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Checking for interns in the wardrobes a... |
Checking for interns in the wardrobes and assassins in the palm treesLITTLE did I know when I booked to fly to Cape Town for the last week of March that the leader of the greatest nation in the free world would also be there. I knew the trip was scheduled, but I assumed that a combination of domestic problems combined with the need to keep his finger on the pulse of Gulf War II would mean that US President Bill Clinton would be forced to cancel his hotel booking and lose his deposit. The extraordinary thing is that very few Capetonians appear to be talking about the visit. Indeed, one or two that I spoke to didn't even know that the Clinton circus was coming to town at all. In a city where most people think Camp David is a gay friend of the American president, this shouldn't come as too much of a surprise. After all, there are far more important things to occupy the mind like drinking cappucino at trendy pavement cafés. So Clinton's visit probably passed unnoticed by many Capetonians, particularly if they were unaffected by the traffic snarl-ups that these things cause. Apparently the president was accompanied by about 800 fellow Americans. Many of them were to look at business opportunities and to avoid the bad weather at home, but a good many of them were connected with the visit in an official capacity. South Africans who complain about the extravagances of our own globe-trotting politicians and their entourages should hang their heads in shame at even mentioning the subject, because when it comes to hosing it against the wall the Yanks are in a league of their own. All right, the US economy is so large that nobody really cares that much. What are a few billon dollars here and there? Anyway, an official visit to Africa is a special case because it gives African-American White House staff a chance to discover their roots; something they all apparently like to do until they realise that they would probably be living in shacks with no running water if their ancestors hadn't been abducted by slave traders. Still, it is a hell of a lot of people just for a two-day visit, so why are they here and what do they do for their money? There is a suggestion that Washington was warned that Cape Town has some of the most beautiful girls in the world and the 800 travelling partners are simply here as witnesses to testify that the president didn't get up to any of his old tricks. More realistically though, they are here to make sure Bill and Hill have a great time, don't meet any timewasters, don't get interviewed by right-wing extremists with an ulterior motive and get home safely. That last one is very important, particularly as last weekend Cape Town provided the setting for a gangland gunfight not 2km from the hotel in which the first couple stayed. The advance guard have apparently been here for months, much to the delight of a certain hotel group. They are the security people whose job it is to make sure the phones work, that there are no listening devices hidden in the shower heads and no interns hiding in the wardrobes. There is also a special contingent of highly trained interior decorators whose job it is to redecorate, at the American taxpayer's expense, any room where the president or the first lady might linger for longer than 10 minutes. They picked this habit up from Hollywood where film stars are notorious for gutting entire hotel floors and having them redesigned to their own peculiar specifications. With any luck this idiosyncrasy won't be picked up locally, although I wouldn't put it past Winnie to try. There was a suggestion that the US security people wanted to seal all the manhole covers in Cape Town and dig up the palm trees lining the drive to the Mount Nelson just in case Iraqi hit men were hiding in them. Even Table Mountain didn't escape the attention of the men in black who thought that the top of the mountain was flat enough for hostile helicopters to land and asked the Cape Town municipality to make it more mountainous during the president's visit. The refreshing thing about living in a new democracy is that we haven't yet discovered crass commercialism. Nobody has rushed out a special commemorative wine called "Oral Sensation", there are no souvenir Clinton visit T-shirts with the slogan "Bill blows into Cape Town" and no tacky coffee mugs with smudgy pictures of Madiba and Bill. More's the pity.
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