Humanitarian Reason by Fassin Didier

Author:Fassin, Didier
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2012-07-27T16:00:00+00:00

THE SCANDAL OF RAPE

“Things Fall Apart”: the special report that was published under this headline borrowed from Chinua Achebe’s novel by the Weekly Mail and Guardian on November 9, 2001, was damning. The article began in literally apocalyptic tone: “ ‘The coming of the Lord is nigh, I’m telling you,’ asserts Jan Pietersen, his gaze fixed on the sunset. ‘They have rejected the name of the Lord’. He falls silent. Standing in front of his humble house in Louisvale, a township on the dusty margins of the town of Upington in Northern Cape Province, his dark eyes reflect the last glimmers of dusk. Pietersen smiles sadly, shaking his head. ‘It’s frightening, beyond my imagination.’ ” The event that prompted these remarks was a drama that rocked South African society. A nine-month-old girl had been raped in this “colored” township. The penetration had caused major injury. The suspects were six men from the neighborhood, including the little girl’s great-grandfather. They were drunk at the time of the incident. The father, aged twenty-four, and the sixteen-year-old mother, who had left the child alone, were themselves drunk when the rape occurred. The article described the scene in detail, citing the clinical account supplied by the doctor, reporting the dismayed or vengeful responses of neighbors, and quoting local residents’ comments about the trauma for the neighborhood and the curse it would bring on the township. The reporter took particular care with the writing, mixing realism with a poetic tone. The full front-page photo showed the grandmother and a neighbor: the two women were covering their faces with one hand, to allow their tears to flow, it was suggested, but in fact more probably to conceal themselves; one sister of the victim stood at their side looking at the camera. The caption spared nothing: “In the weak light of the lounge, the women discovered a bleeding, gaping wound as they parted the infant’s legs.” In spite of its reputation as a serious and even intellectual publication, the Weekly Mail and Guardian yielded to the temptation of rendering the intolerable sensational.

While this terrible abuse has a particular resonance in the recent moral history of South Africa, it emerges in a broader context of the chronicling of horror. On a daily basis the press intones a litany of brutality and crime, not only the publications that specialize in sensationalism, but also the major national newspapers. There is something remarkable about the media’s readiness to propagate this striking and even repulsive image of South African society. Without wishing to underestimate the reality of the violence, it is difficult to elude wondering about the meaning of this national representation of self in the register of abjection. The imaginary of South Africa is thus less that of fear of violence—however real this is in individuals’ experience—than of its obscenity. In this respect reports about children are the most distressing—especially the stories about the rape of very young children, the case of the little girl in Louisvale obviously representing an extreme example.

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