Oz goes mediaeval
NOTHING like a bit of mediaevalism. Sharks that attack swimmers off Western Australia will be "hunted down, shot in the head and sawed apart until their spines are severed", according to news reports.
That'll larn 'em! I suppose it's an easier way to deal with a shark than for it to be hanged, drawn and quartered, the way they used to do at the Tower of London and such places; and probably just as effective in establishing a deterrent among the shark population.
The Western Australia Department of Fisheries don't explain how they identify a shark that is guilty of man-eating but I've no doubt they have this in hand.
They are likely to be plagued however by animal rights activists demanding a fair trial for sharks. "Better that 100 guilty sharks swim free than one innocent shark is shot in the head and sawed apart until its spine is severed" – that kind of soppy nonsense.
The Government of Western Australia needs to stand firm, show who's boss. While they're about it, how about a crackdown on mermaids, who are such a distraction to honest sailormen?
Yes, you've guessed. Burn them as witches!
Strange and tragic
IT'S A strange and tragic business this shooting up of a bus carrying the Togo football team to the Africa Cup of Nations competition in Angola. Especially strange is that they should have been travelling by bus at all, given the distance from their training ground in the Congo Republic (Brazzaville); the terrain to be covered – Cabinda, where the attack happened is on the edge of the Maiombe rain forest – and the fact that Cabinda is a zone of secessionist insurrection.
TV reports that the attack happened as the bus entered Angola are technically correct, in that Cabinda is Angolan territory, but a little misleading. Cabinda is an enclave surrounded by the Democratic Republic of the Congo (Kinshasa), not geographically linked to Angola proper, a relic of the colonial carve-up of Africa.
The reports also say insurgents have been fighting for the region's secession for about 30 years. It's rather longer than that.
When I was in Cabinda soon after the coup in Lisbon that led to Portuguese withdrawal from the African territories, I met with members of Flec (Front for the Liberation of the Enclave of Cabinda), who said they had been fighting the Portuguese since the 1960s. They said their concern was that they had been ruled directly from Lisbon until the 1920s, when administration was transferred to Luanda. (Cabinda had originally been a Portuguese enclave of the Belgian Congo.)
They did not consider themselves part of Angola, ethnically or historically, and they did not want to be included in an independent Angola.
They seemed to have a technical point, underscored by the fact that Cabinda was earning billions in oil royalties. But that alone meant the Angolans would never let go.
Cabinda always was something of a paradox. At the height of the Angolan civil war, American oil installations there were protected by Cuban troops from attacks by groups like Flec and Jonas Savimbi's Unita movement.
The Flec people I met seemed to be schoolteachers and clerical workers. I couldn't imagine them shooting up anything, let alone a civilian bus. But – as happens so often, alas - it seems the toughs and hoodlums have taken over.
Fanciful
SUGGESTIONS that the Cabinda attack could have an adverse effect on this year's Fifa World Cup are surely fanciful. A look at the map tells you the place is bang on the equator and part of West Africa rather than Southern Africa, whatever the political technicalities.
Cabinda has an atmosphere like a sauna bath. It's a place of gigantic pythons, a two-headed snake, another violet-coloured snake that sings in the night and regular drumming competitions between the gorillas of the rain forest.
I mention all this with reluctance – being sensitive to accusations of telling tall stories – my point being that none of these will be at the Fifa World Cup, any more than the Flec insurgents will be there.
Tailpiece
DID YOU hear about the cowboy dressed in brown paper? He was arrested for rustling.
Last word
The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.
GRAHAM LINSCOTT
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