such close relatives and all.
Nobody needs three-headed toads the size of warthogs leaping for your throat every time you step into the garden for a wee.
I’ve got to be honest. I’m on the guttural’s side. He’s the underfrog here. He’s just trying to get by, like all of us. Give the dude a break.
He not only has to keep an eye out for the specieist vigilantes of the rapid reaction unit, but he’s also up against a hit squad called the NCC Environmental Services Unit.
One of their jobs is to “run the guttural toad control programme in Constantia”.
This is great news. Not that there’s a unit dedicated to “controlling” the gutturals, but that my warty comrades from the east coast have made it to Constantia. Apparently some have even been spotted in Bishopscourt.
That must be the recces. All we need to do now is smuggle them into Bantry Bay, Clifton and Camps Bay and the entire western seaboard is ours.
If I was a guttural in Noordhoek, I’d be very worried. I’d be trying to catch a lift to Cape Town station to get a train back to Durban. Controlling, like culling, is code for killing.
Will they be stabbed, gassed or bludgeoned? Shot, electrocuted or poisoned?
Perhaps they will be dropped into pots of water and gently heated until they boil to death without even realising it. Just like what’s happening to us.