LOOKING FOR WITCHES TO BURN

Andrew Kenny says that his fellow South

Africans view with numb detachment their country's slide into murderous chaos

Natal THE END OF empire is coming to South Africa, and so we have a nervous interest in the histories of fallen power. On the dusty shelf of a second-hand bookshop in Cape Town, I picked up A Short History of Eng- land by G.K. Chesterton and came upon this passage on the state of Britain after the collapse of Roman rule:

. . . something like this extraordinary transi- tion takes place in British history at the end of the purely Roman period. We have to do with rational and almost mechanical accounts of encampment and engineering,■ of busy bureaucracy and occasional frontier wars, quite modern in their efficiency and ineffi- ciency; and then all of a sudden we are read- ing of wandering bells and wizard lances, of wars against men as tall as trees or as short as toadstools. The soldier of civilisation is no longer fighting with Goths but with gob- lins...

Something like that has happened in South Africa. Take, for example, the fol- lowing two incidents: One year ago next week, at the squatter settlements of Crossroads and Xonkizwe, on the outskirts of Johannesburg, a band of black killers, mainly Xhosa, hacked to death 32 innocent black people, mainly Zulus. The response from the world's press and the anti-apartheid movement was silence. The slaughter of blacks by blacks was, as usual, considered very boring, with- out moral content, as if one uninteresting pack of animals had killed another.

Two and a half months later, under a full moon at Boipatong, in the same region, another band of black killers, mainly Zulu, hacked to death 42 innocent black people, mainly Xhosas. But this time from some- where there was a hint, an inkling, a rumour that flitting among the assassins in the shadows of the moon there were white men. And this was enough to produce ban- ner headlines around the world and send the anti-apartheid movement into a parox- ysm of moral outrage. There followed sonorous speeches in the United Nations and the Organisation of African Unity, apocalyptic warnings by the ANC, Anglo- American company flags flying at half- mast, Archbishop Huddlestone wearing his long face — the whole grisly pantomime.

This hypocrisy maddened me, and my anger increased when an independent investigation by Dr Peter Waddington of the University of Reading found no evi- dence of any police complicity in the mas- sacre at Boipatong. (He found instead massive incompetence from the police.) So, filled with righteous fury, I resolved to write an article on the two massacres, but I decided to wait until Judge Richard Gold- stone, who is investigating the events at Boipatong, had completed his inquiry. But Spot the player as I waited, my rage faded into stupor; the clear outlines of South African politics seemed to wobble and dissolve; and the Goths turned into goblins.

There are no more righteous causes to defend in South Africa, and no clear-cut outrages to attack. The past year was one of shocking events which shocked nobody. Over 3,000 people were killed in political violence; the Goldstone Commission found that agents in the government's sinister Civil Cooperation Bureau had been mur- dering political opponents and lying to offi- cial inquiries. Amnesty International found that the ANC had been torturing and exe- cuting prisoners at its camps in Zambia; vast corruption was uncovered in govern- ment departments and 'Homelands' admin- istrations. Rival black taxi drivers had gunfights on the high streets; the economy shrunk by 5 per cent; President F.W. de Klerk purged the South African Defence Force of 23 senior officers. The public reacted to all of this with numb detach- ment, as if heavily sedated.

This year holds the prospect of the most important political change in three cen- turies. Constitutional negotiations, halted after Boipatong, are about to resume, and there might be an interim, multi-racial gov- ernment by the end of the year. Yet South Africans have hardly noticed. Last month, the chairman of a national radio phone-in programme told us that the topic which most interested the listening public was the tape of the conversation between Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles.

Suddenly, we South Africans are living in a dramatic void. In retrospect, you can see how much the communists and the anti- communists here needed each other, and how much the apartheid government and the anti-apartheid movement drew mean- ing from each other. Since 1990, when communism and apartheid died, terrible misfortune has come to South Africans, but once-bitter opponents do not know how to explain it or who to blame. Instead, they are retreating into dream-worlds, and con- juring up goblins.

Among the blacks, muti murders are increasing. Witch doctors are killing black Zimbabwean refugees who cross the bor- ders, and selling their body parts for medicine. In Soweto, a two-year-old boy survived a muti mutilation when his penis, testicles and thumbs were cut off. He is now being brought up as a girl. In Cape Town, a black crowd discovered that a cou- ple had cut off a woman's breast (to improve the fortunes of a tavern), and so the crowd made the offending man cut off the offending woman's breast and the woman cut off the man's right hand. Resi- dents of Natal are resisting attempts to improve sanitation with pit latrines, because they are afraid that 'other people will bewitch them by adding herbs to their faeces'.

Superstition has taken on more modern forms as well. A former black policeman, Mr Mokaleng, identified sites where he said the police had buried 20 bodies of people they had tortured and killed, but when they dug up the sites in front of press and other witnesses, they found no bodies and no recent disturbances.

Among the whites, fantastic conspiracy theories are on the rise. Recently, a col- league asked me why I thought F.W. de Klerk had made 'that speech in February 1990' (in which he released Mandela, unbanned the ANC and effectively ended apartheid). I replied that apartheid was economically unworkable and enough important whites had lost the desire to impose it. He smiled knowingly and said, 'That's what they want you to think.' The real reason, he explained, lay in a global conspiracy in which F.W. de Klerk, like Hitler and Lenin before him, was merely a puppet of international Jewish bankers working for the Anti-Christ. It was all there in the scriptures if you knew where to find it: the Illuminati, bar-coding, the Mark of the Beast, and the New World Order. (According to AWB supporters, their three-legged swastika is actually three sev- ens, 777, to counter 666, the Mark of the

Beast.) Throughout white South Africa there is an increase in those morbid Chris- tians who are more interested in the mon- sters of the Book of Revelations than in the good advice of the Sermon on the Mount. We are invited to believe that Satanism is on the rise and that Beelzebub is making inroads through the northern suburbs of Johannesburg.

. These fantasies are all the more appeal- ing when set against the pallid and amoral real figures of the new, open South Africa. When he was banned, Joe Slovo, the com- munist chief, was a dangerous legend; now he is a portly old bore droning away in dis- cussion programmes. Nelson Mandela has shrunk from the most famous prisoner in the world to a puzzled and unconvincing old man. The new generation of govern- ment ministers and ANC spokesmen are very concerned, very understanding and yet always completely blameless. They call television interviewers by their first names: Yes, John, we are aware of these things i!eferring to murder, torture and corrup- tion] but, John, I want to assure you that we are looking into them very seriously.' They also make horrific decisions with- Out seeming to understand the implica- tions. In a deal between the government and the ANC, President de Klerk passed an Indemnity releasing from prison a horde of assassins and terrorists, including Robert McBridge, a coloured ANC terrorist who had slaughtered three women with a bomb, and Barend Strydom, a white fascist who had walked up to eight black civilians in the centre of Pretoria and shot them dead. Cln television we saw evil wearing its bland- est face in these two weak boys, the white bOY grinning foolishly into the camera at his trial, the coloured boy sauntering to lib- erty at his release, neither with the slightest regret for what he had done. Fantasy, in a time of great misfortune, is also appealing: human beings are loath to attribute personal misfortune to imperson- al. causes. It is more satisfying to burn a witch for a crop failure than investigate a fungus disease. But the quest for magic 'causes of South Africa's sorrows is running rt. The search for some devilish 'third is(),ree, an all-powerful conspiracy responsi- u'e for violence in the townships, has yield- Led Only a handful of fascist adventurers and f'ungling mavericks from the security °Irces. The evidence overwhelmingly sug- gsts that the violence is caused not by any 'flgle human conspiracy but by various !libal and economic forces, and neither we la South Africa nor our noisy critics abroad \N'ant to recognise them, let alone try to °vercome them. To test whether impersonal tribal forces t3r white plots are causing our bloodshed d impoverishment, we should look to 'mean countries which never had 4LI?artheid and lay beyond its influence. In biberia, Zaire, Somalia, Uganda, Burundi, w''w.anda, Sudan and Ethiopia, there are no

une conspirators but plenty of Boipatongs and mass poverty. If we look north, we see an explanation for many of our troubles, and indeed we see where we are headed. But we avoid looking north. When black Africa is brought up in public discussion, there is a moment of embarrassment and the subject is changed. Like Cremonini, the Aristotelian philosopher in Galileo's time, who refused to look through a telescope to the heavens for fear of seeing a heretical truth, we refuse to look at black Africa for fear of seeing a horrible future.

A dangerous illusion, which encourages violence, is that a golden future awaits South Africa if only we could get rid of conspirators, either black or white. In fact, even with a democratic settlement, the eco- nomic future is bleak. South Africa has got some strategic metals and some promise for tourism: once you have said that, you have exhausted her economic attractions. The best we can hope is that South Africa will go the way of Zimbabwe, sinking peacefully back into the bush. Recently, an English-speaking colleague, a chemical engineer, said forlornly, 'When you look at this country in ten years' time, what do you see? Another flea-bitten African state where nothing works and there are short- ages of everything.' He was hoping to emi- grate to Canada. On the same day, I spoke to an Afrikaans shift supervisor who had just returned from visiting friends in the backwoods of the Transvaal and was gleaming with excitement. 'I tell you, Andrew,' he said happily, 'there's going to be war! The people are arming up, getting ready. I'm going to be there with them!' Fighting for an impossible Boer millenni- um was more attractive to him than living in flea-bitten peace was to the engineer. Peace in South Africa, even if it is flea- bitten, depends on the ending of self- deception. We must stop looking for witches to burn when things go wrong and we must look forward with sober eyes. The

fierce tribal yearnings of my Afrikaner supervisor must somehow be accommodat- ed within the practical limits of a rather humble future. He must be persuaded to abandon the shining city on the hill for an honest village in the veldt.

Judge Goldstone, peering into the dark with his small light, has become a strange focal point for the country, a little centre of truth. But, perhaps because he has so many enquiries to conduct, he is very slow and has not yet completed his findings on Boipatong. However, from all the evidence so far, from his preliminary enquiries, from the findings of Dr Waddington and from the investigations of respected reporters, Boipatong was just the mirror image of Crossroads, where a group of blacks with one tribal and political affiliation carried out a revenge massacre on another. The significance of Boipatong, and other mas- sacres like it, is not on the field of slaughter but in the mind.

The need to impose clarity where none exists has also affected foreign journalists. The reporting of Boipatong, especially in the British press, was an extraordinary out- pouring of imagination with almost no facts to back it up. A report in the Independent on 19 June 1992 read like an account of a sighting of a UFO. The reporter himself saw absolutely no evidence of any white killers but evoked 'dozens of eye-witness- es', who vanished into the ether afterwards. I believe the white killers of Boipatong were goblins, conjured up in an hysterical last-ditch attempt to keep alive the only script on South Africa which interests the outside world: evil white men systematical- ly persecuting innocent black men. Once that has gone, as it is going now, the inter- esting drama of South Africa is likely to fade into the boring process of decay which you see in black African countries where British newspapers do not bother to employ foreign correspondents.