Klawer – an out-of-the-way dorp in the northern reaches of the Western Cape – has featured grimly in the news over the past two weeks. The issue is framed well in a headline from the Cape Argus: ‘Klawer community to protest after gruesome discovery of teen’s limbs in suspect’s sewer.’
I can’t really better that description for its visceral power. The apparent dismemberment of a 13 year old – believed to be Jerobejin van Wyk, known to friends and family as Terence – and the concealment of his remains should turn one’s stomach. According to reports, his death was likely a case of murder after he was caught pinching fruit from trees belonging to one Daniel Smit.
According to Santie Human, Smit’s lawyer, he has admitted to the killing. It seems that he has also claimed to have been involved in occult activities since his youth. At 19, he learned to kill as a member of a ‘cult’ in Sea Point, but had broken free of its malign influence. ‘Daniel has not been practising cult doings until the day of the murder. Daniel had a relapse on 2 February which resulted in him killing the young boy. He has also told me that this is the first child he killed,’ Human is quoted as saying.
The murder of a child is an act of wickedness that violates all conceivable moral boundaries. The notion that there was some sort of diabolical impulse behind it, whether this is the workings of a malign entity or the sociology of a mind-controlling authority structure, will fire our imagination. It’s at once terrifying and oddly comforting – for it offers at least a framework to understand something that defies our assumption about what it means to be a moral being, perhaps reaffirming a belief that ultimately no one could really be like that…
The point has been made in media commentary that the ‘occult murder’ has a particular place in South Africa’s consciousness. Those old enough to have been around in the 1980s and early 1990s will recall just how prominent this became. Concerns about Satanic conspiracies abounded, their reach and dangers a worry for parents and pastors and police officials alike. Their membership was supposedly numbered in the hundreds of thousands and they had a voracious appetite for the blood of the innocent, both human and animal. News media, sensational and serious, gave this a great deal or attention. Itinerant experts toured schools and churches warning of the dangers and publicising ‘warning signs.’
Fascination
This is a phenomenon that has been surprisingly well researched – perhaps itself an indicator of the fascination it holds. Check out the Wikipedia entry Satanic panic (South Africa) for a flavour of this.
For all the concern about Satanism and its pathologies in South Africa, very little evidence ever surfaced to back up the claims that were made. The covens were always apparently too well hidden, too protected by social influence or the power of their magic, to be identified; their victims invariably disposed of too expertly for discovery. Tabloid accounts of youthful groups who butchered cats on Friday nights or of national sporting champions or prominent socialites who were mixed up in this never seemed able to reveal identities.
This is not out of line with experience worldwide. Similar fixations on Satanic cults have emerged in the US, Canada and Britain, but with scant credible confirmation.
True enough, there have been instances where supposedly occult elements have been associated with particular crimes. Richard Ramirez, the ‘Night Stalker’, who carried out a series of brutal home-invasion murders in Los Angeles and San Francisco in 1985 and 1986, claimed to be in league with the Devil, made some of his victims ‘swear on Satan’ and famously yelled ‘Hail Satan’ in court. In Italy in 2005, members of a music group named the Beasts of Satan were convicted of four murders (and suspected of more than a dozen others) between 1998 and 2004 in what appeared to be at least partly a ritualistic ceremony. Closer to home, the death of Johannesburg teenager Kirsty Theologo in 2011 resulted from a lurid do-it-yourself ritual by her peers (one of whom was the son of a Christian minister) to invoke dark powers.
Sinister, frightening and tragic, certainly, but neither evidence of an epidemic, nor of a massive conspiracy.
‘Satanic panics’
Scholarship on ‘Satanic panics’ – or on moral panics more broadly – makes the point that they typically represent societal anxiety. For South Africa in the 1980s, there was the sense of a country in flux and crisis. Above all, for the white population, there was a growing sense of the decline of the established order of society and insecurity about the future. Think of the township uprisings, growing economic stress, increasing isolation and ostracism from the outside world, along with the abandoning of deference for established cultural patterns and institutions.
Wits academic Nicky Falkof made the following observation:
Much of the fear surrounding Satanism was encoded in worries about foreign films and music, newly inserted into a nation that had, until fairly recently, maintained strict censorship and a prohibitive attitude to American and European cultural products: television, for example, was only broadcast after 1976. Heavy metal bands like England’s Iron Maiden, whose growled lyrics were barely decipherable and whose album art featured gargoyles, demons and other signifiers of the occult, became poster children for the moral disaster befalling white South African youth. Copied cassettes of foreign metal bands spread like wildfire, fostering a growing gothic and heavy metal subculture. Black t-shirts, long, dank hair, pentagram symbols and other physical affectations associated with the heavy metal scene became common and, read as signifiers for this new threat by parents and teachers, served as a visual reminder that Satanists were out there.
I take strong exception to the description of Bruce Dickinson’s lyrical style as ‘growling’, but I get the point. I remember this all too well. Popular music was the great doorway to the demonic underworld, and I often found myself having to defend my musical tastes, and sometimes to wonder to myself if they were not in fact leading me astray. Iron Maiden, Depeche Mode and Chris De Burgh all seemed to be in on it. I attended a screening at the local Baptist Church of a video entitled Rock Music Exposed … though why pop stars would encode messages encouraging devil worship or drug use rather than buying more records – remember records? – was something I couldn’t quite understand. (Towards the end of my time at school I discovered the Dubliners and their world full of whiskey and porter, horse-racing and tweed-clad comic wastrels, Donegal Danny, Dicey Reilly, Tim Finnegan, the Spanish Lady, the Enniskillen Dragoons and MacAlpine’s Fusiliers. I’m not sure how much of an improvement this might have been for my moral guardians, but at least there were no pentagrams or cryptic lyrics.)
Statement warning of Satanism
And for those thinking that Satanic panics were an apartheid phenomenon, or one confined to the country’s leafy suburbs, remember that the murder of 13-year-old Keamogetswe Sefularo from Mohlakeng in Randfontein in 2013 was variously described as either an attack by Satanists or motivated by a belief that she was involved in it. The following year, SADTU put out a statement warning of Satanism in township schools. Not a great deal of proof was proffered.
As it happens, after Human’s pronouncement, local Satanists took offence, saying that they did not condone any sort of violence, that those expressing opinions about Satanism didn’t understand its worldview and so on. (Incidentally, it says something about the manner in which society has changed that the Church of Satan issues statements.)
One Satanist practitioner wrote sardonically to the media that ‘if you look for the Devil behind every bush, you will find him.’
Well, here they may be correct. We’ll need to await the trial, the pleadings and the evidence to get a clearer sense of what transpired and how competing narratives stack up. Whether spiritual beliefs played a role is something that may merit attention. It may, or may not, have been a genuine factor. It would be prudent to reserve judgement on this.
And this bring us back to the initial reporting. Some headlines are instructive. IOL ran a story on the 8th: ‘PICS & VIDEO: Farmer arrested for murdering and mutilating Klawer teen accused of stealing mangoes.’ Other, smaller, outlets echoed this: ‘Teen’s Body found in Klawer Farmer’s Drain, Boy Stole Fruit with Friend’, ‘A 13-year-old allegedly BUTCHERED by a farmer for stealing a mango in Klawer’, ‘Klawer farmer who butchered a 13-year-old boy for mango has abandoned his bail application’.
It’s the word ‘farmer’ that jumps out. Smit was no farmer. A glance at any of the photos of his premises would be enough to indicate that.
Loaded connotations
But the word ‘farmer’ has loaded connotations in some quarters, serving a purpose that would not be entirely dissimilar from that served by ‘Satanist’. True enough, ‘Satanist’ might tickle a different part of our moral universe, but the ‘farmer’ – the ‘Boer’ – has often been presented as the embodiment of a societal pathology. I addressed this in early 2018 in a piece published on Politicsweb entitled ‘The Brutal Farmer Stereotype’.
The ’farmer’ is all too often a type of archetypal symbol of irredeemable evil lurking on the platteland, as I put it, ‘that of the brutal, racist Boer and the casual violence with which he dominates his workers.’
Sadly, I have seen this characterisation over and over. My experience of it goes back to the 1990s, when I had an exchange with a prominent land reform advocate at a conference put on by the SA Human Rights Commission, who told me firmly: ‘As far as I’m concerned, [white farmers] have no human rights.’
One-time minister of agriculture and land affairs under President Mbeki, Lulu Xingwana claimed with no evidence that farmers regularly ‘rape and assault’ their workers.
In one case, a ‘farmer’ living near Springs force-fed one of his workers sewage from a septic tank. Abominable this clearly was, but the assailant was not a farmer, nor did he even live on a farm. Yet The Star, featuring this on its cover page on 31 January 2018, used terms such as farmer and farm worker some 13 times. Inside, it said that this was ‘the latest shocking incident in a spate of racist attacks endured by farm workers at the hands of their employers.’ Among its list of allegations was one from suburban Pretoria.
In Smit’s case, the use of the ‘farmer’ terminology at least seems to have faded, but it is sadly indicative of a part of our political culture that it was so rapidly and assumptively adopted to begin with.
Political dynamics
This is not all that different from a conventional moral panic. People may come to assume there is an abusive farmer behind every rural transgression.
Indeed, given the political dynamics of a fractured and often angry society, it is arguably a great deal worse, making the complex discussions about the country’s problems – dare I say, its ‘demons’? – that much more difficult.
Rather like occult conspiracies.
[Image: https://pixabay.com/vectors/demon-devil-hell-inferno-lucifer-161049/]
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