CHARMAIN NAIDOO: There it was again, the reptilian laugh as the MPs screamed

Thrashings were still acceptable when I was a girl. Not only acceptable, but often encouraged. It was good for character building, Mr M used to tell us, his 13-year-old maths class.

It was his way of explaining his delight in cruel and unusual punishments for his Standard Six class.

For some reason, standing on one’s chair seemed to be the appropriate tool of torture if you talked in class or struggled to find the X and Y intercepts of an equation.

Climbing up onto a high stool does not seem like a harsh punishment if you think about it. And yet it was mortification for us girls in our short(ish) skirts. The humiliation of being stared at, not knowing if the boys next to or behind you were peeking up your skirt.

Mr M would be struck off if that happened today. He’d have been struck if my lovely dad, the headmaster of the school, had heard of it. My dad believed in reasoning, not beating. He believed that adults set the tone for the behaviour of young people, that children responded to an environment of discipline and fairness in a disciplined, fair way.

Spare the rod, spoil the child was not in his lexicon.

Like my gentle dad, my grandpa had been a rough peasant whose only admonishment was to raise his gruff raspy voice to his five sons and two daughters. It was enough, my dad used to say, to put the fear of God into you. Grandpa was slow to anger, but once riled, his bark was arresting, instilling the requisite fear into one of his errant children.

So my dad outsourced the horrible part of his job to his deputy who seemed to have no qualms about caning male students.

The headmaster, you see, was required – according to the school code of conduct – to cane boys for some or other serious transgression. Cuts they were called. Six of the best.

Dad couldn’t bring himself to. I once heard him tell my mother it was barbaric and floggings belonged in the dark ages.

The only time I saw him condone the thrashing was when a 15-year-old boy was accused, and found guilty of, house breaking and assault.

It felt fell to my dad to discipline him as the family whose house he’d broken into didn’t want to press charges. The headmaster, the man whose wife had been pushed, who fell on the sharp edge of a table and cut a deep gash in her arm, should mete out punishment.

My father addressed the school assembly, called it a heinous crime, spoke about respect for women, and men and other people’s property. He said how it pained him to inflict pain, but that was the only course of action left to him because the boy was a minor.

The family he’d hurt had taken pity on him by not reporting the incident to the police, an act of grace my dad called it.

And so I have a solid understanding of and experience in the execution of “fitting” punishment.

Mercy and grace come into the process of punishment. So says a holy woman whose life is devoted to peace, and who is a peace ambassador at the United Nations.

She sat on the panel that ruled on the execution of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, accused of crimes against humanity and the death of hundreds.

I asked how she could reconcile peace with the death sentence. Forgiveness, she said, was necessary before punishment was meted out. Only then is it fair and without rancour and anger.

And so this week, I dug deep to find some way to understand the violence and the racism and the anger and the confusion and the hate at the State of the Nation address in Parliament.

I looked inside to find forgiveness, mercy and grace and came up empty.

There were several things that not only alarmed me, but also stirred in me an anger and sense of foreboding about what is to come.

The worst of it was not so much the astonishingly violent expulsion of the EFF from the chamber, though that was shocking. (There was a woman with wild hair wearing a white shirt that identified the security team brought in to evict the men and women in red who stood in the doorway and just lashed out at EFF members – who were already restrained – as they were carried out.)

Then there were the screams of “Racist” and “Sell out” from the floor as the Democratic Alliance members walked out.

Outside parliament was the chilling line up of troops there to “control” the protesting crowds.

It was blood-run-cold stuff and the EFF claims that security forces were carrying cable-ties and “biological warfare” injections to contain their protest.

But while all of that was terrible, the worst of it was the behaviour of the president, the man referred to as a constitutional delinquent, and his cold, reptilian handling of it all.

He sat, stony faced. And when, in the end, the EFF had been violently expelled, the DA had walked out amid hurled obscenities and expletives – waving their Remember the Esidemeni 94 flags – and Mosiuoa Lekota had walked out after being asked to leave, the president stood up and laughed.

He laughed. He he he he…

A snigger. A snicker. A derisive laugh. Sounds of ridicule and scorn. Scoffing at his ANC detractors in the house who squirmed their discomfort, but stayed; scoffing at us.

In the midst of the mayhem he’s caused, snideness. We were treated to his mocking contempt.

Many among those ANC men and women who stayed looked like they would have liked to join the DA in its walk out. 

That ridiculing laugh was as directed at many of them as it was the rest of the country.

That laugh… it was the most shocking thing of the night of the SONA.

I wondered what my gentle dad would have to say of this act of extreme disrespect.

It felt like the grown ups had left the children alone in the nursery. It feels like the grown ups are not coming back for a while.