MURDER IN THE "RAINBOW NATION"?
I watched Johan Nel being sentenced recently during a TV newscast for the murders he committed in the North West. He walked through a black settlement shooting and killing people at random in broad daylight. Watching this young man, no more than a boy, listening expressionlesly to the sentence being handed down I wondered what possibly could have triggered such a senseless act
Professor Jonathan Jansen's latest column, An Educated Guess, in "The Times" shed some light on this sad and sordid event and is well worth reading:
Hatred reinforced by his experience
“SO WHAT do you think of Johan Nel?” a journalist asked me the other day. “I would like to hug him,” I offered as a conversation stopper.
In the past few weeks, newspaper headlines once again screamed blue murder over the head of the youth, who in January this year pumped bullets into the defenceless bodies of black people in an informal settlement in the North West.
Before and during his trial I felt as if we were back in medieval times. A senior political leader spoke of “this young animal” whom he also called a “young brainwashed racist”.
To some screaming voices “the devil entered Nel” and to others, he was simply a “mental case”. Placards outside the courts wanted blood. I am not sure which scares me more: the bloodlust of ordinary people or the murderous acts of Mr Nel.
Unless you believe in the parachute theory of youth development - that Nel dropped out of thin air into a decent, harmonious, raceless society - it is worth thinking about how he became this way. Testimony in the courthouse and the final judgment indicate that Nel learnt to become such a brutalised, troubled child.
I am sure he learnt to hate within his family, his school, his peer group and his church.
What I am certain about is that nothing within these institutions challenged or reversed the bigotry that built up steadily in the heart and mind of Johan Nel as he made the transition from child to man.
Nel grew up in a dangerous country inhabited by dangerous people. He was not only fed dangerous knowledge about black people, he experienced black people as dangerous.
Friends and relatives were attacked in their homes and on their farms by, yes, black people. Some died, others were scarred for life.
Here a dangerous cocktail was being mixed: the mind of a boy learning to hate others was now gradually reinforced in its beliefs by what he experienced around him. Slowly, Nel moved from being a receptacle for dangerous knowledge to being able to act on that knowledge with a .303 rifle and a huge supply of bullets.
The court is correct to impose a severe sentence on the teenager who erased the lives of four precious souls and mutilated the bodies and psyches of others.
But to simply dismiss Nel as an incorrigible racist is an intellectually lazy response to explaining his actions.
Like all of us, he would have read that criminals run riot in this country. He too would have read the screaming headlines of every daily newspaper and found that yet another woman was raped in her home or a family hijacked on the streets. He would have seen the statistics that most of those who murder get away because of problems of capacity and competence within police services.
He could probably swop stories with millions of other South Africans about personal loss and grievance. He would certainly, like most of us, wish vengeance on killers who stalk our streets and join the growing call for the reinstatement of the death penalty.
And like every one of us, he would filter the knowledge of what was happening around him through a racially tinted lens. You see, Johan Nel not only came from among us. He is us.
We have a long way to go in this country before we can see ourselves as part of Mandela and Desmond Tutu's Rainbow Nation