SGSA: Appendix

As mentioned in the introduction, we've had some colourful characters, has South Africa. You don't need me to tell you about Nelson Mandela, or Gandhi (whose passive resistance movement started here). Only slightly less well known are the intriguing figures of Cecil John Rhodes (ridiculously wealthy and ridiculously British), and Jan Smuts (one of our early statesmen, who incidentally coined the word "holistic").

But I'm not interested in them. I'm interested in the nutters.

"The tapeworm made me do it"

SA's favourite nutter is Dimitrios Tsafendas. John F Kennedy had Lee Harvey Oswald (and a legion of conspiracy theories); Hendrik Verwoerd, the designer of apartheid, had this guy, following orders from his tapeworm. Tsafendas was of mixed race, but not officially "coloured"; when he fell in love with a coloured woman (an illegal union, under apartheid), he tried to be reclassified coloured, but failed because "nobody ever reclassifies that way". Under the mores of the time, that attempt was probably enough to prove his insanity, but nowadays it's used to suggest that he was more politically motivated than schizo. Funny how things turn out, eh? There's been two plays about him, that I know of.

A boy forever

Dr James Barry — not to be confused with JM Barrie, the author of Peter Pan — was a surgeon in the British Army, and was posted to Cape Town for some years in the early 19th century. Not really South African, then, but we like to claim him as one of our own, because he was a she. And s/he got into a fight with Florence Nightingale. Pretty cool. There's been a play about him too.

All the world's a stage

Josephine Dale Lace was very rich, very beautiful and very theatrical (well, she did start out in life as an actress). She claimed to have borne King Edward VII's child, and to have turned down a proposal from Rhodes. Her preferred mode of transport was a carriage drawn by four zebra; when she left the house, she had a servant blow a bugle to announce her entrance to the world. (Because the zebra wouldn't be enough to get anyone's attention, I guess.) Naturally, she still haunts her house (a Herbert Baker mansion in Johannesburg's best location). There's been a book about her.

Ma-brrrr!

Slightly more up to date, we have Brenda Fassie — the "Madonna of the townships". Pint-sized (famous people always are, aren't they?), bisexual, drug-addled and completely publicity crazed, she overdosed and died a couple of years ago in hospital, with her dealer by her side. We love her because she said things like, "He knows about my lesbianism and my drugs and all the other good things I've done," and because she wasn't shy to rock up at the City Press offices (the townships' Sunday newspaper; I was working there on this particular occasion) and demand that they put her on the front page. Not that she'd done anything newsworthy. She just wanted some attention. (As I recall, she made it to page 3.) No play, that I know of, but it's surely just a matter of time. (A David Kramer/Taliep Peterson musical, perhaps?)

"I married an alien"

Elizabeth Klarer didn't wait for anyone else to tell her story — she wrote her own memoir. All about her lifelong contact with aliens, her visit to another planet (she was missing for four Earth months; apparently that's nine years on Meton), and of course, her alien love child. Exciting stuff! Can't wait for the movie.

"I looked into his blowtorch eyes"

And moving on to a different ET affair... Jani Allen was a Sunday Times journalist who became suddenly notorious around 1990 because the silly bint sued one of the London tabloids — might have been the Mirror — for reporting that she'd had an affair with Eugene Terreblanche, a fat, bearded white supremacist. The tabloid of course used the "but it's true!" defence, resulting in screeds of column inches as the newspaper hauled in all the deliciously detailed evidence it could find (the whole nation now knows that ET wore green Y-fronts, with a hole in them) and Jani argued that the lurid details in her private journals were fantasy, not fact. Which is what earns her a place in my nutters' list. I mean, shagging ET would be weird enough. But fantasising about him? Imagining that that is a remotely plausible claim? Bonkers. Quite bonkers.

Right, that's all I can think of right now. Nominations for great nutters I have missed in the comments box, please.