When you consider the list of things that typically expose the dark underbelly of a society, it is difficult to surpass a murder trial, especially one brimming with as many salacious ingredients as the just
concluded trial of the South African runner, Oscar Pistorius.
The 27-year-old double amputee's trial for the murder on Valentine's Day 2013 of Reeva Steenkamp, his enchanting blonde girlfriend, had it all- celebrity, beauty, violence, masculinity, intrigue, intense media interest, and rumours. If the trial weren't such a tragedy, it would have been a great operatic spectacle, mounted against the social backdrop of a nation at war with itself, torn along racial, spatial and class divides, and still clearly struggling to find a collective identity a mere two decades into its liberation from the trauma of Apartheid.
South Africans proudly call theirs a Rainbow Nation, an aspiration al nod to the pageantry of skin colours that populate its national palette. If the trial of Oscar Pistorius shows anything at all, it is that the country still has a long way to go in melding the riot of colours into anything remotely resembling a rainbow, let alone the wondrous harmony for which rainbows are renowned.
For Oscar Pistorius, the entire episode must feel like a classic Greek tragedy. Two years ago, he was a global hero, invoked, a tad, extravagantly perhaps, in the same breath as the Goliathic Nelson Mandela. At 25, callow but assured, he had sprinted into the history books, having doggedly and successfully pressured the International Olympic Committee (IOC) into changing its rules in order to allow him to run with his prosthesis.
The world's "fastest man on no legs" had failed in his first attempt - he missed the cut for the Beijing 2008 Olympics - but in London in 2012, there was no denying him. Although he eventually couldn't make it beyond thesemi finals of the 400 metres, Oscar had made his philosophical point, which is to render the line between ability and disability even more blurry, and nudge us to reflect deeper on the notion of human limits.
Yet, here he is today, found not culpable of murder to be sure, but nonetheless reeling from the aftermath of a trial that revealed many, some would say too many, sordid personal details. Overall, Pistorius' image took a battering from which it may never recover, and his fate rests in the hands of 66-year-old Judge Thokozile Masipa, who must decide next month at sentencing, whether to commit him to prison, or impose a more lenient suspended sentence.
Until then, and no matter the outcome, it is the whole of South Africa that is feeling as if it has been in the dock- and rightly so, for even after controlling the danger of reading too much into these things, the Pistorius trial, right from the very beginning, has always been about South Africa as a country.
It was difficult to see it otherwise. Oscar Pistorius had shot his girlfriend four times through the door of a bathroom in his hyper-secured Pretoria home, convinced, so he claims, that he was firing at an intruder. It is a perfect metaphor for the generalised insecurity in the country, one indexed by a worsening epidemic of gun violence (in 2007, 53 per cent of homicides in South Africa were linked to gun violence), serial police brutality, carjackings, xenophobic attacks, domestic violence, murder (the country has one of the world's highest recorded per capita murder rates), and last but not least, rape. Symbolically, the most high profile rape trial in recent memory took place in 2006 and involved the incumbent president, Jacob Zuma.
There are two ways of looking at the situation. One is to conclude that things are really bad in South Africa, in which case one would have to account for the paradox of an extremely high rate of inward migration. A different tack is to laud the country's actuarial rigour as a society that counts and keeps records. True, one woman is raped every 17 seconds in South Africa; but we only know that because it is a country that is fanatical about counting, and has developed the appropriate institutions for doing so.
Either way, there is no escaping the extrapolation that it is a country that is profoundly ill at ease, in which the odour of institutionalised masculinity and state violence is perhaps too strong. It has taken a perfectly modern trial, complete with the modern media's operatic gyrations, to bring this home, and for that alone, South African must feel especially grateful.
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