I had been assured that the African National Congress breakaway would be having a meeting in the tiny dorp of Winburg Saturday. So I was thrilled to discover, some four hours from home, that it had been postponed ’til next week in some other little Free State town. Oh joy.

The rains we of the Southern African hinterland have all been waiting had sporadically reached Johannesburg, but not yet the hard-luck town of Winburg. And it seemed as if the adjoining black township of Makleketla had somehow been denied even last season’s rains.

Posters encouraging voters to register for elections had been systematically torn down, leaving an intriguing arrangement of smiling models apparently attacked by a madman.

At the local hall, ANC, Communist Party and unionists from COSATU had gathered ahead of a voter registration drive.  One party activist said, “No, no meeting, there is a funeral service taking place in the hall.”

Hmm? I thought and tried keep a straight face And soon thereafter we as journalists were told how we made things up, lied and misrepresented facts.  Usually, this might have annoyed me, but I had been to the Terror Lekota breakaway presser in Johannesburg (see “A grass-eye view of the elephants”) and every verbal assault on the ANC he had not quite left yet was greeted with applause from a section of the gathered media.  I was appalled, though there were clearly a couple of plants among my colleagues, but still…. pretty poor form.

It was tough to argue about the unbiased nature of journalists in a society noted for its polarization, so instead I took the path of least resistance and said I was a photographer.  I thought he began to warm a little, and so when he struggled to read off the phone number of the regional chairperson from his mobile screen, I offered him the use of my glasses. “I can’t look through a journalist’s glasses,” he muttered, rather darkly.

So much for the thaw.

Following the activists on a door-to-door registration drive, wit was pointed out to us that there was now water-borne sewerage installed, though not yet up and running. Quite impressive I thought, until I heard that in that region there used to be 14,000 households using the bucket system in 2006 when Thabo Mbeki (then president) had said they would eradicate the bucket system. Today, there were only 13,500 shitting in buckets. Now, since the original ANC is made up of the Zumarites and the Mbeki clique has been cast out and is starting the new party, who would you, in government built matchbox RDP house number 1675, vote for?

and and the next day, Sunday, back in Jhb, radio says that the rebels were denied entry to a university campus for a meeting they had already booked and paid for.

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