Royal Pains

Did you know South Africa has it's very own royal family? No! Wait! Make that families! That trusty online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, informs me we have no less than 14 royal groupings of relations, that's excluding Queen Elizabeth and her kin and extended inbreeds. There's the more publicised (usually for all the wrong reasons) Zulu monarchy. His Royal Highness, the Wearer of Dead Animals and the Regent Waster of Money, King Goodwill Zwelithini, is probably better known in Kwazulu-Natal than the Windsors. To the rest of the country his and his family's reputation is characterised by their opulent and flagrant squandering of money. I guffawed at a recent news story where a spokesperson of the Royal Zulu family, Prince Something or other, referred to his boss as 'His Majesty'. I suppose if we speaking royalese he's sticking to the rules. But should the rest of us follow suit and even give a crap that there's this pointless family, perpetually intoxicated by an anachronistic insistence by government to entertain and kow-tow to these so called regal buffoons and their planet-sized egos? Should we then start dishing out state funds to the Mahlangu dynasty or the Bafokeng monarchs and every tiny Khoisan clan with delusions of grandeur.
What about the MaKhwinde Dynasty or the AmaDlomo and amaHala Dynasties? I once worked with a woman who insisted she was a real life traditional Xhosa princess. Apart from her penchant for expensive cars, an irritatingly over-inflated ego and neck which she seemed to have been trained so as to guiding her eyes down on all whom she spoke to. I could never quite understand her verbose explanations at how she was of the blue blood type. For all I know she was exploiting my white tendencies and ignorance. Let's not forget how, like the royal families of Europe, regal bloodlines across the length and breadth of time, are s deeply entrenched in inbreeding, incest, blood lust, war, greed, corruption and arrogance, they've lost touch with reality. When some jump to protect the Royal Zulus of South Africa, they conveniently forget, these are the same people who don't find anything wrong with selling off teenage girls, under the guise of arranged marriages (a concept so far removed from modern thinking it belongs along side state-sanctioned public executions). It's these royals who don't seem to understand the concept of working for a living. They're quite happy to live off state-sponsored budgets set aside for them, while millions starve and rot amid unemployment and poverty.