I incline towards a word which best describes for me the deep sense of disease which I am made to feel in the country of my birth in the first month of the year 2023. The word is “miasma”.
The miasma theory held that bad diseases were caused by miasma, a noxious form of bad air that caused epidemics. This led to the notion that bad experiences had the odour of rotten or rotting flesh, which gave credence that “…there's something rotten in the state of Denmark” in that great play by the Bard.
It follows that one could say of a drunkard that the day after his binge that “…he has a miasma of alcohol around him”.
The “bad smell” theory was posited by Hippocrates in the 4th century.
Scientists bought into the idea that bad experiences had a bad odour, even to the extent they believed one could become obese from inhaling the smell of food.
It is no surprise this theory was eventually abandoned by physicians and scientists after 1880, who replaced it with the germ theory of disease. Specific germs, not miasma, caused specific diseases.
But getting rid of odour remained as a cultural imperative (thankfully) because it made the cleaning up of putrefying waste a high priority for cities.
Strangely, the word describes, for me at least, the malodorous stench that I experience when I hear words like “Eskom”, or “politicians”, or “ANC”.
The same notion of a bad smell pervades when the names of certain individuals who run this country are mentioned. There can be no doubt there is something rotten in the state of the Republic of South Africa.
Ancient as the notion might now be, miasma comes closer to any other word for me to describe what greets me when I wake up. It is not a question of bitterness, or chagrin, which drives my lament. It is a deep-seated helplessness when I am denied the chance to roll up my sleeves and help clean up whatever is causing the stench.
Those miscreants who have put personal gain and instant riches before good governance emanate a stench that has become unbearable, as malodorous as the cheap coal which fuels our crashing generators.
If by now there is a notion that I am being unfair or high-handed (even high-minded), please press pause and consider what I am saying in the light of where your children will be in the next 10 years.
Because that is the best-case scenario for replacing the broken machinery that is Eskom. How long it will take to fix the broken machinery of the ANC is a moot notion. It can happen next year at the polls, or you can vote these miserable free-loaders into power for another five years.
Bloated salaries represent the stinking bloated carcasses of beached dead whales. Recycling friends and cronies to repeat the mistakes that left us nowhere after 30 years smells as bad as decomposing flesh.
For those who are interested, synonyms for miasma are: stink, reek, stench, odour, malodour, pong, niff, whiff and guff.
We no longer believe evil has a smell, but I cannot find another word to describe the air around me. We all have one life, one spin around the mulberry bush, one chance for falling around the sun on a little blue ball consisting mostly of water.
Is this the best that the government in power can give? They who made race-categories redundant and then promptly started acting out of character?
This country is good. Our lorries roll, our supermarkets bustle, our peaches swell on the trees to plump ripeness that bring sensuous joy.
But what is that pong that assails the senses? What is that miasma that sullies the air I breathe? Is it corruption? Ineptitude? Stupidity? Pig-headedness? We are in dire need of air-freshener.
* Alex Tabisher.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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