Riaan Cruywagen: Man van Staal!

Imagine that there was a secret that the South African government didn’t want you to know. Imagine that the secret was hidden in plain sight.

I’ve found that secret, and it is both profound and disturbing.

Riaan Cruywagen, well, at least the Riaan Cruywagen we all see on the SABC Afrikaans news….is a robot.

Wait! Wait! Don’t close the window yet!! Let me explain!!!

It all started one night flipping between channels. By chance I caught the tail end of a SABC Afrikaans news broadcast. And who should be reading it, but a face from my distant childhood: Riaan Cruywagen!

Riaan Cruywagen: Robot in Disguise…

And more than the shock of seeing a comforting old face, was the shock that the face in question hadn’t aged in more than a decade and a half!

Then it hit me: Riaan was a ‘droid.

Now what possible evidence would I have to back this up? Well, for starters he looks YOUNGER now than when I last saw him almost 15 years ago. The hair is exactly the same. Its as if they put him in a Zip-Lock bag every evening to preserve his crunchiness and freshness (I pondered that theory for a second and then promptly dismissed it as “creepy” and “wierd”). His skin tone is far too light for a normal human being.

See, how this came to light is that the real Riaan Cruywagen emigrated to Holland during the unrest in the 1990’s. In an attempt to circumvent the inevitable panic among the population that would follow at the departure of such an august personality, the old South African government developed the “Realistic-Imitation-Amorphous-Android-Nano-Bot” or the “Riaan-Bot” for short. Now they could have Riaan read the news for at least the next 50 years without interruption. Originally built as a series of 10 robots, only one remains. And that one remaining robot is the one we see on TV every night (Unit 10).

The reason why his skin tone is so light is that Unit 1 worked so well that the SABC thought that they would never need more than 5 units. The last 5 weren’t well maintained and were stored on the SABC roof, left to weather the elements on their own. As the first PC’s came out the “Stoned” virus corrupted the operating system of the initial core of 5 robots. When the last 5 robots were recovered from the roof, only 1 remained fully functional (if somewhat bleached). Namely Unit 10.

A very reliable source from the local pub has informed me that a combat function was also built into the Riaan-bots. After all, if you’re going to spend that kind of money developing an android you might as well put a gun on it, right? The Riaan-bot preserves its precious outer skin during battle by transforming into a more utilitarian shape, ready for battle (See image below).

The Riaan-Bot, fully transformed and ready to Rock!

So the question currently on your mind has to be: Whatever happened to the REAL Riaan Cruywagen? Well, he’s currently living a comfortable life in a quiet corner of the Dutch countryside in a palatial estate just outside of Amsterdam with his wife, and is grandpa to many little Riaan-lings. He is able to afford to live on such a huge estate with servants because he struck a deal with the then government to pay him royalties every time they used his “image” on TV.

And that explains why the programming on SABC stays so crappy, even though hundreds of thousands of us pay our TV licenses every year.

All that TV license money goes towards keeping Riaan in clogs.

Rest easy though. Should Zimbabwe ever attempt to invade our fertile shores, you can sleep in peace knowing that the Riaan-Bot will be first in line to defend our democracy, giving the ungodly hordes a facefull of good ‘ole South African Lead!