Strangely, and without anyone seeming to notice, the battle in the courtroom was now repeating the internal dilemma of Oscar Pistorius himself, as it split down the middle between the two ways of seeing disability in our time: Pistorius as crippled and vulnerable, Pistorius as perfect and empowered. If the first, then he shot Reeva Steenkamp out of his deep-seated fears; if the second, he shot because his physical prowess, and the acclaim that followed, had allowed him to nurture the illusion that he ruled the world and could take the law into his own hands. Ironically, it was the prosecution that had to believe unreservedly in Pistorius on his own terms, had – in effect – to side with him. ‘For the prosecution to succeed,’ Carlin writes, ‘he needed Pistorius to be regarded by the judge as he had always portrayed himself prior to the trial […] Nel had to deny the existence of the secretly vulnerable and fear-plagued amputee as vigorously as the Blade Runner himself had sought to do all his life until the night of the shooting.’57 The defence, on the other hand, could only proceed by ruthlessly dismantling his lifelong, most carefully nurtured, image of himself: ‘Without legs, abuse, abuse, abuse.’
It was therefore the defence that mutilated Pistorius’s own defences, as it proceeded to uncover his disability in the eyes of the world. On two occasions during the proceedings, he was obliged to reveal his stumps to the courtroom (one might also see his weeping, retching and vomiting in court as his body spilling over its borders and revealing itself). In fact, he himself was more than ready to follow this line of his defence: ‘The discharging of my firearm was precipitated by a noise in the toilet which I, in my fearful state, knowing that I was on my stumps, unable to run away or properly defend myself physically, believed to be the intruder or intruders, coming out of the toilet to attack Reeva and me.’58 Note: ‘the discharging of my firearm was precipitated’ – no subject of the act, no agent, no responsibility, as if the gun had gone off all by itself.
Perfection is killing. We have to ask whether making heroes of the disabled – which of course in Pistorius’s case, indeed in all cases, is somehow also right – might not at the same time exacerbate the anguish and violence of the soul. Banners at the 2012 London Olympics read: ‘Paralympics. We are the superhumans.’59 Not cripples but gladiators, as one commentator observed. Pistorius was the ‘bullet in the chamber’ (the strap line to the banner on his official website). Between Pistorius, his father, two of his uncles and his grandfather, his family owned fifty-five guns. In one notorious episode, Pistorius shot through the sun roof of a car after an altercation with a police officer about his gun when the driver was pulled over for speeding: ‘You cannot just touch another man’s gun,’ he offered by way of explanation for his rage – his gun a body part, the most intimate piece of himself. Samantha Taylor spoke about his gun as a ‘third party’ in their relationship. A 9mm Luger bullet sat upright on his kitchen counter. At the time of the killing, he was waiting to take delivery of six firearms including a semi-automatic, the same as that used by the South African Police Service, and 580 rounds of ammunition.60
There is, again, a history of South Africa to be told here. The Afrikaner had conquered the southern tip of Africa with guns, a heritage of which, Carlin observes, the Pistorius clan were proud.61 In Zakes Mda’s 2014 novel Black Diamond, a white magistrate is under threat for her crackdown on crime. When she insists to her assigned black protector that she does not want guns in her home, he replies with a smirk on his face: ‘You don’t want guns? […] What kind of Afrikaner are you?’62 As Gillian Slovo put it in her Ralph Miliband lecture at the London School of Economics in May 2014, the guns that supported and opposed apartheid are still too present in South Africa today.63 ‘In this vast and beautiful land of post-apartheid South Africa,’ Jonathan McEvoy wrote on the trial in the Daily Mail, ‘there is too often a gun at the end of their Rainbow.’64 Pistorius was fearful of crime – no white South African, indeed no South African, can avoid being fearful of crime. Robberies in residential properties increased by seventy per cent between 2003 and 2012, although in nine out of ten cases the victims of such burglaries are unharmed, and it is the poor who are most often the victims of violent crime. In fact, the vast majority of South Africans do not own firearms (barely five per cent of the population, a figure that has stayed roughly stable since then).65
On this Masipa was unhesitant. Pistorius’s actions could not be justified by his fears. ‘I hasten to add that the accused is not unique in this respect,’ she states, in for me one of the best moments in her judgement. ‘Women, children, the elderly and all those with limited ability would fall under the same category.’ ‘But,’ she asks, ‘would it be reasonable if without further ado they armed themselves with a firearm if threatened with danger?’ ‘Many have been victims of violent crime but they have not resorted to sleeping with firearms under their pillows.’66 Vulnerability is no licence to violence. You think you are unique in this regard? Think again. Disability or weakness is something you can suffer, but never own. It is no excuse. For that reason I am not persuaded by those who argue that Masipa’s sympathy for Pistorius’s disability swayed her judgement, although it is surely true that she refused to join in the hatred directed against him.67 She is a universalist, moved by a compassion that manages at once to be specific to South Africa while taking in the vulnerable – women, children, the elderly, all those with limited ability – everywhere. Nor am I convinced that she was above all driven by the desire to avoid being seen as enacting revenge justice – that is black justice – on a rich white man (although it is surely the case that, as a black woman judge, she too was on trial).
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Sex, race, disability, what’s left? What’s left is the life of the mind, the limits of human knowledge, the psychic and political imperative of thought. There are guns, and there is thinking. In his testimony, Pistorius repeatedly insisted that he wasn’t thinking when he fired four shots through the door:
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[In] the split moment I believed somebody was coming out to attack me. That is what made me fire. I did not have time to think.
I did not shoot at anyone. I did not intend to shoot at someone. I shot out of fear.68
I fired my firearm before I could think.69
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Or as Masipa replays in her summary of what she has heard him say: ‘I am a gun enthusiast. I did not have time to think.’70
But if he did not intend to shoot anyone and was not thinking, then he cannot rely on an argument of putative self-defence (that he shot in response to a perceived threat). Whereas if he shot because he thought he was in danger of attack, then he clearly had time to think. As he himself explains, only making matters considerably worse, had he wanted to kill an intruder, he would have shot higher up, towards the chest. ‘I pause to state’, Masipa comments, ‘that this assertion is inconsistent with someone who shot without thinking.’71 Pistorius’s ‘plethora of defences’ obey the logic of the unconscious, each one cancelling out the next. He was judged according to whether his behaviour was that of a reasonable person, but it is something beyond reason that the law found itself up against. ‘What is this irrational fear that has sunk so deep into the psyche?’ was Margie Orford’s question. ‘In that unyielding construct of threat and danger,’ she elaborates, ‘of your death or mine, there is no middle ground, no compromise and no space for thought or language.’72 Not thinking does not render you innocent, any more than fear. It is in the split second between thought and non-thought that you kill.
Recall that in her dismissal of dolus eventualis, Masipa argued that Pistorius could not ‘reasonably have foreseen’ that the shots he fired could kill ‘the person behind the door, let alone the deceased, as he thought she was in the bedroom at the time.’ And yet, finding him guilty of culpable homicide, she asks: ‘Would a reasonable person in the same circumstances as the accused, have foreseen the possibility that, if he fired four shots at the door of the toilet, whoever was behind th
e door, might be struck by a bullet and die as a result? Would a reasonable person have taken steps to guard against that possibility? The answer to both questions is yes.’73 This is reason straining at its own leash: the accused could not have reasonably foreseen the death of the deceased, a reasonable person would have taken steps to guard against the death of the person behind the door. Who is this reasonable person? If Masipa is wrong – as the Supreme Court decided on appeal – it might be because the law cannot take full measure of the complexities of the human heart to which we, unreasonably, expect it to be equal. It might also be because its category of reason, not least in the realm of violent crime, is a shape-changer. ‘The reasonable man’, Masipa observes, quoting a legal precedent, ‘of course evolves with the times. What was reasonable in 1933 would not necessarily be reasonable today.’74
There is also an issue of language involved, as the attribution of guilt hangs on the finest linguistic discriminations, in particular on the auxiliary verb. Some examples: ‘I am not persuaded that a reasonable person with the accused’s disabilities in the same circumstances, would have fired four shots into that small toilet cubicle.’75 Criminal liability is attributed according to whether ‘he ought to have foreseen the possibility of resultant death’.76 The court, Masipa commented, citing another preceding judgement in relation to the charge of murder, ‘should guard against proceeding from “ought to have foreseen” to “must have foreseen” and thence to “by necessary inference in fact foresaw” the consequences of the conduct being inquired into.’77 ‘[The inference] of subjective foresight cannot be drawn if there is a reasonable possibility that the accused did not foresee, even if he ought reasonably to have done so and even if he probably did so.’78 At which point, we appear to have entered the world of that first great experimental novel, Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, of 1759. How, asks Tristram’s Uncle Toby, can someone speak about a white bear if he never saw one? Whereupon Tristram’s father produces this paean to the auxiliary verb and its power to conjure before our eyes what isn’t there:
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A WHITE BEAR! Very well. Have I ever seen one? Might I ever have seen one? Am I ever to see one? Ought I ever to have seen one? Or can I ever see one?
Would I had seen a white bear! (for how can I imagine it?)
If I should see a white bear, what should I say? If I should never see a white bear, what then?
If I never have, can, must, or shall see a white bear alive, – have I ever seen the skin of one? Did I ever see one painted? – described? Have I never dreamed of one?
Did my father, mother, uncle, aunt, brothers, or sisters, ever see a white bear? What would they give? How would they behave? How would the white bear have behaved? Is he wild? Tame? Rough? Smooth?
– Is the white bear worth seeing?
– Is there no sin in it? –
Is it better than a black one? 79
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This is language as speculative decay, losing its grip on reality, which – as we have known since the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (and Sterne) – it never had anyway.
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‘What is this irrational fear that has sunk deep into the psyche?’ (Orford’s question.) So let us return to bathrooms. After all, it is not just in the South African imagination that they are the scene of the crime – the shower scene in Hitchcock’s Psycho most obviously comes to mind. In one of the most famous passages in Proust’s A la recherche, the narrator – at no small physical risk – hoists himself on a ladder and peers through a fanlight into the shop into which the Baron Charlus and the tailor Jupien have disappeared after a mutual seduction in the courtyard. Whereupon he hears sounds so violent that ‘had they not constantly been taken up an octave higher by a parallel moaning, I might have thought that one person was slitting another’s throat close beside me, and that the murderer and his resuscitated victim were then taking a bath to wash away the traces of the crime.’80 A bathroom is a place of purity and danger. Not just the scene of a killing, but the first place you go in order to wash away the traces of the crime.
In Western culture bathrooms are places where we submit the roughage of our inner and outer worlds to the regimen of the controlled and the clean. ‘There is no denying the cleanliness,’ Junichirō Tanizaki laments of the Western toilet in his 1977 meditation In Praise of Shadows; ‘every nook and corner is pure white.’ Yet, ‘[t]he cleanliness of what can be seen only calls up the more clearly thoughts of what cannot be seen.’ ‘I suppose I shall sound terribly defensive,’ he continues, ‘if I say that Westerners attempt to expose every speck of grime and eradicate it, while we Orientals carefully preserve and even idealise it.’81 Like the Nyakyusa, described by Mary Douglas in Purity and Danger (the first and still the last word on these matters), who make it part of the ritual of mourning to venerate their own detritus and sweep rubbish onto mourners, ‘to welcome filth’. An obsessional culture, on the other hand – Western culture – is guilty, unsettled in the discriminations it most earnestly wishes to police (the distinction between men and women, or between black and white). As Douglas also points out, it is only around norms and behaviour which are contradictory or unstable – for instance, the attempt to subordinate women in a culture which partly recognises their autonomy as human – that pollution fears tend to cluster, and that they are rarely independent of sex (she gives the example of the husband ‘needing to be convinced of his own masculinity and of the dangers thereof’).82 In the case of Pistorius, it was not just his body – ‘I beat my body and make it my slave’ – but also his mind that he wanted to subordinate: ‘Every race is won or lost in the head, so you have to get your head right,’ he responded to a question about his obsessional note-taking in an interview with the Financial Times. ‘Writing things down helps you to control your thoughts.’83
But there is a limit to such control. After Mark Gevisser had been attacked in a private home with two close women friends, he started by believing that their lives were saved by the respect they paid to the black intruders. By the end of the process, he came to things rather differently: ‘You have no control over what will happen to you. It is random and chaotic, and even if your reasonable behaviour lessens the odds of your being hurt or killed, it guarantees you nothing. You have no control over when, and how, you will die. Once you understand this, you accept that life is a gift.’84 This is the opposite of obsessional thought which, as Freud puts it, endlessly returns to – because it cannot make peace with – ‘those subjects upon which all mankind are uncertain and upon which our knowledge and judgement must necessarily remain open to doubt’; a form of thought which above all cannot bear human ambivalence.85 On this, Gevisser’s story is exemplary. He felt genuine empathy with his intruders, but this did not prevent him from pursuing one of them to court, a Zimbabwean migrant whose story of barely surviving in the city he unfolds with the utmost care. But he also hates him: ‘I hated him for having made me hateful and I hated myself for hating him.’86 This tale bookends Lost and Found in Johannesburg. Its psychic complexity is surely the perfect counterfoil to the idea that the only way to deal with an intruder in today’s South Africa is to shoot four times through a locked door.
More than twenty-five years after the end of apartheid, South Africa is riddled with violence, still suffering the legacy of its history, ‘that unfinished business buried in the South African body politic’, which the Paralympic superhero Oscar Pistorius was called upon to help the nation deny and transcend.87 We could say that it was his tragedy, although far more the tragedy of Reeva Steenkamp, that, prey to a fantasy of omnipotence in which the whole world colluded, he tried to take control of whatever he could: his body, his mind, his women, his guns. If there is a lesson to take from all of this, it is that we keep human injustice and suffering in our sights, while understanding that we too are the criminals; that we should not expel our own hatreds in a futile effort to make ourselves – to make the world – clea
n. ‘The dark hole in the floor’, Rebecca West observes of a toilet in old Serbia on her extraordinary 1930s journey through Yugoslavia, ‘made it seem as if dung, having been expelled by man, had set itself up as a new and hostile and powerfully magic element that could cover the whole earth.’88 Expelling dirt is as self-defeating as it is murderous. Someone – a race, a sex – has to take the rap. As I see it, our pressing task is to look at whatever cowers from the light, but without deluding ourselves that we can master it, without ever claiming to know too much.
7
POLITICAL PROTEST AND THE DENIAL OF HISTORY
South Africa and the Legacy of the Future
Given the awfulness of the political moment, the ugly collective fantasies of nationhood being unleashed across the US and the UK, it seems urgent to turn to examples of political activism where a collective or group, together with its accompanying rage, has been spawned in the name of social and racial justice. All the more so where that same movement has been charged up with a visceral, affective energy which has made it the target of critique. The student protests which started in South Africa in 2015 have implications which reach way beyond their original complaint: witness their resurgence after the police killing of George Floyd in May 2020, the felling of the statue of slave dealer Edward Colston in Bristol and the revival of the Rhodes Must Fall campaign in Oxford. In this chapter, I suggest that, far from being an eruption of disorder to be met with an ‘appropriately’ firm, coercive, state response, this moment, in all its intense volatility, is best understood as bringing back to life a violent history which the nation was, and is, trying to transcend and forget. There is of course a long tradition of emotionally charged political struggles being mobilised on behalf of the oppressed: feminism, civil rights, Black Lives Matter, and a recurrent focus here, #MeToo and #AmINext. But what happens when such a movement carries an additional psychic burden, when it rises up in the name of a radically incomplete emancipatory project which is in danger of being undone?
On Violence and On Violence Against Women Page 25
