LITMIR.BIZ

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will be enforced …

      The willingness of individuals to sacrifice or subordinate their personal ambitions or goals for the sake of the group is also a notable similarity. This tendency is often closely tied to a willingness to engage in communal sacrificial acts, either symbolic or involving actual physical violence. Such sacrificial violence is sometimes justified as an important and necessary act to contain communal violence by focusing it on a sacrificial victim. Some of the most gruesome necklace murders [killing a victim by setting alight a motor-car tyre filled with petrol which is placed around the person’s neck] committed by political activists in the 1980s involved the sacrificial death of fellow activists suspected of disloyalty.¹⁶

      Whenever we identify with a group we immediately put ourselves in jeopardy of being expelled from the group. As children we discovered how painful this could be when other children refused to play with us, or when our parents, in order to discipline us, threatened that we would be expelled from the family. In our teens our peers became very important to us, and our happiness depended on being accepted by them. A pair of shoes or a certain haircut could put our meaning structure under threat because we had failed to conform to our group.

      Because the group demands conformity individuals must adapt their meaning structure to what the group sees as the correct set of ideas. For some people this is a serious threat to the integrity of their meaning structure, while for others just about any change is acceptable because they value the security and support which the group gives them above all else. However, the group itself might not be secure because it is under attack from other groups. Then, as Mamphela Ramphele pointed out, conformity is likely to be enforced.

      In such a situation the fear of being prey comes to the fore. The group then can create a defensive solidarity, not just against the outside enemy but against a member of the group. Coming together to sacrifice a scapegoat can produce in the group what Barbara Ehrenreich called ‘a burst of fear-dissolving strength’.¹⁷

      The choice of a scapegoat is never random though it might be mistaken. The scapegoat is someone who is considered to have betrayed the group; the punishment will serve as a warning to those group members whose loyalty to the group might be less than absolute.

      To many whites in South Africa necklace murders were simply utter barbarism, acts of mindless violence which showed that the blacks were incapable of governing themselves. Such an interpretation maintained the whites’ sense of superiority and thus their own meaning structure, but it failed to take account of how all actions, whether peaceful or murderous, arise from the way in which the participants have interpreted the situation.

      William Finnegan is an American journalist who, in the eighties, spent long periods in South Africa, where he worked with black journalists. He recounted the story of Ruth, a secretary in her forties who lived in the township of Alexandra. She told him about her background: her teenage son had been jailed without charges for three months.

      For the first month she had not known where he was, or even whether he was alive: many mothers were simply informed by the authorities that their children were dead and already buried; others never heard. ‘When he was released there was something wrong with his heart,’ she told me. ‘The police struck him too many times. The doctor told me he must not get excited. But how can you tell a seventeen-year-old boy that he must not get excited? Especially with all that is happening to us now.’ Ruth’s son was on the run. She saw him occasionally when he came home for a change of clothes, and friends of his who were also running sometimes slept at her house. But the police came regularly, bursting in, hoping to find her son, and seizing any other comrades they found there. ‘I have not slept properly for a year or more,’ Ruth said, and I believed her.

      The conversation then moved on to a recent incident when a woman who had been informing for the police was caught and necklaced. William Finnegan wrote,

      Ruth turned to me and said, emphasizing every word, ‘I think the necklace is a good thing.’ Her eyes were full of strange, sad anger. She went on, ‘It makes people think twice before they will collaborate, even if they have no job and the system offers them money to inform. We are unarmed. They are armed. We must take and use what little weapons we have. Informers have been the system’s greatest weapon for a very long time. Finally, now, we are stopping them.’¹⁸

      There is no way of knowing how the woman who was caught informing interpreted the events which followed, but, just as the act of necklacing can be interpreted in at least two different ways, so the act of being scapegoated can be interpreted in at least three different ways, each then having a different effect on the meaning structure of the victim.

      Victims might accept the verdict of the group and believe themselves to be wicked and deserving the inevitable punishment. This punishment might be viewed with utter dread because it is ultimate and for ever, a hellfire from which no escape is possible. Or the punishment might be seen as an expiation of sins; out of such hellfires the person will be redeemed. Both primitive pride and moral pride may prefer the second interpretation.

      Victims might see themselves as unjustly charged and the punishment totally undeserved. This may well be the case. Groups are not infallible. Or it might be that primitive pride has come to the fore, determined to maintain a sense of feeling good about yourself no matter what the evidence against you. After the people of the Philippines deposed President Marcos, who had enriched himself at the expense of his country, his wife Imelda demonstrated that she was a past mistress of this kind of interpretation. She always insisted that everything she did was for the good of her people and that she was, actually, very poor, despite the fact that she still lived in a most luxurious fashion.

      Choosing the ‘I am innocent’ interpretation can arouse in the person great anger and resentment and even paranoia. Or it can lead to a third interpretation, one which Imelda Marcos has often demonstrated – that of being a martyr.

      Groups often need martyrs and martyrs always need groups. Martyrs might feel themselves to be alone and isolated, but they need a group to play the support role in the drama of their lives. The group, or at least some influential members of the group, must first heap scorn and suffering upon the martyr before casting him out. (Men as martyrs usually choose a very public role for their martyrdom while women down the centuries have found a special niche as domestic martyrs. For domestic martyrs, being taken for granted by those for whom you sacrifice yourself is the equivalent of scorn and suffering and being cast out.) In the course of time members of the group must discover the error of their ways, whereupon they repent and forever revere the martyr. A martyr is, by definition, superior and good, therefore any group which has a martyr must itself be superior and good.

      To turn yourself from a scapegoat into a martyr you must have the opportunity to say a few last words. The victims of necklacing never did. Some of the most fraught and painful testimony at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings was from the relatives of those who had been necklaced. We need to learn how to live together in groups without resorting to scapegoating in order to maintain group solidarity, but we will not be able to do this until we can deal effectively with our fear of being prey.

      The history of religious and national groups is full of scapegoats and martyrs. The nation state was a product of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Nationality is now an idea that has common currency, but not everyone feels the need to claim membership of a national group.

      Nationality becomes a vital part of a person’s identity when little else is available to sustain that person’s pride. If you feel that you have considerable control over your own life, if you have work which bolsters your identity and you have an income which meets your needs, nationality becomes an add-on extra, something you can assume when your national football team looks like winning the World Cup and abandon when you go abroad and wish to demonstrate your international skills. However, when you feel that you are utterly helpless, that your fate is in the hands of other people, even though you might have work which bolsters your identity and an income which meets your needs, and even more so if you do not have such work and income, nationality can

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