Not since the Oceanos sank in 1991 have so many South Africans watched a ship with such dread, hope, impatience and relief.
Almost every hour, it seems, its progress is updated to a nation biting its nails.
Early on Thursday morning we were told it had left Cape Town harbour the night before. On Thursday afternoon, it was reportedly “half way to Namibia”, a somewhat over-zealous and geographically ambitious way of saying it had just put in at St Helena Bay north of Cape Town. As you read this, it will be steaming hell for leather northwards towards Luanda and, for millions of South Africans, salvation.
Yes, the Léon Thévenin, a plucky little cable repair ship named after a French telegraph engineer and electrical pioneer, is sailing to our rescue, and soon we will all have fast internet again.
I can’t tell you why the big pipe that carries the internet down to SA stopped working. Perhaps Angola’s Isabel dos Santos tried to do a late-night EFT to the Cayman Islands and burst it. One of the major casualties of the semi-outage has been Twitter, with many South African unable to access the site. This raises the possibility that the cable was deliberately cut by a team of scuba-diving hippies who want us all to be kinder and groovier to each other.
What I can tell you, however, is that the crew of the Léon Thévenin, after taking six days to reach their destination, will need a further 48 hours to repair the break. This seems like quite a long time in a world in which data travels at the speed of light, but I prefer to imagine the whole thing if it had Eskom, rather than French telecom firm Orange, trying to repair a hi-tech cable at the bottom of the Atlantic.
In this scenario, reports of a breakdown near Angola would see Eskom swing into action by sinking all existing repair ships before commissioning two new ones, the SAS Malusi Gigaba and the SAS Brian Molefe. These would take 472 years to build at a cost of R18-trillion each, and be constructed out of sieves tied together with tissue paper.
At their official launch, the Brian Molefe would catch fire and sink, despite still being on a Venter trailer on dry land. The Malusi Gigaba, however, would float, thanks to the late addition of thousands of highly buoyant sacks of money, and sail for six days, at which point investigative journalists would reveal that it had been going in circles, on the Vaal Dam. The captain would resign in tears, demanding a R30m pension, as the unions issued a stern warning to the ocean to stop being so arrogantly large....
No, for a South African in the post-capture era, waiting just six days and 48 hours seems a miraculously small price to pay for being reconnected to the world. And so to the crew of the Léon Thévenin, a grateful nation says merci and bon chance.
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