The South African horror we’re too afraid to talk about: Andrew Kenny

Key topics:Muti murders: South Africa's hidden horror, ignored by media and elites.Young mother throws baby from car, fearing kidnapping for body parts.Media silence on black-on-black muti crimes, focus on white racism instead..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa's bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..*By Andrew Kenny .There was a terrible story in last week’s Sunday Times. I read it and, since it was straightforward except for some details, I understood it. But it was so shocking I had to read it twice more to make sure. It was like looking through a narrow window into a nightmare world. It was a glimpse into a world of horror that ordinary South Africans have to fear all the time but which the South African elites – most whites, most newspaper editors, and most journalists, all political and social commentators, most politicians, and most activists, all of the chattering classes – try to ignore.They change the subject if it’s brought up, and get angry and embarrassed about if you persist in talking about it. And yet all of our people, black and white, have at some periods in their history gone through similar horror, if not quite as bad as this.This is what happened. A young woman, who lives in Vastfontein near Pretoria, was walking to a Spar shop carrying her four-month-old baby girl. A man and his passenger in a white bakkie stopped to offer them a lift. She accepted and got into the bakkie. When he reached the turn-off for the Spar, the driver carried on straight. The woman asked him to stop so that she could walk. The driver ignored her and drove on. The woman tried to throw her baby out of the window. The passenger tried to stop her. They grappled. Then she succeeded and threw her baby out. The baby died. The car stopped and the mother got out. The driver tried to flee but was stopped by someone. The police came by. The driver told the police what had happened. They arrested the mother.Was she trying to get rid of her baby? None of the facts suggest this. Many poor South African women do deliberately get rid of their babies or even kill them, for a variety of reasons. Not all human mothers have strong maternal feelings towards their newly born babies. Some regard them as aliens. Post-natal depression might make some mothers resent their babies. If a woman has a baby by a man who abandons her before the birth, and she gets a new boyfriend, he might be very jealous of the baby, somebody else’s baby. (This is how some human males are. Animal males are much worse; lions kill all cubs not sired by them.) So she might get rid of the baby to keep the new boyfriend, but in this case the mother’s husband was the father of her baby.A young mother might find her new baby a restriction on her social life. Most of all, the mother might not be able to afford to feed the baby. So babies are left on the steps of hospitals or in the local dump or behind some bush. But all of these are done furtively, privately, not when people are watching, as they were when this young woman threw her baby out of the window of a moving car.MutiThe husband of this mother gave her reason for what she had done. He said that by the attitude and behaviour of the driver and his passenger she thought, she instinctively knew, they wanted to kidnap the baby – for muti. Not for ransom, not to sell to some childless woman, but for muti – for the baby’s body parts.In 1987 I was working at an industrial plant in what was then the Eastern Transvaal. I became friendly with an Afrikaans operating foreman there. He was a sociable type and invited a group of us round to his house for beer, wine, Klippies, and potjiekos. He had been in the police, which he said was most interesting but had left for industry, which he said was less interesting but better paid.He was boasting about his deeds as a policeman in some rural part. He explained the way they interrogated suspects (all black) to extract confessions. One method was to grab the suspect, push his head into a tub of water until he was on the edge of suffocation, then lift his head out so that he could have a quick gasp of air and push it back under water again. They did this until he confessed.Another method was to cut up an inner tube to make a rubber sheet, and then apply the same technique but suffocating the suspect with rubber over his nose and mouth instead of water. Our host was a jovial sort, and apparently a good cook; I didn’t taste his potjiekos because I am a vegetarian but I’m told it was delicious. I asked him what crimes he was interrogating these men for. Political crimes? He looked surprised. “No, muti. Muti murders.”The police would get a tip-off from local villagers. They would go into the bush and there find the corpse of an infant boy – an incomplete corpse, with eyes, testicle, knees, and elbows cut out. He explained that for strong muti it had to be fresh. In other words, the parts had to be removed while the donor was alive. The practice seemed widespread in the area. All the villagers were aware of it.And I think in large parts of the country, most black people have always been aware of it, but the mass media don’t seem the slightest interested in it. Recently, in Saldanha Bay, the case of the six-year-old girl, Joshlin Smith, who has gone missing and who it is alleged may have been abducted for muti (she is a very striking little girl), has made the news in a spectacular but confusing and unresolved court case. But this is unusual. Most muti murders and mutilations are ignored by the mainstream media, who are far more concerned about trivial cases of white racism. There was a ghastly example of this racist double-standard in 2016.HorrifyingI apologise for repeating myself here but I can’t get this horrifying case out of my mind. In January 2016, a white estate agent from KwaZulu-Natal, Penny Sparrow, having observed black people on the beach, tweeted that she regarded them in the same way as those “cute little wild monkeys” littering on the beach. In May of the same year, a young black man was abducted by three other black men, who drugged him and then gouged out both his eyes and testicles. In both cases all the facts were known.The Daily Sun (the only paper in South Africa that cared enough about poor black people to report the case in detail) told us that police had found the “fresh balls” of the victim in one of the suspect’s refrigerator. So it was obviously a muti matter. One of the black men was found guilty of the mutilation in a court of law and sentenced to imprisonment.In the case of Penny Sparrow, there was uproar all over the country. Sparrow found herself “at the centre of a race-row that has gripped the country.” The Equality Court found her guilty of hate speech. Newspaper editors, politicians and social justice warriors raged and thundered against the evil Penny Sparrow. Not a peep from any of them about the young black man who had had both eyes and testicles ripped out.There are two reasons for this. First, the woke commentators who make up our mass media think that whites are naughty but very, very interesting, especially when they sin, but they find blacks boring, of little interest unless they are abused by whites. Second, they do not want to admit that many black people have dark and primitive superstitions, which can cause terrible suffering. This is extremely dishonest. Actually in the past whites also had dark and primitive superstitions, which caused appalling suffering. Some of the superstition lingers on today, even onto the pages of our daily newspapers.Western Civilisation was founded in Athens and Jerusalem and soon centred around the Mediterranean Sea – which was often called a “Pagan Lake” because its first religions were all pagan. These were nominally supplanted by Christianity, which became the official religion of the Roman Empire. But you might notice that the days of the week and the months of the year are still named after pagan gods.In some newspapers, there is a page for the signs of the Zodiac and for your daily horoscope. This is strictly Pagan, going back far before Christ. (I think the Catholic Church once banned belief in the Zodiac; I’m not sure if it still does so.) In Europe, down the ages of Christianity, there were still enduring pockets of “the Old Religion”, which meant witches, demons, paganism, and even occasionally Devil Worship. In the 17th Century, the age of Shakespeare, Galileo, Rembrandt, and Newton, there was a frenzy of witch-burning; bad weather and poor crops were blamed on witchcraft. In the 20th Century, films such as “Rosemary’s Baby”, ‘The Wicker Man” and “The Exorcist” were hugely popular.Not fundamentally differentWhat I am saying is that muti, while undoubtedly evil, is not fundamentally different in its belief system from ancient western beliefs. The Golden Bough, an extraordinarily complete compendium of superstitions down the ages, gives testament to this. It is important – urgent – for us all to recognise the danger muti poses to large sections of our population. We must shout and scream about muti murders that happen, to alert everybody to the danger, to show we care about poor black people in themselves and not only when they suffer from white racism.“Traditional healing” in South Africa covers a wide range of practices, some outright evil, such as muti, some harmless but useless, and some of definite benefit, where practitioners have learnt through experience and observation about the healing properties of certain herbs and roots, and using instinctive psychological understanding can bring peace to troubled souls just by speaking to them. They should not all be condemned because of muti.Western medicine also has its ancient counterparts, some of which were close to muti, when ancient apothecaries used human body parts, including brains. Some of these old “alternative medicines” persist today. Some are pure nonsense and their practitioners merely eloquent charlatans. But some have great value. I rather derided acupuncture until it was tried on me with 100% success, recently restoring me from crippling pain in my lower back to complete recovery. Many modern medicines are derived from ancient herbal cures. Aspirin is not really one of them.The Sunday Times story was on page 5. The mother was Jessica Kwangware and her baby Mennyesha. She had first tried to throw her baby onto grass next to the road for a safe landing but, because the passenger grappled with her to stop her, her aim was thrown out and the baby landed on tarmac and died. It’s not clear how the driver of the bakkie was stopped or by whom, or what the driver told the police, or why the police believed him and not her.No doubt all of this will be revealed in the trial (or maybe not, given the poor state of some of our court proceedings). From what I know, which is just this one report, I have strong sympathy with the mother, but if the court believes her, I don’t know what its verdict on her could be. It’s a wretched, terrible case. I suppose it would be very difficult for her to show that the driver was indeed intent in kidnapping the baby for muti. The whole thing fills me with dread.Muti shows an immediate racial difference in that it is now practised by blacks and not whites. But it is not a profound racial difference in that whites in the past had similar superstitious beliefs and horrible practices. What I am pleading for is that muti, which is here and now, should be fully reported as loudly as possible, massively publicised and condemned from the highest quarters..*Andrew Kenny is a writer, an engineer and a classical liberal.*This article was originally published by Daily Friend and has been republished with permission.

The South African horror we’re too afraid to talk about: Andrew Kenny

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