fbpx

Notes from Cape Town

In 1995, a year after the end of apartheid, South Africa’s new government formed the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Disgraced officials met face to face with their victims, offering up their sins in exchange for amnesty. Not everyone got off so easily. Eugene de Kock, the architect of apartheid’s secret police force and an executioner responsible for thousands of murders, spoke to the commission despite serving a 212-year prison sentence.

The psychologist Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela spent several months interviewing de Kock in his cell at Pretoria Central Prison. In her book, A Human Being Died That Night, she describes being by turns charmed, repulsed, drawn in. Something de Kock says makes her want to comfort him—and she reaches out to touch his “clenched, cold, and rigid” hand. Later, he informs her that it was “ ‘my trigger hand you touched.’ ” She notes then how he splits himself into sections, corralling his bad acts into a discrete part of his body, and concludes that she must do the same: “It was through ‘splitting’ that I too . . . had managed to separate the evil deeds from the doer . . . [to] embrace the side of de Kock that showed some of the positive elements of being human.”

This splitting mechanism has its roots in apartheid—what Gobodo-Madikizela calls a “compartmentalization of South African thinking.”

There were two South Africas: white and black. Similarly, there was the public world and the private world, the open and the covert. And they were rigidly separate. . . . White South African bystanders were able to live with the brutality against blacks because it was being carried out in relative secret, in that “other world.” Everyone engaged in an “apartheid of the mind.”

One wants, post-apartheid, to be able to frame South Africa more cohesively, but what’s happening now that the barriers have come down simply feels schizophrenic. The sweep of the view from Silvermine Reserve; tourists buying farm-stall watermelon konfyt; teams of manual laborers in their distinctive blue jumpsuits; a man left for dead on the shoulder of the road, having been robbed of his prosthetic leg: it won’t, it cannot, cohere. The splitting going on today is not so much about race or public disclosure as it is about time: the newness of this democracy versus the welter of memory, and its bitterness. Mandela deferred the reckoning for a while. He acted as a stopgap, his promises of a gorgeous future made credible by his ancient face.

Now AIDS has distorted time, but in a different way; it has retroactively poisoned the hopeful past. It stayed dormant, or at least unobtrusive, during those first euphoric years, until it erupted everywhere at once. Government ministers began dying at 40 of “TB”—but TB was an opportunistic infection caused by AIDS, something the newspaper obituaries never mentioned. HIV transmission was stealthy—covert, to use Gobodo-Madikizela’s term—and its silence implied a national hex, or worse. It didn’t seem much of a stretch to think of the disease as apartheid’s latest iteration. It was killing only black people, after all. Perhaps disgraced Boer officials and American pharmaceutical companies had conspired to make condoms spread the disease? And condoms were oddly slimy; many men preferred “dry sex,” wherein a woman used herbs, soil, or salt to desiccate her vaginal lining. Condoms dulled sensation—you didn’t eat candy with the wrapper on—but if you slept with x many virgins, you might get rid of the virus. Hence the spate of baby rapes, unthinkable yet easily explained. Health minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang urged everyone to get well via a robust diet of beetroot, garlic, and olive oil; a gentle-looking lady named Sonette Ehlers patented a device called Rapex, a female condom fitted with tiny barbs.

More from Issue 5

Issue 5 Decivilizing Process

It has lately become clear that nothing burdens a life like an email account.

Issue 5 Decivilizing Process

Alexander started the silent era of the West; Nokia will finish it.

Issue 5 Decivilizing Process

Lit-bloggers are the avant-garde of 21st-century publicity.

Issue 5 Decivilizing Process

The work machine is also a porn machine; the porn machine is also a work machine. Work enters everything.

Issue 5 Decivilizing Process

Our new technologies always open the possibilities to the best, and somehow open the floodgates to the worst.

Issue 5 Decivilizing Process

I experienced the despair of the creature who evidently cannot will himself to die.

Issue 5 Decivilizing Process

Nobody in the proliferation business should expect privacy, or even want it.

Issue 5 Decivilizing Process

They had to travel to see Kashmir; we lived here and did not need to travel. We waved at them; they waved back.

Issue 5 Decivilizing Process

Dworkin wanted all of us to recognize and despise the sickos within ourselves.

Issue 5 Decivilizing Process

For the last six days, I have been measuring my chances for the Volvo like a meteorologist rating the likelihood of rain.

Issue 5 Decivilizing Process

You reach points in life at which you can no longer live like other people, though you don’t want to die.

Issue 5 Decivilizing Process

I killed a near-son today. Naturally I did not tell my lover about it.

Issue 5 Decivilizing Process

There was a gap, but it was not technological. The problem was “humint,” in intelligence-community parlance.

Issue 5 Decivilizing Process

Bush’s foreign policy advisers do not want to break free of the established system. They wish to run the jail.

Issue 5 Decivilizing Process

Care of others hampers self-development—at least, development of the kind employers require.

Issue 5 Decivilizing Process

Here we are half a decade into the 21st century and still no flying cars.

Issue 5 Decivilizing Process

This year’s Most Notable girl protagonists don’t grow up, they go crazy.

Issue 5 Decivilizing Process

We attempted to come up with an alternative title, but nothing pleased us as much or suited us as well.

More by this Author

August 30, 2009

In brief: discoid mothership comes to rest above Johannesburg.

Issue 11 Dual Power
Issue 21 Throwback

It was a climate of fear for a bunch of delicate orchids.