Oh shock! Horror! Now pass the knife

Violence is part of our DNA

ONE of my proudest moments during my sojourn in the US was when a group of us were taken to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), down the road from our home base at Harvard University, and I stumbled on Oscar Pistorius's blades.

We were ushered into the media lab, an unassuming hi-tech hovel at MIT - where they have designed and invented everything from web browsers and wireless networks to robots that serve you coffee - by our guide, Professor Hiroshi Ishii, who proceeded to explain to us how things worked.

Through the corner of my eye I saw a picture of Oscar Pistorius. I became curious. Noting my sense of curiosity, the professor said: "He's from South Africa, like you. We've worked with him on his legs. Nice guy."

I wanted to know more.

After the formal presentation, Ishii, who was excited by my enthusiasm, introduced me to a guy who had worked closely with Pistorius when the lab took on the mammoth task of designing his prosthetic legs.

I could have spent the whole day at the lab, or even a week, so enthusiastic were the people about the story of Pistorius.

Yes, they took pride in their invention - the legs - but they were more inspired by the feats Pistorius had achieved with those legs.

I wonder how they have taken the news now swirling around their "project".

No matter how you look at it, the Pistorius story is sure to stir emotions.

There is a section of society that is railing: How can such a powerful person, an achiever with the world at his feet, so to speak, so carelessly destroy himself? "With his wealth," they scream, "he could have any woman he wants!" Another faction screams back: "Be patient. Do not judge. Wait until justice takes its course."

Both assertions have merit. We do not know what really happened. All we know is that Reeva Steenkamp is dead. All we know is that Pistorius's reputation will never be the same again, regardless of the judicial outcome.

Because we are human beings, we will talk. We will speculate. We will ask questions. And, yes, others will judge, just as one of the callers to the John Robbie Show on Talk Radio 702 did: "Why is Oscar being treated as a victim? Justice must apply to him as it applies to everyone else."

Another tweeted: "This goes to show that violence against women knows no class, social status and race."

But the point I want to get back to is: no matter how hard we try to be level-headed about the Pistorius story, we simply can't ignore it. I think it will be our own OJ Simpson saga. People want to know more. People want to say more. People want every sensational detail brought into their living rooms, onto their front pages, their computer screens.

On Thursday, the morning the Pistorius story broke and the details were still sketchy, the Sowetan led with the story of a man who had allegedly beheaded his wife and was in the process of burying her in a shallow grave in his back yard when he was caught by the police.

The man had kept his wife's head in his room and kept talking to it. He had apparently told his children that the head would make good muti that would bring them wealth and comfort. Some people at the office gasped.

Then they moved on to The Star, which led with a story, headlined "CEO shot in bumper robbery", about Trent Barcroft, the Chrysler chief executive who was shot during a robbery.

Sipping our coffee, we raced through the story, shrugged, muttered "small potatoes" and flipped the page.

Then, a few minutes later, Talk Radio 702 broke a story about a 14-year-old girl who was raped, stabbed and left for dead in Cosmo City. We gasped, ate our cereal and moved on, looking for new tweets on Pistorius.

The afternoon edition of The Star led, naturally, with Pistorius. The 14-year-old girl's story did not even make the papers the following day.

When I say "Anene Booysen", some people will give me a blank stare, until I remind them that she was the 17-year-old girl from Bredasdorp who was gang-raped and disembowelled last week. She was buried only last Saturday, but we have already forgotten about her.

I think what the Pistorius story illustrates is that, as we hurtle from one incident of violence to the next, we are not pausing long enough to ask certain questions about ourselves.

Have we simply made peace with the fact that violent crime is part of our national DNA? Have we been desensitised to the extent that when we get shocked today we expect the following day's outrage to be more brutal, more gory? Does it mean that, perhaps at the back of our minds, we are silently praying for the next sensation, the next shock to hit us and remind us that we are still alive?

Do we even ponder these questions? If we do ponder them, what do we propose to do? It's the easiest thing to blame the government for the seeming resurgence of violent crime, but is this the solution?

An exasperated person on Twitter complained that "this thing" was overshadowing the state of the nation.

What was that? Oh, the president's state of the nation address! But on all social media platforms I visited, no one was interested in that state of the nation.

I could picture an editor trying to decide: the national development plan or blood?

His troops, in unison: "Blood!"

Pistorius's blood. The rapists' blood. Anybody's blood, as long as the punters out there can derive some morbid satisfaction as they discuss it over dinner: "Now this murder holds some promise. Ah, guns are so yesterday. But a hammer is revolutionary. Oh, pass me the knife, sweetheart. There, I want to see the blood in my meat. Yummy! Just like this story here."

But the media reflect only what is going on in society. We don't manufacture these things - only throw them back at you in the hope that they will, possibly, shock and revolt you and thus help the so-called man in the street to ask questions about himself and his interaction with his family, his neighbourhood, his city, his country.

Maybe all this gore is the state of this nation.