'And our lives shall shrink'

Modern crime and the modern soul: an extract from Rage and Love.

My home country of South Africa experiences on average 75 murders a day. This equates to a homicide rate of 45 per 100 000 people.

That rate is matched only by certain cities in the US and across South America.

In El Salvador, the murder rate in 2019 was 38 per 100 000 people. Midway through that year, Nayib Bukele was elected to the presidency. Today the murder rate is 2.4 per 100 000, after a crackdown on gangs and a refusal to negotiate with them.

This has driven liberals to despair. Democracy is now apparently under threat in El Salvador, because you can walk the streets freely, because it was shown that a country torn apart by drugs and civil war and gangs could, within years, become as safe as Luxembourg given the right leadership.

A common experience for any South African, of any race, is being told by one’s elders how one used to be able to walk around cities at night, how one did not fear for one’s life returning home from a dinner party, how houses used to not be fortresses, how farmers were not always terrorist targets.

When I ruminate on all this tragedy, I often think of a passage from the classic South African novel, Cry, the Beloved Country, by the liberal paragon, Alan Paton, written in the ‘voice’ of white, English South Africa, after the murder of the reform-minded character, Arthur Jarvis:

We shall live from day to day, and put more locks on the doors, and get a fine fierce dog when the fine fierce bitch next door has pups and hold on to our handbags more tenaciously; and the beauty of the trees by night, and the raptures of lovers under the stars, these things we shall forgo. We shall forgo the coming home drunken through the midnight streets, and the evening walk over the star-lit veld. We shall be careful, and knock this off our lives, and knock that off our lives, and hedge ourselves about with safety and precaution. And our lives will shrink, but they shall be the lives of superior beings; and we shall live with fear, but at least it will not be a fear of the unknown. And the conscience shall be thrust down, the light of life shall not be extinguished, but be put under a bushel, to be preserved for a generation that will live by it again, in some day not yet come; and how it will come, and when it will come, we shall not think about at all. 

The irony is that Paton believed this great suffocation was entirely because of apartheid. Of course, when apartheid ended, these things did not improve, but became worse on a scale Paton would never have been able to anticipate.

But his genius lay in so eerily predicting something so many of us South Africans would live through ourselves in my lifetime in the post-apartheid regime.

The great sadness of this all is we need not live like this. El Salvador demonstrates this clearly, as the great reduction in crime in cities like New York in the 1990s demonstrated. (Murders have since ticked up again owing to the George Floyd depolicing effect.)

I tried to express the sense of suffocation and stress caused by the ever-present threat of crime in my book Rage and Love: A Memoir of White South Africa in an Age of Destruction.

The excerpt below tells the story of my own brush with a violent chaos familiar to all South Africans, and the insidious effect it has on the soul:

---

Python 

The snake is primordial fear. This creature of cylindrical muscle, with no arms and legs, is an emblem of our first reckoning with the terrors that live in nature. As a child, our Zulu housekeeper, Emmarentia, once rushed into the house, pale with fright. She told us she had seen a snake bigger than her arm at the bottom of our garden. We had always thought pythons lived there. 

The sacredness of games in the ancient world was connected to the story of Apollo slaying a python to protect his prophetess, his oracle. The Greek games were a tribute to this act of struggle against the dark, constricting heaviness of the snake. Physical struggle was a way of imitating and honouring the god of light. The fight was good. The python was somehow necessary…

I continued to feel the pressures of life in the country’s capital. We struggled to make ends meet. Our children became ill in a bad flu season, the so-called swine flu. One of my wife’s friends lost her baby in this dry, dusty, and cold winter. The world never stopped, or locked down, however. I tried to earn extra money through my writing. I wrote four columns for a Durban newspaper but lost that job when the media group was bought by an ANC and Chinese investment partnership. 

I wrote for other local magazines. I remember once driving into Pretoria to interview the Minister of Transport for one business magazine. I was amazed at how shoddy the offices were, and the fact that the minister, whilst being very kind and friendly, was a famous communist poet.  

The pay for such work was not great. One enjoys a middle-class life, but there is an anxiety to hang onto it, as crime rises all around you, as you feel pressure squeeze you, like a bandage tightly wound around your head. 

The sense of struggle and conflict came to a head one night. 
 
It was the beginning of the season of thunderstorms. A few nights previously I had awoken to a cat lying in my infant son’s crib next to our bed. It then raced away down the passage. 
 
That week, my wife and I had also been perturbed when garden services had left an item of clothing behind on an external windowsill. The next day it disappeared, meaning that unbeknownst to us, somebody had entered our property to retrieve it. 
 
On this night, my wife woke me to inform me she had heard strange noises down the passage. She thought it was the cat again. 
 
Looking back, I am surprised that I didn’t stay put and just wait to hear it myself. Instead, I wandered down the passage to see three intruders coming towards me. They burst into our room, turned on the lights, pointed a gun at us, forced me to the ground and began to gag me and tie me up with my belts and ties. 
 
The night hit rock bottom when I heard my elder two-year-old son wake up and cry in his room down the passage. One of the intruders went and picked him up and put him in the bed next to my wife, who had begun to breastfeed our younger two-month-old son to try to keep him quiet. She then tried to hide our elder son under the sheets so he would not see what was happening. 
 
I distinctly remember the feelings I experienced as I lay on the floor. The python squeezed the air out of my lungs. The anaconda was in the room with us. As I lay there gagged on the floor, I thought about how vulnerable my wife was. I thought about how vulnerable my sons were. And I knew, deeper than any rational thought, that I was completely powerless. That anything could now happen to my entire world and there was nothing I could do. It could all be destroyed, right now, in front of my eyes. 
 
I don’t care to recount the next six hours in too much detail, but we were left unharmed physically. Eventually the invaders left, we freed ourselves, and summoned the neighbours. One neighbour arrived the next morning, a wealthy one, with a wad of cash and an apologetic and sympathetic manner, expressing real sorrow in a thick Afrikaans accent. I think about him still. 

All of this was made worse by the strange news I received that same day, that my grandmother in Switzerland had committed suicide by means of the legal procedure of euthanasia within Swiss law. She had not been in any pain, or ill in any way, but had followed her ‘partner’ in the process. This to me is the ultimate symbol of Western decadence, and I remember my thoroughly South African father, her son, who had long rejected the narrow, cramped order of the country of his fathers, being angry more than sad. The rest of our family were more understanding. 

I believe we were psychologically harmed by the trauma counselling that followed soon after. It is conventional wisdom that you need to talk out your problems, to process them, to come to terms with them. I am yet to see any proof that mental health and suicide rates have improved with the enactment of this wisdom. When I retold our story to the counsellor, the fight or flight adrenaline simply re-soaked my body. Later I would read up on this phenomenon.  

It turns out that Nietzsche was right to some extent when he wrote, ‘There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy’. Your brain reaches out to your entire body via the nerves, particularly the gut. Your limbs can move milliseconds before neurons fire in the brain. We have largely misunderstood the Greeks, who taught that the anima, or soul, was not naturally separate from the body, as well as the classical Christian teaching that even in the afterlife, the physical body will be reunited to the soul, because we are not spirits but material beings with a soul which belongs with the body and still transcends it. The soul is substantial but because it is a human soul, it belongs with the human flesh. One way of visualising this, albeit imperfectly, is to imagine the soul as not being within the body, but as encompassing the body. Nietzsche’s view surprisingly corresponds, in my opinion, with the Greek idea that the soul is the form of the body and depends on the body. We must listen to it. 

Nietzsche is, of course, famous for his apparent rejection of the Christian idea of the soul, but I am sceptical that he truly does oppose the concept of the soul, at its core. I think he hearkens back to the classical idea of the soul, as the self of the body, as the genius at the heart of all our drives and instincts: ‘Behind your thoughts and feelings, my brother, there stands a mighty ruler, an unknown sage – whose name is self…’ That self he would later identify with spirit: ‘That commanding something which the people call “spirit” wants to be master within itself and around itself and to feel itself master: out of multiplicity it has the will to simplicity.’ 

The self wants to be master within itself and around itself… You can read such words as a reference to burgeoning tyranny. But that is not what is truly intended here. To master yourself and your surroundings is rather the call to coherence – to have ownership of yourself in space. 

We see how animals, after escaping danger from humans or predators, instinctively run, roll, and move, to burn through the adrenaline coursing through your body. Adrenaline is good in moments of danger, but if it remains in your body, the heightened awareness and energy drains you and makes you sick and tired. It gets in your soul. I wish I knew that then. I would have lifted weights, swum in a cold pool, and taken a sleeping pill – instead I had a drink, told the story over and over, did not sleep, and soaked myself in stress. I would jump at any noises in the night, remaining hyper-vigilant for years.  

Something in my personality made me more susceptible to this stress than others. It is a sad truth that most South Africans have had this same experience, with many having a far worse ending. Farm murders, for example, are real in South Africa and in areas where I have lived, there have been beheadings, torture, and people hacked to death with machetes. Statistically, the South African murder rate is around five times higher than the global average. But for a white South African farmer, his chances of being murdered are 15 times greater. 

If you bring up this violent rage against white South Africans, you are simply accused of being fragile and having a victim mentality. Never mind that many of the ANC politicians have been singing songs about killing the Boers and having one bullet for each ‘settler’ – including Mandela. Of course, we are all settlers in South Africa, with the San people, or Bushmen, being the oldest settlers, and the Bantu people having moved from West Africa centuries later – which is why you can still find similar words in Zulu and Swahili. 

As for the common experience of traumatic crime, when I taught at a very wealthy South African school, majority-white, but with significant African numbers (who were given favoured admission), when I set essays for the students or chatted about their lives, the number of them who had had similar experiences, or had seen people shot, or who knew of people being murdered, was shocking.  

One boy under my care arrived one week after having suffered such an experience that weekend. I was able to tell him to get into the gym, to get outside, rather than to brood. Telling the story should come later. 
 
The day after the robbery set the tone for these years. I grew tired. Utterly exhausted. I looked for some relief in our next move. I wanted to escape the hot and dry tension of Gauteng, the province of South Africa dominated by the cities of Johannesburg and Pretoria, their highways, their townships, and their masses of people trying to survive joblessness, crime, and icy winters. 

We moved down to the green Midlands of KwaZulu-Natal, nearer to my own family. I had found a job at one of the country’s most prestigious boarding schools. The school’s green grounds and beautiful architecture offered a new beginning for us. It was here that my third child, a daughter, was born. This was to be the kind of life I had planned for myself when teaching had beckoned to me during university. But in South Africa, in the world, there is no real escape from the traffic of modern life, from the heat of highways.  

When our third child was born, after we had moved into a new house on the school grounds, which needed a lot of work, I fell ill, and stayed ill for about a year. This was years before covid, so when people complained about long covid, I would often explain that chronic illness was not new. (Intriguingly, as we moved into the house, a massive snake had crept across the driveway just a few metres in front of me.) 

It was as though the fatigue would naturally drip into a puddle of fevers. I remember thinking, as I woke up, as I walked to work (I was very lucky to be able to do that), how on earth am I going to make it through another day? It felt as though each cell in my body was sick and tired. 
 
On my son’s third birthday, I remember breaking down amid a bad fever and sheer emotional emptiness. I was being suffocated slowly. It seemed like I was always one long day away from the ‘flu. 
 
On the weekends, things like weeds in the lawn or dirty dishes would drive me insane. Minor irritations of life would become crises. The weeds, however, would prove to be a revelation – literally. 

One of the often-forgotten parables of Christ features weeds: 

The kingdom of heaven is likened to a man that sowed good seeds in his field. But while men were asleep, his enemy came and oversowed weeds among the wheat and went his way. And when the blade was sprung up, and had brought forth fruit, then appeared also the weeds. And the servants of the goodman of the house coming said to him: Sir, didst thou not sow good seed in thy field? Whence then hath it weeds? And he said to them: An enemy hath done this. And the servants said to him: Wilt thou that we go and gather it up? And he said: No, lest perhaps gathering up the weeds, you root up the wheat also together with it. Suffer both to grow until the harvest, and in the time of the harvest I will say to the reapers: Gather up first the weeds, and bind it into bundles to burn, but the wheat gather ye into my barn. 

Suffer both to grow until the harvest… 

When you weed, it is difficult to stop spreading the weeds. If you poison the weeds, you often poison soil, animals, and the grass. Yes, in the parable, the enemy plants the weeds, but the weeds create the drama of the story. In the same way we are told that in some cosmic sense, Jesus was already crucified at the foundation of the world, because the drama of the possibility of evil was present in the mind of God. 

To ask for purity in your surrounds too soon, this side of eternity, will only be destructive. You must allow life to outgrow the weeds; you must suffer the enemy’s work around you for now, just as the anaconda rears it heads from the watery depths in your life from time to time. Without facing weeds and monsters, decadence and complacency grow. There is no discipline of the spirit.  This was the story of white South Africa to some extent. Material gains from the fresh, green land, had led to a loss of that discipline and identity which sustains all cultural endeavour. Without this sense of endeavour and discipline, when the weeds and pythons emerge, we lack the weapons and drive and will to face the chaos as Apollo did, and so our connection with the sacred, his oracle, is lost. 

Another snake was soon to lash out, this time from beneath the hot tarmac of our chaotic South African roads…

---

To read the full book, become a paid subscriber by clicking the link below. You will automatically receive it digitally.

Alternatively, buy the book on Amazon.