SOS Steve on Sunday
13 June 2021
Greetings my fellow power experts,
It is quite mortifying to know that our dearly beloved Prez, you know who he is I think, is very very busy at the G7 meeting at St Ives in Cornwall England. Cannot say United Kingdom these days because they are not really united are they? Nor can they be called Great Britain for quite obvious reasons.
So, our Prez, not quite the darling that Madiba was in those long gone halcyon years in the 1990s, still has the ear or perhaps all the ears of a certain seven super powers. And other minor powers who think they are super too. So why is he there? Surely not to beg for more money or investments because many of us also know exactly where that is going to end up if anyone actually promises and gives something.
I seriously believe that he is there to advise those seven Premiers, Prime Ministers or Presidents on how to sort out problems in their own countries because he has been very successful here at the southern tip of Africa.
He can advise on when to build new power stations, when to maintain existing ones, how to survive when there is no electricity, keeping trains running on time, sorting out corruption, charging skellums (scoundrels) in a court of law, not allowing former high ranking politicians to keep on appealing, showing all how to survive on a mere R100 000 a month, and so many other important matters. I am very sure they will listen to him, but maybe only to score some biltong (jerky) from his game farm. Or a freebie shoot or two.
Do not expect too much to come out of this meeting fellow leaders other than a tummy full of good food and wine compliments of First World countries.
While writing of G7, do any of you recall the less famous G5 and G6? They were not political or socio-economic gatherings, but some extremely efficient and dangerous weapons, one as a normal gun and carriage, and the other a mobile gun. I would guess that comparing the G5 and G6 with the G7, the two former would quickly sort out the latter. Not with our army though…Hahaha.
Are not our modern day soldiers brilliant on the parade ground? Let me not go there, they think that they are good so we’ll leave it like that.
On to St Ives in Cornwall, a lovely place in England where I have been fortunate enough to give a few talks to the public, at meetings, on radio and on TV. It was not about politics, or I suppose it was in a way. My theme on my visit to St Ives was Emily Hobhouse whom I am sure a few of you have heard of.
Humanitarian and super heroine to the Afrikaner nation for her role in admonishing her own nation for the Boer Concentration camps during that conflict of 1899-1902; and for the amazing support she gave the Boer women and children, even when the war ended. Please do google her, she so deserves more than just this one paragraph.
Now Emily was born in St Ives and stayed there for much of her latter life before her death in London in 1926, her home in St Ives being bought with money donated by Boer families after the war. A sum of £2300 had been raised by the destitute nation and Emily invested wisely. This house was later converted into an hotel – the Porthminster Hotel – and her lounge was converted into a memorial to Emily with a commemorative plaque and wall displays on her life. The hotel is now known as the St Ives Harbour Hotel.
Her ashes were incorporated in the Women’s Memorial in Bloemfontein. Her death, unheralded in England and not reported in the Cornwall press, was greeted in South Africa with much grief and sorrow. She was a heroine.
Is she remembered? Other than the memorial in Bloemfontein, she has a statue at the Anglican church in St Ives, the oldest girl’s hostel at the Free State University is (or perhaps was) named Hobhouse, and there is a town in the Free State named after her.
She would not have been delighted but one of South Africa’s three Daphne class submarines was named in her honour. It was renamed after 1994.
As Emily was an Honorary Citizen of South Africa, it is a sure bet that our Prez will pay a visit, or has paid a visit, to what was her home in St Ive to show respect. Perhaps he actually stayed there! That would be something would it not?
Have a wonderful week ahead.
I thank you.
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A further development….Until the G7 invasion Cornwall had been relatively Covid free…. in the week following the freeloaders convention the Covid cases soared and the county now has a major problem.
Spot on as usual. Now let me indulge myself please?
The Cornwall free food fest is taking place even as 25% of the children of Cornwall are officially living below the poverty line and some 40% of the Cornish population is relying on food-banks to survive. The runway at the only larg(ish) Cornish airport had to be extended to take Biden’s sky carriage… at a cost of £7.8 million. The freeloaders all flew in…. even BoJo The Clown (aka Boris Johnson). all the way from London…the Queen had the good sense to come by train. The new aircraft carrier HMS Prince of Wales (the twin of the other one, HMS Queen Elizabeth which is now on the way to the South China sea to “deter” China. with 8 jets of the RAF and 10 of the United States Navy.) So the twin, HMS Prince of Wales, was out in the bay as a “show of strength, despite the fact that it has no aircraft and leaks copious amounts of the stuff it is hesitantly floating in. The Queen summed up the farce in her speech by asking the others on the podium “Are we supposed to smile and look happy”? A lot of uncomfortable fidgeting greeted that arrow to the heart, after which they tucked into enough food to feed 10 x the 5,000, and not just with fish and bread. Surface to air missile batteries, armoured cars and so on. All that to effectively prevent the locals getting near them…. all that effort and manpower while hundreds of illegal migrants are being escorted across the channel by the French every week to land on the beaches like a victorious Nazi invading horde and then whisked off to hotels at the taxpayers expense. The benefit to that area of Cornwall was to loose two weeks of the tourist trade, all buses and trains cancelled for a week, local hospital closed, people fenced into their homes, a few narrow country lanes resurfaced on the cheap (ready to crack open next winter when the frosts hit) and general mayhem with 6,500 gun toting cops brought in from as far afield as Scotland, saturating the streets and looking quite lost…a number of whom tested positive for Covid (and, I bet, a few other holiday acquired ailments), a cruise ferry in the harbour to house 1,000 cops, the rest in hotels, bed and breakfast dives and a tent city with all mod-cons…. just like the camps at Calais? The Duchess of Cambridge and First Lady Biden visited a primary school of well-nourished kids…. but seemed to miss out on the hungry kids down at the foodbank. The new wife (number 3 and mother of the latest of the seemingly countless children) of Boris Johnson, Carrie Symonds (aka Carrie Antoinette) flounced about looking like a lost female grockle… Cornish for what in Durban is known as a “Kyk Daar” (a Vrystaater op vakansie by die groot dam) who had been hitting the local cider before succumbing to a team of ever willing local surfing boys.
A waste of money that was off the scale and two fingers up at the locals who had difficulty visiting each other
and even reaching the food-bank, let alone the doctor or the out-of-bounds hospital.