A baby’s minder leaves her charge in a locked motor car. The car is standing in an open parking lot, out in the sun on a hot day. An hour or so later the minder gets back from her shopping jaunt to find the baby has died, literally been suffocated in the heat. The police open an investigation, the newspapers vibrate with horror.
Within a few days a parent of the baby says that she has ‘forgiven” the minder for her negligence. On the radio talk shows the apologists are soon off the mark in their defence of the minder. She ‘had no way” of realising how hot the interior of the car would become. It was an awful accident. Certainly she meant no wrong. The minder is ‘obviously heartbroken” at her ‘mistake”.
No one, it seems, had anything much to say on behalf of the dead baby. One caller did say ‘shame”.
Elsewhere that week a brutal murder takes place outside a nightclub. Within days the older brother of the slaughtered youth absolves the killers of any categorical, leave alone moral, accountability. When two fellows savagely beat his brother to death with tyre irons they were obviously high on drugs, not really responsible for their actions, the brother will say. He will add that therefore he cannot bring himself to hate them for what they did. After all they will always have to live with their consciences, their terrible guilt for what they have done. On talk radio more soap-opera poignancies flow.
Is it a hangover from the parent sentimentalities of the forgive and forget process of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC)? Is it that, as a nation, we are so weary of guilt, resentment and remorse, that in the face of crisis or terrible injury we elect appeasing denial? Where does it come from, this weird need to look the other way, to ignore or excuse patent iniquity? Why do we so often supplant what should be untutored outrage with rhetorical magnanimity? Do we always have to make silk purses?
Perhaps it is a shifting of position, a retreat to a sanctuary of commonality. South Africans seem far more genuinely outraged by the loss of a cricket or soccer match, than by issues of greater ultimate consequence. A sports ‘tragedy” can be ameliorated by debate and excuse; it is explainable, doesn’t worry at the conscience. Not so the gruesome story of yet someone else being gang-raped and murdered which, if only diagnostically, is of more substantial significance. The South African cricket team losing a match carries little personal assignment, certainly no feelings of blame for the witnessing citizen; it is an easily assimilated guilt without responsibility.
It seems to be an inverted social pathology, some reaction to a nation’s recent stigma.
I can’t speak for black South Africans but white ones have come to acknowledge — no one expects them actually to believe — that they’ve been utter shits for so many years. Now that they find themselves back on the international shopping list they can’t stand the thought of being shown up to harbour leftover monsters — of any kind. Do we feel vulnerable, afraid someone’s about to point a finger at us? Why always the pathetic exculpation and vindication — even for killers of children?
The trouble with a national cop-out mentality comes with its political sequelae. One of the easiest rides any government can hope for is an all-forgiving electorate. No bothersome tyranny is necessary when the general population doesn’t give a tinker’s about a depreciating moral life, has been somehow coaxed into shrugging off as inevitable a rash of brutal crime that its government can’t or won’t try to control. Over the Christmas holidays a thousand people are killed on the roads.
Apart from vacant fulminations, the politicians do precisely nothing about inhibiting a similar slaughter a year hence. They don’t have to do much more than say they will. A year’s a long time and, anyway, the ‘people” have long been persuaded that their government’s patent inability to deal with something like soaring road deaths is somehow excused by its ongoing exercises in practical democracy.
There can’t be one or two, even several reasons for what has become almost a national strategy of absolution and pardon, but a large proportion of the blame surely falls on the legacy of the TRC. I share a belief held strongly by the late Marius Schoon: that the TRC hearings were not the way to go, that they should have been Nuremberg-style trials and none of the namby-pamby soft-soap of the TRC. Under the precision of formal legal process many more ghosts would have been laid — and punished. In any case, if you are going to deem apartheid a crime against humanity then surely its beasts should have been prosecuted in a suitable court.
They weren’t. That so many walked wealthy and free is an uncomfortable testament to a nation’s sentimentality. As much is the instant pardon for the baby minder. Somewhere under the rainbow we’ve buried too much of our sense of rectitude.
Archive: Previous columns by Robert Kirby