This is before the powers that be figured out that an airport that close to the hustle and bustle of the city could result in aeroplanes crashing on top of people’s heads (and ruining their expensive hairstyles) or inside the stadium when a match is in full swing.
When the only queen known to man touches down in your country it is a big deal. We were hurriedly bundled out of classrooms and given little flags to wave to the queen as she made that long stroll with her queen strides waving to the multitudes.
We really felt special until we got to the airport to find that all the schools in Gaborone were there but just like in the movie Titanic (when the band played on in the face of trouble) we kept waving our flags in glee. Nothing could rain on our little parade.
We were too young to realise why her visit should take precedence over our education. Later on as we grew up and started appreciating global issues it became clear that there’s no point in getting educated without knowing the queen.
More recognizable than the Pope the queen is a modern Pied Piper. Wherever she goes there’s a posse of people following. When the queen left our shores the more opportunistic parents immortalized her name by naming their baby girls Queen, Elizabeth or Mmamosadinyana (the latter being a layman’s translation of queen to Setswana) and hoped their kids’ looks will pan out like those of the queen. It didn’t happen most of the time but ours is a nation of hopeful beings. So this little family project resulted in queens with controversial looks.
Clearly the queen’s beauty cannot be achieved by magic-wanding it with a name. Right now I am imagining how the funeral will be like. In our culture (most of which is copied from the British culture manual) the funeral ceremony of a very important person takes a very long time. It can start off at 5am with the viewing of the body and then speeches of friends, relatives, co-workers, ex-colleagues, councilors, political party representative, local team representatives, kid’s representative. There will also be a speech by the person who nursed the deceased to death.
We always honour and revere people who nurse deceased people to death and want to hear their journey with the deceased’s health and how they failed to stem the tide – a classic case of rewarding ineptitude.
There will be a song by women from the burial society which the deceased was a member of. Some time will also be allocated to a rabid preacher who will poor scorn on the mourners because they are refusing to repent. Most of the people in attendance don’t like the preacher because he strikes raw nerves but they should be grateful because this is the closest they can get to God.
By the time the mourners leave for the cemetery it will be close to midday. So I assume the queen’s sendoff will follow a similar path but because this is the queen whose reign unofficially stretched to many now unwilling subjects in the Commonwealth there will be between 100-200 speakers. That means many will be nicely exasperated by the time the hearse leaves for the cemetery.
None of the mourners would have ever attended a queen’s funeral and the sheer length of the ceremony will affect many itineraries. You cannot go to England without throwing in a sightseeing trip or a shopping expedition in your programme. As with local funerals the first goat has been slaughtered. We saw the pictures of the unfortunate goat. Many will follow.
It is a Commonwealth thing to kill goats during funerals and it will be sacrilege not to do so for the mother of the Commonwealth. Budget permitting, I will be a part of the whole spectacle. Hopefully I can get the chance to speak and say how me and the queen go back a long way (1979 to be precise) and how she’s the kindest person I know. I mean when Prince Charles was here in the 80s I shook his hand and that should count for something. One could say I was dealt a royal flush by Prince Charles who is now going to be the new queen.
I was counting on hitching a ride on President Mnangagwa’s flight but he has been denied a visa entry- clearly a result of Robert Mugabe’s jabs at the queen and her country. At one point Uncle Gabriel ‘mistakenly’ made a huge claim that Zim is better than England and this infuriated people around the queen enough for them to say ‘Don’t ever set your queen-defying foot in our country’. Nowhere did it include Mnangagwa until now.
And that has grossly affected my plans. (For comments, feedback and insults email [email protected]) Thulaganyo Jankey is a training consultant who runs his own training consultancy that provides training in BQA- accredited courses. His other services include registering consultancies with BQA and developing training courses. Contact him on 74447920 or email [email protected].
