Khaya Zuma and the Firepools of Africa

For the erstwhile powerhouse of Africa, I was a little disappointed in the photographs that came back from the Nkaaandla inspection.

For the amount of money spent, I was expecting something a little more Versailles than Khaya, to be honest.

To begin with, the Firepool with its goat-catching safety-net was not a patch on some competing African Firepools.

Trawling Google Images, I dredged up some firepools of the past. Unfortunately, most of the photos were taken after the demise of the Saviors of the People who built them, so are now in ruins, overtaken by foraging subjects and the revenge of the jungle.

First found is the Firepool at President Mobutu Sese Seko’s country residence at Gbadolite in Zaire. Tastefully tiled and surrounded by ornate paving, the firepool still shows a bit of grandeur after all these years.

President Bokassa, late of the Central African Republic possessed a firepool of impressive dimensions. Although this photo shows the ubiquitous water hyacinth has taken over, the remains of a water-slide into the pool, shows that the President was not all executions and torture but also had a playful side too.

The late Brother Leader, Muammar Gaddafi had an affinity to water. Not only was he executed emerging from a storm water conduit, but this firepool at one of his houses, shows an opulence that Nkandla wishes it had. Coming from a desert country, the acres of wooden roof are a luxury that people from more forested regions can’t really appreciate.

This African affinity to water is quite interesting because swimming is not a culturally ingrained practice. This is probably a Darwinian imperative as the Nile crocodile is by no means confined to the river of that name, but is found lurking anywhere wet in Africa. This is probably why, in a paternalistic society, it became the woman’s job to fetch the daily water. The common practice of polygamy allows the supply of water to be uninterrupted throughout the year with only very poor men, with few wives suffering water-shedding in the more voraciously crocodilian months.

So much for comparative firepools, another curious commonality I noticed while surfing Google Images, is that at least two firepool owners, namely Presidents Zuma and Bokassa were the subjects of artworks made in their images featuring their reproductive organs.

Now, I wont get into any comparative dimensions, because, being works of art, we can assume that some artistic license has been taken, but it must be said: South Africa seems to have been short-changed yet again.