JOHANNESBURG. International icon and statesman Nelson Mandela is reportedly resting quietly after spending his 92nd birthday throwing eggs at pedestrians off the roof of Luthuli House, doing donuts in a 1957 Studebaker and getting into a protracted bar brawl in an East Rand drinking hole. “It was the best birthday ever,” said a tired but content Madiba.
Despite nursing a black eye, a hangover and bruised knuckles, Mr Mandela was in high spirits as he recalled a day of carousing, mild vandalism and public violence.
“My aides came in with a cake and said, ‘Happy birthday, Tata, now here is your schedule of humanitarian duties’,” said Mandela.
“I said, ‘Look, I love the orphans, but seriously, if you make me play Saint Madiba today I’m going to freaking orphan all your kiddies, capiche?’”
Rubbing Deep Heat into his shoulder, Mandela explained that he had wanted just one day on which he could be a “bad-ass hell-raiser, just for once”.
“I told them that I had given the nation 67 years and now all I wanted was the nation to give me two crates of eggs, some cans of spray-paint, my old 1957 Studebaker, and 24 hours of mayhem,” said the icon.
He said he had then phoned his surviving comrades from the Rivonia Treason Trial.
“I said, ‘Let’s commit subversive acts like it’s 1960!’,” said Mandela. “They were super stoked. Once they understood what I was saying. Most of them are a little deaf.”
He said that the Studebaker still handled “like a dream”, but added that Ahmed Kathrada had become car-sick while doing donuts in Brakpan’s main street.
“We let him out and he just egged a few shop windows while we did some next-level drifting,” said Mandela.
However, he said, while they were spraying ‘Madiba Wuz Here’ tags on the toilet walls in Henkie’s Dop ‘n Skop, a bar in Benoni, that the day’s outing “got totally ayoba”.
“A bunch of former ANC comrades who defected to the PAC in 1968 approached us, claiming that we had painted over their ‘Sobukwe Wuz Here’ tags,” said Mandela.
“I’d already done a few shooters and informed them that if they persisted with their accusations I would open a can of whuppass on them.
“They said, ‘You and what liberation army?’ so I raised my fists and said, ‘Nobody but me and my two little friends, Mkhonto and weSizwe’.”
He said that what followed was “chaotic, undisciplined, a disgrace to the principles of black consciousness and totally freaking awesome”.
“I broke a stool over one guy’s head,” he said. “I thought I knocked all his teeth out but it turned out it was just his dentures.”
Asked what he thought of the new generation of ANC leaders, he said that while Jacob Zuma was “very good at doing body shots”, Julius Malema was a “white-bread lady-boy” who would “burst into tears if you socked him in the mouth”.
“If I was ten years younger I’d take my belt to that sucker,” sighed Mandela.
“Oh to be 80 again!”
