Dudu, the flightless bird…

A khaki-clad figure, wearing knee-high leather boots and a wide, sweat-stained bush hat, stepped into the circle of light.

Applause erupted.

This was the hot-ticket lecture on the New York academic circuit because everybody wanted to see who would be able to fill the big, big boots of the late, great Indiana Jones.

“Silence!” the figure roared. (These scaredy white people liked a bit of what the Boers called swart gevaar, he thought as he looked out on them in a mixture of pity and irritation. Yes, I see you, you #IAmStaying people … when the going got tough, you got going.)

“Good evening, my name is Zambezi Zuma … and I am nothing like Indiana Jones!”

(Of course, he wasn’t: he was pitch black, his boots were made by Louis Vuitton, his bush hat was DKNY and his actual name was Honesty Mabuza. That used to get so many laughs, he eventually dropped it. The new name was cool – Zambezi sounded wild to dumb Americans and Europeans and the name Zuma told everyone he wasn’t going to be cheap …)

“Ladies and gentlemen, thanks to your generous contributions, I have completed my expedition to find out the fate of the Great African Flightless Bird!”

ZeeZee (as some of the Yanks called him – and who was he to complain when they were transferring the money?) pulled up a map of Africa behind him.

“The old colonialist scientists used to say that the great flightless bird was native to the islands off the African coast. They called it the dodo and said it had gone extinct.

“Of course, they were so busy raping and pillaging and writing scripts for Helen Zille that these fascists did not notice a survivor bird escaped from Madagascar and was blown towards KwaZulu-Natal.

“She came to land at a village called Nkandla and was about to be the main course (along with putu) for the people there that night, when she was rescued by the Chief.

“He called her Dudu and sent her waddling north-west.”

ZZ paused for effect.

“We tracked her to a place called Kempton Park. We couldn’t find her but we could see the destruction she brought to the nest of the SAA hadeda. That strange bird made a lot of noise, splattered crap everywhere, left its nest in a mess but it could still fly…

“Until the Dudu Bird moved in. She ate all the strong SAA offspring and interbred with the parasites (forming entirely new life forms called Numsa and Irvin Jim) so that, in the end, there was a second Great African Flightless Bird, looking up at the sky above Kempton Park and squawking pathetically…”

The audience tittered in sad sympathy.

“What should be done, is that the Dudu Bird and its hangers-on should be roasted.

“There will be plenty of meat, especially for Numsa, which would love the left wings…”

“Of course, South Africans are kind, so they won’t do this. They have found a source which will continue to feed the mutants and hope they will one day fly again.”

He looked solemn: “The source is the South African job holder – Taxpayerus exploitatus – but it is also in danger of becoming extinct.”

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