From demon-possessed killers to charismatic cultists, it can sometimes seem as though South Africa is at war with evil itself.
- Professor, University of the Witwatersrand
Rural violence is a huge problem in South Africa that deserves a strong response. But white people are not the only casualties.
Fear has important consequences for how people vote, what they spend their money on, who they consider to be part of their communities, and who they treat as outsiders.
In 2013 stories emerged of gangs stealing plasma TV screens to use to make street drugs. It’s a myth, but it tells us something about South Africa’s social anxieties.
Johannesburg is not the most anxious or dangerous city in the world, but its global reputation, history and architecture make it a valuable site for thinking about how anxiety structures our lives.
During the 1980s, press coverage of South African family murders suggested that something was ‘wrong’ with white society – and with the white Afrikaans men who were usually seen as perpetrators.
The rhetoric of racial purity is full of suggestive terms like illness, weakening and dilution. These imply the medicalisation of the nation.
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