The Battle of the Colours

There's a war in my pocket and it's bursting to get out. I can hear the agonising screams of the casualties (those who couldn't keep their mouths shut), the staccato of machine gunfire (their asinine comments), the rumbling of artillery fire (counter-comments and even more stupidity).The front line is drawing ever closer. Our 'Battle of the Bulge', with the enemy before us, behind us, everywhere! Derision and insults whizz by. Duck! Take cover! That was yet another close call!
No, friends, I'm not writing this from Libya or the Ivory Coast. I'm not hunkered down in a hotel room in Iraq, nor am I 'embedded' with allied forces in Afghanistan. The banal 'bunker' setting of my desk is where I'm waiting for the the 'enemy'. The problem is, much like the ironic paranoia sketched by J.M. Coetzee in 'Waiting for the Barbarians', I'm not too sure who the enemy actually is. I still haven't decided if it's even the traditional kind of foe.
Kuli Roberts marched out onto the battlefield, possibly still drunk from a previous victory (or party, more like it). She opened her mouth, stupid things were discharged like cannon shells and they exploded in glorious fashion. Roberts, ever the headline-junkie, inadvertently declared war on on an entire race, Coloured people, following on from a separate conflict sparked by the new lieutenant in charge of government miscommunication, Jimmy Manyi. His 'Oversupply of Coloureds in the Western Cape' was a quasi-diplomatic gaffe of note, one which would ensure peace talks between Black people and Coloured people remain strained in the Cape. Behind the Manyi debacle is a lilly-white, centre-right trade union, Solidarity. The organisation could easily be labelled an agitator for war, along with Manyi and Roberts. But my cynicism tells me it was simply a cheap publicity ploy. It was Solidarity which alerted all and sundry to Manyi's infamous comments. So, in my extended war metaphor, the union could be seen as Italy during WW2 - a nowhere little nation, keen to get in on a major conflict so as to raise it's profile. We all know how that worked out for Italy in the end. Everyone from Trevor Manuel, the ANCYL, DA and the ice cream seller on Clifton beach is now firing off their weapon-cum-mouths, more to make a noise and a nuisance of themselves than to actually hurt anyone. And this low-level, theoretical 'Race War' is playing itself out minus the likes of the maddened influence of a crazy Whitey like Eugene Terre'Blanche! Bizarre. Who needs the right, when the left, is becoming right? All the while us ordinary mlungus stand on the outskirts of the battlefield, perplexed, worried and confused. You mean we aren't to blame for this furore? You mean know one has tried to pin theisbitterly ugly racial spat on us? Even more bizarre. From our trenches, us Whitey's nervously peer over the edge, scouring this dirty landscape of non-sequiturs, racial innuendoes and hilariously unfunny stereotypes.
Is it a coincidence this watered-down war is taking place amid an election year? Is it a coincidence the stage for this mindless conflict is the Cape, where the DA is still struggling to win the hearts and minds of black voters, and where the so-called 'Coloured vote' is as sought after as as a cushy government job (uhum, paging Mr. Manyi)? All I know is that this White boy ain't coming up from his bunker just yet.