Umshini wami

Image via Wikipedia

South Africa's President, Jacob Zuma, has just completed a state visit to France where, among other matters, he was due to discuss French involvement in the supply of nuclear power to his country - though why anyone would want the leaky products of Areva when South Africa had its own super Pebble Mill nuclear project is beyond me.

Well, it isn't really beyond me. I just wish it were.

Why develop your own projects, encouraging your own R and D talent and resources when more people (people who matter, you understand, not ordinary people) can get their hands in the till by encouraging international commercial cooperation.
What has efficiency, safety and value for money to do with it?

This is part of the Alice Through the Looking Glass world of the financial and political nexus model which has superseded democracy as the mode of government in first world countries.

Still to return to the visit.
It is devoutly to be hoped that the French head of protocol managed a better job of rendering that stately and haunting South African national anthem 'Nkosi sikelel' iAfrica' than did his counterparts of the French Rugby Union when France played South Africa at home in 2009.

He probably did, while as the FRU's aim was, as ever when France organises a tournament, to disrupt the opposition, the aim of Sarkozy is to keep Zuma happy.

He'll be happy with the dosh dished out by France, to be sure....but he is looking for more.

South Africa ordered six of the new Airbus 380s...but thanks to technical hitches...like cutting the wiring too short...and financial shenanigans...there were delays.
The delays were such that South Africa cancelled its order.
But Airbus kept the deposit, and South Africa would like it back.

Now, anyone who has lived for sometime in France and has had a problem with white goods will know that Zuma is on a hiding to nothing here.....and even more so because the sums involved are large.
As are the white goods at issue.

merewoman will confirm this after her epic batttle over the Philips Senseo coffee maker which didn't..make coffee, that is. She had to threaten to bring in the heavy mob.

I too have experience of the delights of French customer relations, from the woman who upped the price of the embroidered sheets at a vide grenier while I was still buying them on the grounds that I liked them and that I was English......the shock and insult to Scots blood was such that she made no sale that day.....to commerce proper.

The first was when I was new to France, in the days when bricolage - DIY - was a serious affair of men dressing in special overalls to hide in their sheds and take six months to make a bread board.
None of the big chains, the Bricodepots and Bricomans, existed and the smaller ones, like Mr. Bricolage, catered only for the six months bread board makers.

So, needing paint, I went to town and found a shop which not only sold paint but mixed it as well...which was handy as the colours on offer ready to go as it were were less than inspiring.
There seemed to be vast quantities of eau de nil, which had featured largely in the houses of my youth to the extent that I never wished to see it again and certainly not on the shutters which I had taken from their hinges and brought to the barn to work on.

There are moments when you find yourself on a ladder at a first floor window heaving an oak shutter as tall as yourself off two sets of iron hinges when you wonder if there is some sort of mathematical formula for how far backward you can lean with the shutter in your hands before the ladder decides to follow your general direction.
If there is, I don't want to know about it. Making fear concrete would be more than I could bear.
Especially when you have to do it another eleven times or risk leaving the house look uneven.

I had decided on a sort of drab olive colour and found something approximating to it on the chart offered by the lady with the mixing machine.
I decided how much I wanted and she duly mixed paint and banged down paint pot lids...those special French ones which prevent you from closing the tin properly after use in the fond hope that the paint will dry out and you will be forced to buy a new tin when touching up your paintwork a year later.
She wrote the mix number on the bill...thus confirming my suspicions that I would be needing more the next year and I paid up, wondering how it was that I was funding the French national debt singlehanded while just seeking to paint my shutters and went on my way.

That oak soaked up paint the way traditional fast bowlers supped ale.
It swallowed the primer....equivalent in cost to buying France a new nuclear submarine.
It slurped the undercoat.....enough to fund half an Ariane missile.
It turned its attentions to the olive drab......it clearly liked it - a cheeky little number with turpentine overtones and a long finish.

I returned to the paint shop.

I handed over the bill with the mix number and Madame got on with mixing. She seemed in an awful hurry to bang on the lids when she had finished and I could see why.
The colour was nothing like the olive drab...more like a matt black.

That's not the right colour!

Yes it is.

It's not. Look at this paint stain on my hand.

It is. It has to be. This is the colour for that number.

Then the number must be wrong. I had olive green paint and this is nearly black.

It will settle when you stir it.

No it won't. I'm not taking that.

But I've mixed it. You have to. Anyway, you can use it for undercoat.

I don't want black paint. The whole point of putting the mix number on the bill was to avoid this.

You must have written it yourself and made a mistake...being a foreigner, you didn't understand French.

The handwriting for the number and the rest of the bill are the same....

As I left the shop I saw something I had previously overlooked......the notice on the door for the chamber of commerce publicity drive.

The customer is king.

So now we know why Louis XVI ended up under the blade of the guillotine....he must have kicked up about the paintwork at Versailles.

Given that persistence at tin of paint level...what chance does President Zuma have when it comes to millions of euros worth of white goods?

There is a chance that they might try to divert him with a bunga bunga party....to which he is as partial as Signor Berlusconi...but as it is unimaginable that an African President could be bribed by anything so trivial I suspect that he will have to invite those concerned to an evening at the South African embassy in Paris to explain the realities of the case. I am sure that once EADS directors and French government ministers hear him singing his favourite song, the advisability of coughing up will become apparent.

He will entertain them with his rendering of 'Umshini wami'...

Loosely translated as 'Hand me down my machine gun'.

Why don't I want to be French?

A debate is taking place on what it means to be French, inspired by the minister dealing, or not, with immigration, Eric Besson.....whose ex wife's book details his refusal to vow fidelity at their wedding ceremony, a refusal validated by what she has to say about his serial infidelities during the marriage. Perish the thought that a politician could be inconsistent, so one can only suppose that he thinks marital infidelity is one component of the French identity he wishes to promote among native French and immigrants alike. I knew that he opposed women wearing the burqua, but his wife's revelations now lead me to suppose that it might not be a cultural question as such, but more of an objection to an obstacle to his ability to size up the talent.

Wanting to have your cake and eating it might well figure as a more general French characteristic.....contestants in the Koh Lanta television 'reality' show - a designation which has always puzzled me given the nature of these programmes - have claimed that they were not participants, but, get this, employees! Furthermore, a court agrees with them, and they have been awarded their entitlement - a few days paid at the minimum wage, the SMIC, and their social security payments made for the period. The television company concerned has, following the logic of the ruling, decided that as the winner was in fact an employee they don't have to pay him the prize he won by eating beetles and suffering the humiliations inseparable from reality shows, just a few days' pay on the SMIC. Not quite what he bargained for, but then, anything to do with eating cake in France has been a bit risky ever since the days of Marie Antoinette.

As part of Monsieur Besson's campaign to emphasise French identity, it has been proposed that children should sing the national anthem, 'La Marseillaise', at least once a year in their schools. A brief perusal of the words reveals a certain lack of warmth toward those other than the native French.....are the French to support the presence in their country of foreign cohorts who would impose their own laws upon the French? Well, bang goes the European Union then. Impure blood shall flow in the furrows of the fields.....we get the message, thanks. France is for the French.

Which brings us full circle. What is it that makes someone French? Born in France...perhaps, in terms of nationality, in formal terms, but what makes someone shout for the French team in the Six Nations rugby tournament, or for 'les bleus' - the national football team? I don't qualify, that's for sure. In the last rugby world cup, held in France, France beat England in the preliminary rounds.....all around us, deep in the country, the night air resounded to 'La Marseillaise' bawled from every farm - impure blood had appropriately been made to flow, no doubt. When England beat France in the semi finals, no sound whatever rent the firmament, except for 'Rule Britannia' blasting out from the speakers on our terrace. If I'd had 'Hearts of Oak' I'd have played that too. I'd never pass the Tebbit test, any more than would the north african immigrants and their families who whistled down 'La Marseillaise' at a football match between France and Algeria in Paris.

Perhaps we should be posing a different question. Why is it that people who come to France to live and work don't want to identify with the country? Let's start with why I was playing 'Rule Britannia' during the rugby world cup as I am more at ease and, shall we say authoritative, in the examination of my own reactions than in pontificating about others.
I cannot say that I ever thought of myself in terms of my nationality...I had a culture and the associated assumptions and I thought that these were common to Europe....our shared christian, post Roman heritage. Then I moved to France.
I cannot claim either that I swiftly became aware that it was not just a question of language...I was living out in the sticks among ordinary people, learning to communicate, imbibing their customs and adjusting to their mentality. Except that I could not adjust. Why should decent, upright people feel that
'Nous sommes pour rien'........'We count for nothing'?

I began to learn. The French Revolution of 1789 mght have overturned royal power, but it was instigated and shaped by the French middle class, much more adept than the 'aristos' in exacting the last sou from the peasants living on the land these lawyers and merchants bought at the auctions of the property of those who had emigrated from France as the old order crumbled. Nothing much changed in the countryside until the German occupation in the 1940s when the farmers found that they could sell their produce at top prices both to the occupying power and to the starving people from the towns, so that at the end of the second world war, the farmers could afford to buy out the leases from their bourgeois landlords, impoverished by the war, and could become independent. Post war food policy and the Common Agricultural Policy further strengthened their position to the point where their interests began to mesh with those of the bourgeoisie proper, with whom they began to assimilate and to inherit the fruits of 1789. If you're not part of that group then, truly, you count for nothing.


I think that it is this fruit from a rotten tree that sets on edge the teeth of immigrants...the fanatical nationalism, the sense of superiority, the wish to impose, born of an era when the new France was surrounded on all sides by enemies......the vision of the state as embodying the will of the people - and woe betide any sector of the people who disagree........the obscene lust for money and the pursuit of the last brass farthing, the actual religion of the bourgeoisie who came to power at the fall of the monarchy.

As an immigrant, all goes well while you play the game. While you accept that someone incompetent will be appointed because they are French even though your qualifications are superior.....while you see your daughter, with a gift for languages, being directed to a career as a secretary rather than as a graduate level translator, because you were not born in France....while your children learn from newly qualified teachers, sent to the sink schools in the largely immigrant suburbs by an administration that doesn't consider it worthwhile to send in experienced staff to improve the life chances of children of non French parents.....while you accept the third world standards of service.....while you accept the rip offs from French artisans because you bear a foreign name....

When an immigrant doesn't accept his or her lot, the solids hit the fan.
I remember the employee of France Telecom, when upbraided for total incompetence, telling me that if I didn't like it, I could go home - not just to my house, but to my country of origin.
The railway clerk who refused to issue me with my prepaid and prebooked ticket responding to my request as to what I was supposed to do to get home with the lapid statement
'Vous etes foutue, Madame.' 'You're f.......ed, lady.'
The plumber who came in with an estimate for putting in a stop cock that would have paid for a last minute holiday in Turkey who became a red as a Turkey cock when it was queried, announcing that he had had enough of British clients....they shouldn't ask for estimates when they couldn't pay.

I have and have had a number of French friends, ordinary people, just trying to keep their heads above water. I have a few immigrant friends, not all of them British, either working or retired in France. The common denominator is that we all try to see things as they are, not as they are presented, and, in my case, that means playing 'Rule Britannia' when the England fifteen hammer France because I don't appreciate being treated as a second class citizen in a third rate society.

Now........let's just have cricket in the Olympics and I'll have to go looking for a recording of
'Advance, Australia fair.'