Holiday In Zimbabwe

Rock and Roll himself with Colonel Sir Lawrence Rock and Roll literally having his back.

Every day that goes by, Africa gets weirder and weirder and weirder and weirder and weirder and weirder and weirder and weirder and weirder and weirder and weirder and weirder and weirder and weirder and weirder and weirder and weirder and weirder and weirder and weirder and weirder and weirder. The more fucked-up the country is, the weirder the phenomenon. If the president has blown the country’s wealth, magical shamans come to save the day. If there’s no leader at all, everyone decides to spend half the day digging mass graves and the other half filling them. Just kidding, they spend the whole day filling them, and if there are no graves they just let the bodies rot there in a horrible position that when you see pictures of it you go, “Why the fuck did I ignore the warning before clicking on that? Now I’m going to have that image in my head for the rest of my goddamned life. Fuck.” What the hell is going on over there? Like, what’s the death toll in Darfur at by now, a zillion billion? We’ve had child armies where they’re told a plastic cross around your neck makes you impervious to bullet wounds. And a man who calls himself Michael Jackson and slaughters your parents in front of you so you have no choice but to join his gang until you get to the next family. There’s General Butt Naked and his ability to become invisible when people shoot at him. What about people in South Africa fucking babies to cure themselves of AIDS? I know—try this: How about the president of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, telling every nonwhite in the country they can kill all the whites in the country and take their land? Even if that means standing over miles of crops you have no idea what to do with (now there’s planning ahead, Mugabs). That went well, didn’t it? No, it didn’t. Well, the what-the-fuck has just been turned up a notch as a new guy has stepped in to take Mugabe’s place, and the Hitler-mustachioed president is shitting bricks the size of General Butt Naked’s gold bars. His name is Rock and Roll (that’s right, Rock and Roll), and he subsists only on the blood of dying virgins. The more pain they suffered on the way to Death Town, the more delicious their blood is. We really need to start making playing cards of these guys. Rock and Roll is 5'1". He is said to be 17 years old. He grew up an orphaned nomad in the Sudan and his powers include: Immortality (as long as the blood keeps flowing), invisibility (how original), immunity to bullets (again, is that all you got?), the ability to fly (finally, a new one), the ability to impregnate women without intercourse (now we’re talking), and the ability to crawl into your dreams and fuck with you à la Freddy (like Kim Jong Il, Rock and Roll is a huge movie buff, so a lot of his shit is ripped off from Hollywood).

“ROCK AND ROLL IS DEAD. HE DOES NOT INTIMIDATE ME, AND HE DOES NOT INTIMIDATE THE PEOPLE OF ZIMBABWE.”

Despite the mind-popping insanity of this guy’s universe, Rock and Roll’s following is growing. Since Mugabe stripped the land of all its wealth by giving away the family farm to murderous children ironically called war veterans, Zimbabwe has no industry whatsoever and is prepared to be anyone’s dog for a bone—the crazier the better. CRAZY LIKE A FOX MAYBE! As far as mentally-ill, bloodthirsty tyrants go, Rock (can we just call him that? I’m getting sick of typing Rock and Roll again and again. I feel like Alan Freed) is not the megalomaniac nutbar you think he is. In fact, his setup is pretty organized. He has a deputy called Deputy Rock Guitar and a Colonel called Sir Lawrence Rock and Roll and a whole hierarchy from privates up to himself including a man called Vice President Vice President. Why? I don’t fucking know. I guess because Africa has gone completely haywire and if you want to become a mad messiah destroying everything in your wake, you have to have a system. Help me out here. Why do alcoholics always shave a lot and slick their hair back? Some questions have no answers. Anyway, back to the article.

Dan Fleming, one of those idiots who waste their time with Doctors Without Borders, almost lost his life trying to rescue a virgin from Rock and Roll’s grip. He is one of the few victims that have lived to tell the tale. “He had already drunk most of her blood and just left her to die,” says Fleming, still panicking as though it had happened yesterday, “but one of the last guys out saw me and went bananas. They all came running back and started kicking me in the face and in the penis.” Fleming had heard a rumor that Rock and Roll sees guitars as holy and is petrified of their power. “I started playing the air guitar because I heard he was scared of it and it worked. I couldn’t believe it. They were about to behead me but as soon as I started going neer-ner-neer-n’neer-neer they started yelling at each other and ran away. I was like, ‘Ooooh-kaaaaye’.”

President Mugabe is floundering at this point and is unable to protect Doctors Without Anything or journalists or even himself. His army is made up of a paltry 12,000 shoeless soldiers, 42 percent of whom have AIDS, and assassination attempts are up to three a day, but Mugabe stays strong. “Rock and Roll is dead,” he was quoted as saying at a very clandestine press conference last Thursday, “He does not intimidate me, and he does not intimidate the people of Zimbabwe.” Yeah, sure. A recent survey discovered that over 87 percent of Zimbabweans (is that how you say it?) believe in almost all of Rock’s powers. In fact, so many people have watched him fly away from bullets and then become invisible, you start to go “What if?” I mean, if anywhere needs a fucked-up superhero to totally rewrite the history of their country, it’s Zimbabwe. Sure, killing virgins and drinking their blood is fucked-up, but who are we to impose our values on magic people from another universe? If Superman came down here and was saving the earth and all he asked was that we kill two puppies a day, I’m sure someone would say to PETA, “Hey, look! What’s that over there!?” and then run behind the shed to step on a baby dog’s head while the activists were distractivised. Shit, PETA’s killed thousands of puppies in the name of the greater good. We could get them to do it for him.

If Rock and Roll were to run for mayor of New York, he would be up against a very tiny Jewish man who is already doing a pretty good job. Not going to happen. However, Rock and Roll is essentially running for president in Hell. When you think of the entire universe, you have to understand that it is infinite. Therefore its possibilities are infinite. Therefore it is entirely plausible that life exists outside here. And if it does, it’s entirely plausible that that life-form would want to come here and get down to some RE-form, you know what I’m saying?

Anyway, there can be no doubt that Mugabe’s done. Nobody has the wealth to start from scratch the way a new Iraqi leader might or the way Mandela did when we gave him South Africa. So the only hope for this country is an incredibly extreme superhero who, odds are, is not magic at all, but fuck… you never know. Besides, you got any better ideas?

TOMMY ARAK SMITHS