Bryan Rostron
The devil continues to have a fine run in South Africa. Hansie Cronje, by his own admission, accepted Satan’s silver. When that cheesy old horror film The Exorcist was recently rereleased, earnest churchmen begged us not to watch in case we were lured by the celluloid wiles of Beelzebub.
Two weeks ago in the Mail & Guardian (“Heart of darkness”, March 9 to 15) Superintendent Kobus Jonker of the police occult-related crime unit, announced grimly: “I believe the devil exists because I have seen things happen. I have seen a woman being attacked right in my presence by a demonic being, cuts just appearing on her arms and the triple sixes manifesting …”
A literal belief in Satan is remarkably prevalent here even after opponents of apartheid proved not to be the anti-Christ. He’s a persistent little devil, all right. So what is it about Lucifer that we even have a dedicated police unit on his tail?
In The Origin of Satan American scholar Elaine Pagels traces how the figure of the devil has been employed, from his first bow, to demonise opponents usually, opponents from the same community. “The more intimate the conflict,” writes Pagels, “the more intense and bitter it becomes.”
In the gospels, for example, Satan is not used to vilify the Romans (who were, after all, the oppressors), but fellow Jews who failed to recognise Christ as the Messiah. Christians simply broadened the target Jews and pagans, but above all dissidents from within their own ranks: heretics. In the ideological struggle for orthodoxy, the Prince of Darkness is commonly portrayed as being the evil infiltrator in the more recent, chilling phrase, “the enemy within”.
In South Africa you only have to read the daily newspapers to see how much public debate is not really concerned with ideas or detail, but demonising the opponent.
It is astonishing how often political argument abruptly veers off the rails of logic and hurtles into a tangled pile of insult, recrimination and accusations about the opponent’s real, hidden motives.
It is not surprising, given our wretched history, that there is a widespread reluctance to accept that those with opposing views however misguided we believe them to be might espouse their ideas in good faith and actually mean what they say. Butnn demonisation has become a nasty habit.
When ideas are challenged, in Parliament or in private conversation, the response is often disproportionately vitriolic. It is as if what is really being dissected is not the ostensible issue at hand, but something far deeper: something that cuts right to our very idea of ourselves and that, in South Africa, is still an extremely raw nerve. National debate can still be less about ideology than identity.
Thus disagreements easily become confused with anger and ambiguity over pigmentation. When criticised, people seem to feel their very identity is under attack; they feel threatened, as it were, from within.
Genuine criticism of the government is all too often simply dismissed as racist. While sometimes a cynical diversionary tactic, at other times you only have to listen to the anger and bafflement to know that there is also a genuine sense of being under personal attack.
Everything becomes racialised. What in another country might be a legitimate debate about, say, professional ethics, here rapidly shapes up along racial lines, obscuring the real divisions of conflict and class interests. And behold the righteous wrath when someone breaches nnthose programmed nncolour lines.
Take the froth and fury over the “Home for All” campaign. Black commentators mostly concentrated on what they perceived as the rights and wrongs of the idea itself. White critics, on the other hand, suddenly had psychological insights into the mental state of those signing this brief admission that whites derived unfair benefits from apartheid. Letters to newspapers fairly boiled about “self-flagellation”, “self-abasement”. It was “hand-wringing” (Tony Leon, Marthinus van Schalkwyk). It was “that white guilt thing” (Douglas Gibson). Leon even questioned, “What is Carl Niehaus’s agenda?”
Move over, Dr Freud. But who, here, is really on the psychiatrist’s couch?
Recently I read Laurens van der Post’s book on Freud’s disciple, Carl Jung, who coined the notion of the “shadow”. This, Van der Post describes as “all the energies that man had constantly despised, rejected or ignored in himself”.
For example, says Van der Post: “We treated the black man in Africa as we did because we had abstracted him from his human reality. We were projecting upon him an unknown part of ourselves; punishing him and punishing a dark, rejected aspect of ourselves.”
Exactly at the moment I came to Van der Post’s refutation that Jung’s own shadow had been a dark strain of anti-Semitism, a book spookily fell out of my bookcase with a loud thump. Against Therapy by Jeffrey Masson had remained unread on my shelves for a decade; it contained a powerful indictment of Jung’s ambiguous fascination with Hitler and Mussolini.
After the war, Jung tried to clear up “misunderstandings”. In The Fight with the Shadow, he wrote: “It is surely better to know that your worst enemy is right there in your own heart.”
Jung described Hitler as Germany’s shadow, yet signally failed to deal with his own ambiguities. Reading his evasions reminded me strongly of listening to many white South Africans. But if that great intellect could not face up to his shadow his own inner demons what chance is there for us lesser mortals?
Thus in South Africa political differences continue to be experienced not merely as disinterested debate but as, almost literally, demonic. This bears out Pagels’s contention that the figure of Satan is historically less a hostile power from without, than “the source and representation of conflict within the community”.
Old Nick, lo, is often merely a dissident: someone who reflects back our own shadow. Perhaps it’s time, in South Africa, we gave the devil his due.