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This excerpt from The End of Whiteness: Satanism and Family Murders in South Africa has been published with permission from Jacana Media. The book is available at all leading bookstores.
About the book:
The End of Whiteness aims to reveal the pathological, paranoid and bizarre consequences that the looming end of apartheid had on white culture in South Africa, and overall to show that whiteness is a deeply problematic category that needs to be deconstructed and thoughtfully considered.
This book uses contemporary media material to investigate two symptoms of this late apartheid cultural hysteria that appeared throughout the contemporary media and in popular literature during the 1980s and 1990s, showing their relation to white anxieties about social change, the potential loss of privilege and the destabilisation of the country that were imagined to be an inevitable consequence of majority rule.
Excerpt as follows:
In September 1992 Cape housewife Dawn Orso was found brutally murdered. The killers were soon revealed to be her teenage daughter Angelique and Angelique’s 18-year-old boyfriend Lawrence van Blerk.
‘[Her] body was discovered in a shallow grave at her Farnworth Street home … Her hands had been bound with pantyhose and her head bloodied after being hit with a blunt object. The girl and her boyfriend disappeared shortly before the gruesome discovery.’
Police were quick to point out the possibility of Satanist involvement in her death after the teenagers were found to have ‘satanic paraphernalia’ in their possession.
Possibly reacting to the police statements and press coverage referring to the ‘Satanist murder’, the pair’s defence rested on their demonic possession during the time of the killing.
Van Blerk told the court he had been ‘influenced by an unknown force, probably to do with Satanism’, and had felt ‘possessed by the devil inside’. The murder gained national attention, galvanising the public into sympathy for a pair of youngsters who seemed to be victims themselves.
As the case progressed, however, it became clear that the so-called Satanist murder was a very different tale of a misfit young man manipulated by a charismatic young woman.
The pair was eventually found guilty because, according to Mr Justice Williamson, their actions were too obviously goal-oriented to be involuntary.
Crucially, however, Williamson made a point of stating that ‘the court accepted that people could become possessed by demons’, but was not convinced in this particular case. Although their defence was rejected, belief in Satanism was strong enough that the judiciary explicitly stated the possibility of possession.
When compared to another South African legal case, the Orso trial exemplifies the different weight given by white South African legislators to black and to white magic.
In the 1933 case Rex v. Mbombela, which appears in disguise in psychoanalyst Wulf Sach’s Black Hamlet and is also mentioned by anthropologist Isak Niehaus, Dhumi Mbombela, a rural Xhosa man of about 20 years old, was put on trial for the murder of a small child who he had mistaken for a tokoloshe.
The prosecution’s case rested on the fact that Mbombela’s genuine fear of and strongly held belief in the tokoloshe were not ‘reasonable’, reason being the legal requirement for acquittal. But the colonial administration’s definition of reason was inherently flawed.
According to colonial law, majority beliefs had to be considered reasonable.
Yet when this statue came up against the apparent unreason of the colonial subject’s occult theories, numbers became irrelevant and the rules were changed. The state’s defence of its unreasonable investment in an inconsistent idea of reason prevented the law from fulfilling its own conditions.
It disregarded anyone whose version of reason did not match its own: ‘Colonial law’s desire to maintain its jurisdiction forced it to violate the very principle of reason that presumably conferred upon it its imperial supremacy and sovereign right.’
The judge in the case, Etienne de Villiers, stated that only ‘one standard of reasonableness’ could exist and it was not one that could permit belief in African spirits, and that the notion of magic divorced from religion was inconceivable.
It is not unlikely that Judge Williamson in the Orso case would have been aware of this precedent: Rex v. Mbombela has been cited at appellate level more than 40 times in South African legal history.
Even while defining African supernatural beliefs as unreasonable superstition, Rex v. Mbombela implicitly acknowledged that European magic could exist and was ‘reasonable’ within the precepts of the colonial law upon which the modern South African legal system is based, just as Judge Williamson did by stating that possession had been a possibility in the Orso murder.
Satanism had a legal legitimacy that was denied to its indigenous equivalents.
The racial dynamics that characterised the mythology and legislative structure of apartheid – that whites were reasonable, civilised and moral and that blacks were not – were brought into the courtroom by the Satanism scare, as they had been by the Mbombela case, and officially validated.
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