Oscar Pistorius (photo: wikipedia)
So, is the Oscar Pistorius saga over? Not by a long shot.
Quite apart from the continuing legal battles, what is sure to follow is the speculation over what exactly happened between him and his victim Reeva Steenkamp in those minutes and hours before he murdered her.
The consensus in the legal fraternity seems to be that Judge Thoko Masipa’s judgment, given the truncated evidence that she and her assessors accepted, was correct, and reaffirmed the independence of the judiciary. But the commentariat and social media remain divided into two camps: those who believe he believed there was an intruder he had to kill, and those who believe he wanted to kill Reeva in a fit of rage.
For the latter the questions remain that are going to be the material for gossip columns, learned articles, movie scripts, book proposals, memoirs for some time to come, some of it spurred by the possible disappearance of certain conversations from Pistorius’s cell phone, as reported by Mandy Wiener and Barry Bateman in their book on the case.
Why was Steenkamp clothed when she was killed? Why did Pistorius not wake her or call for her before crawling off to face the intruder in what he said was a deep state of fear?
These are among the many that spring to mind from just a cursory glance at the facts.
Masipa allowed the hypothesis of the intruder to stand, despite the court’s finding that the killer was a completely unreliable witness. She threw out key testimony by as many as four witnesses that they heard Steenkamp screaming before the fatal shots; another court might have acted differently. Masipa may have got the blessing of many in the legal fraternity for the way she conducted the trial, but in the fit-of-rage corner in the court of public opinion, this testimony will stand.
Why did Pistorius not simply own up to manslaughter and sit a few years in jail, keeping his millions intact, as suggested by several journalists? He would have been out by now and could have massaged his conscience with handsome compensation for the struggling Steenkamps.
The answer from the fit-of-rage fraternity would be that admitting anything would have risked backfiring by exposing his fabricated story and bringing down the maximum sentence on him, effectively finishing him off as the money machine he was – and which could be cranked back into action if he got out in two years. Only a defence of total innocence and hiring the country’s top counsel would ensure that he would get the reduced sentence that he did eventually get.
In the end, more relevant for our national discourse is to reconsider the political aspects that were read into the crime. The many attempts at this provided an excellent demonstration of how our obsession with racialising everything – “apartheidising” is a word to invent – is obscuring those issues, preventing proper discussion towards their solution.
The latest examples are the articles blaming white privilege for a far too lenient sentence. One just has to point to all the rich black men (Cyril Ramaphosa at Marikana?) also getting off the hook, and the many not even getting on the hook, to dispel that one.
More serious was the eagerness with which especially white writers tried to exploit the purported apartheid underside of it all. Writer Margie Orford pounced in the immediate aftermath, and was followed by various racial crusaders right up to Pierre de Vos in his blog “Constitutionally speaking”, who still at a very late stage asked: Was Reeva Steenkamp's shooting a gender crime or a racial crime?
Eusebius McKaiser coined the phrase “the Bantu in the Bathroom”. But since Pistorius did not ever testify about the profile of the intruder, there is nothing to suggest that he did not believe it was a white person, maybe a deranged fan or even a hitman, given the circles in which he moved. This was simply an assumption made by the commentators who were taking the Bantu in the Bathroom angle.
Their racialistic responses followed a pattern. At first racially profiling Oscar by his boyish Afrikaans looks and surname, they predictably spoke about Afrikaners' violent apartheid past and gun culture. Then simple fact-checking – which in our emaciated media now takes a few days – revealed that Oscar was more of an English speaker than Afrikaans, and the Boer-bashing subsided overnight. The Sunday Independent soldiered on with a quite incoherent rant, but it blew up in its face because it was published the day on which the Bafana Bafana soccer captain Senzo Meyiwa was murdered by black gunmen at his home.
But then privilege and whiteness studies burst on to the scene, and the hunt was on for subliminal, subconscious, denialist, micro-aggressive and original sin that made every deed and utterance by any white person a potential trigger for black pain. And the disquisitions continued on how Oscar was guilty of an even more heinous crime than killing a woman, that of being so indifferent to black people that he did not even raise "swart gevaar" as a defence – he criminally failed to belabour his purported reliance on everybody’s understanding why he would shoot an intruder four times as a function of a sustained apartheid conditioning that whites still see as normal.
British academic Jacqueline Rose in the London Review of Books applied this argument even to what she saw as Judge Masipa’s leniency in the original trial, putting forward a dexterously twisting analysis carefully avoiding condescension of how a black woman with her own difficult past of racial repression could do such a thing.
The main feature of the subconscious is that it is unconscious, completely unknown. It can only be allegorised through symbolic meanderings unpicked by a trained analyst, and even then the "talking cure" is the prescription – letting patients discover their subconscious motivations while cathartically finding solutions at the same time. If there was all this suppressed racism presented during the murder trial one would have thought it would have been echoed during Pistorius’s several breakdowns in court, but the record gives nothing to work with – the Orfords and Roses were silent. That was because it wasn't there, many would say, because he wanted to murder Steenkamp, not "the Bantu in the Bathroom".
Having spent part of my childhood in Pretoria, and having visited the estate where he lived just before the murder, I know why Oscar would not have acted out of a conditioned fear of a black intruder. The whole point of apartheid, including the neo-apartheid of our numerous protected villages for the rich, was to remove blacks from ordinary white lives to the extent that they would only ever feature as strictly circumscribed workers.
This was an even more emphatic project in the bureaucratic capital. I cannot recall ever being warned against black criminals lurking around every corner, not because of any racist denialism, but because they were simply not there. A man was once killed by an intruder wielding a knife down the street in the dead of night, but the initial reaction was that the suspect had to be white or Indian. Indeed, we had a far greater fear of thugs from poor white neighbourhoods to the west such as Hercules and Mountain View, who got on to the bus with knives in their school socks, than from blacks.
The racialists brought up the "swart gevaar" slogan of the Nationalists. But this was a political slogan rather than any social one ostensibly warning Afrikaners against going to the outhouse in the backyard. When it came to danger, my first thought as a child was what members of my own extended family might do. Whereas my Afrikaans uncles, all civil servants, would not hurt a fly, at least three of my English-speaking uncles often and severely beat up their wives. Our home on many occasions served as a safe haven for my aunts and my displaced cousins.
Rose went back into history and Afrikaners' conquest of the interior with their guns. This is not false, it is just very incomplete; to my mind, scapegoating Afrikaners over the past gives away an ignorance of history and signals a need for re-education. The true story is far more grievous than Boer protonationalism.
To start with, Afrikaners did not call themselves Afrikaners until after the Anglo-Boer War. The Dutch conquered only a small part of the interior, their British conquerors several times more. Disarmed and decimated by the genocidal actions of the Anglo-Boer War, and rapidly urbanising, Afrikaners’ gun culture was actually greatly diminished, except on the farms and in the armed forces. That was another crucial aspect of the apartheid bubble of safety, to outsource, as it were, all the violence needed to suppress so-called non-whites to semi-military institutions whose deeds were hidden from the view of the whites and their consciences by secrecy laws and the obsequious white media.
White gun culture has been reduced even more since 1994, as it has become very difficult for law-abiding citizens to get gun licences – not so in the former non-white townships, where statistics by the police and gun-control researchers show, for instance, a hugely disproportionate number of gun murders by groups and where, indeed, the prevalence of guns becomes guesswork. (For a good introduction to the issue see this article.)
Oscar’s guns were far more an extension of his Americanised life and its constitutionally encouraged gun culture – his “bullet in the chamber” slogan had greater resonance in the USA through the now infamous Nike adverts than here in South Africa.
Yes, after 1994 crime became probably the most distressing issue for South Africans, all of us. But a spate of murders by whites in Pretoria East would also have taught its denizens that you would be fatally stupid to believe white criminals are not also exploiting the serious deterioration in policing since 1994. If potential intruders are profiled as black simply because they are the majority, it is racism of a different sort, emanating from the simple fear of getting killed like all the many other people getting killed, and not induced by apartheid.
How the racial and ethnic profiling in Oscar’s case obscured the real issue of widespread violence against women by their partners can be extrapolated to political discourse in general. While it is true that white racism and attitudes of supremacy are still present to an unacceptable degree, it is not the crucial problem in South Africa right now. Even if white-bashing succeeds in reducing petty racism, it is not going to rid South Africa of a dysfunctional government that cannot safeguard its people; it is only going to obscure the solution, perhaps fatally so.
- Disclosure: Hans Pienaar has written an as yet unperformed play about the Oscar Pistorius trial, provisionally titled My Brother Oscar, with an Afrikaans version, My Broer Oscar.
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