On Tuesday the world watched on as world leaders, including Barack Obama, spoke at Nelson Mandela’s funeral. While they should have been concentrating on the moving words of the American President, many people were being distracted from or, if they were deaf, unable to understand what he was saying, due to the bizarre behaviour of the sign language interpreter standing next to him. To the untrained eye, the man appeared to be making it up as he went along and it turns out that, to the trained eye, this was exactly what was happening. Essentially, it has emerged that the man in question was a fake.
He wasn’t just making slight errors in his signing but getting it totally wrong and at times even making words up. The man in question, Thamsanqa Jantjie, has been labelled a “fraud” and a “clown”, who made up “childish hand gestures”. Bruno Druchen, national director of the Deaf Federation of South Africa described the ‘interpreter’ as “moving his hands around, but there was no meaning in what he used his hands for.”
It was a complete mystery how this chancer, who didn’t appear to know much sign language at all, was hired to interpret the event which was broadcast to millions of people worldwide. If they’d just wanted someone to come and flap their hands around randomly for a couple of hours, then they could have hired Mark Kermode or any past or current England goalkeeper.
Needless to say, deaf viewers were not very happy. ‘Please get RID of this CLOWN interpreter, please!’ the director of the Deaf Federation of South Africa tweeted. David Buxton, the CEO of the British Deaf Association has said that “it was hours of complete nonsense. He is clearly a fraud who wanted to stand on stage with big and important people,” adding that “it’s quite audacious if you think about it”.
Most people have failed to see the funny side of his audacious behaviour and just thought it was plain embarrassing that this was allowed to happen at such an important and high profile event. How the ‘clown interpreter’ made it onto that stage, within feet of the leader of the free world and others, is inexplicable. Considering that they allowed someone with no real qualifications on stage, you have to worry about the detail of the background checks going on. The people responsible for security must have been, as they might say in The Simpsons, busy ‘eating their watermelon‘… or something like that.
One South African news channel used their own interpreter alongside the phony, to highlight to people what he should have been signing. If you couldn’t already tell from the first video, this should really bring home what was going on. It seems so clear that he wasn’t making sense, that you wonder why he wasn’t simply replaced, rather than being left to it for hours.
The ANC, who have taken most of the blame for hiring Jantjie, say that they have used him in the past and they have “never had any complaints before,” according to spokesman Keith Khoza. This wasn’t technically true: Wilma Newhoudt-Druchen, the first deaf woman to be elected to the South African parliament, has said that footage of him from last year was sent to the ANC to complain but nothing was done. Instead he was used again for an even more high profile occasion.
Nobody really seems to understand where Jantjie has come from. The South African companies that give accreditation to official sign language interpreters all deny that they’ve ever seen him before. Most strangely, the owners of the firm who allegedly provided him for the event have vanished without a trace.
On top of everything so far, in another bizarre twist, the man at the centre of the storm has come out saying that he suffers from schizophrenia and was unable to sign properly because he was experiencing an episode. He told reporters that, whilst on stage, he started hearing voices in his head and hallucinating. You have to feel for him – schizophrenia is a difficult disability too – but his views that his performance was good and he has become a “champion of sign language” do seem wide of the mark.
This revelation has, nevertheless, somewhat clouded the picture of what was going on and this story looks set to run and run.
Just to clarify, this is NOT one of our BBS Spoofs.