The covenant - James A. Michener [610]
'Jopie!' Sannie warned. 'Government says we're not to call them Kaffirs any longer. The legal word now is Plural.'
Frikkie said, 'You know what Van der Merwe calls a Bushman rock painting? Under the new law, that is. "A rural plural mural." '
Jopie said, 'You know what Van der Merwe says to a Kaffir holding a machine gun? "Good morning, Baas." '
Frikkie said, 'Van der Merwe had a flagpole lying on the ground. He propped it in its hole, got a ladder and a tape measure and tried to climb up to measure it, but the flagpole fell down. Twice again he propped it up and tried to climb it. Finally a Kaffir said, "Baas, why don't you measure it when it's on the ground?" and Van der Merwe said, "Stupid Kaffir, I want to know its height, not its width." '
Jopie said, 'Speaking of width. Air France sent out its top pilot to see if Van der Merwe was ready to fly to Paris and London. Van der Merwe made one of the greatest landings in aviation historyhis 747 touched down at the front edge of the tarmac . . . screamed to a braking stop, its front wheels three inches from the other end of the landing surface. "Absolutely magnifique!" the Air France inspector said. "This man is ready for any airport in the world. But tell me, why does South Africa make its runways so short?" "I can't explain it," Van der Merwe said. "And look at the crazy thing. It's almost five miles wide." '
Koos van der Merwe was the prototypical Afrikaner boob on whom all jokes about rural stupidity and childlike simplicity were hung. Everyone had his favorite, so that a session like this could run for hours, with an endless chain of hilarious insights into the stolid Afrikaner mind. It was interesting, Philip thought, that most of the jokes were told by Afrikaners themselves, and not by Englishmen, although he had discovered, from several such affairs, that any really ugly jokes were usually told by the latter.
After Frikkie, Jopie and Sannie had each reeled off half a dozen stories, some of them very rough on their fellow Afrikaners, they turned to Philip and asked him what his favorite was. 'I rather fancy one I heard at the diggings. "What do the numbers 1066, 1492 and 1812 have in common?" ' When Sannie pointed out that they were dates important in history, Philip replied, 'Wrong. They're adjoining rooms in Van der Merwe's motel.' Then he asked, 'Why do you tell such jokes?' and each of the three had a sensible explanation. Frikkie felt that any people who were essentially rural took refuge in two kinds of comedy: 'Barnyard-sexual, and the Afrikaners have some very funny stories in that style, and country-bumpkin. In the first we're laughing at the dominee and the domination of the church. In the second we're laughing at ourselves. You hear the same jokes in each category, I'm quite sure, in rural Germany ... or Norway.'
Jopie had quite another theory: 'We know that the Englishmen laugh at us. So we beat them to the punch and do it better.'
Sannie thought otherwise: 'We do it out of affection. Every one of us has in his family somewhere a Koos van der Merwe. He never comes exactly into focus. But we love him just the same. How many pieces in Van der Merwe's jigsaw puzzle? Two.'
When Sannie said this, Jopie broke into wild laughter, quite out of proportion to the merits of the joke. Frikkie looked at him and asked, 'Have you gone bonkers?'
'No! I just happened to think of something terribly funny.' When the other three turned to stare at him, he said, 'I was in Pretoria when Andy Young and two of his assistants from the State Department were there making speeches and giving interviews about the rights of blacks in South Africa. And I burst into laughter.'
'Why?' Saltwood asked defensively. 'Sometimes Young makes sense.'
'Granted. But not that day. Because it suddenly occurred to me, when I had a chance to look at him, to see him . . . You know, he's not black at all. Neither of his two aides were