Take on unraveling of white society, found lacking

ISSUES of racially defined identity and culture and how this is linked to social dysfunction are much more safely tackled when you write about your own race. This was a recurring thought when ploughing through Falkof’s largely academic take on how white South Africa began to unravel in the dying years of apartheid.

Digging up the trashy offerings of Personality, Huisgenoot and other rags that enthralled and appalled white suburbia, was an excellent plan.

Its success is unfortunately limited by a mixing of descriptive and analytical narratives that becomes repetitive and revisits rather than reconfigures that somewhat worn discourse of apartheid being a system so bizarre and screwed-up that even its proponents and beneficiaries did not understand how it was impacting them.

Falkof recounts at considerable length, many of the familiar explanations of how a dominant but increasingly stressed white community failed to cope with social and political change and became more self-referential and self-absorbed.

Family murder and the real or imagined phenomena of Satanism were widely interpreted as the symptoms of a social order in collapse – a kind of disassociation or mourning for the loss of racial hegemony.

In the glossy mags, news media and religious/academic text of the period, Falkof finds a massive body of evidence which seems to illustrate but not necessarily understand this phenomenon. The theories that shaped these stories are thus all too easily refuted.

While Falkof is deeply critical of the racial and cultural bias that invariably crippled these attempted explanations, we may not always get a clear sense of what she offers by way of an alternative.

For example, if white men wipe out their entire families and then claim (the few who did not kill themselves) that they were driven by social forces and paternalistic notions of guardianship outside their control, we may suspect a degree of expediency.

But so what? Was the spate of white family murders not a significant psycho-social phenomenon?

If white society was beset by irrational fears and insecurity occasioned by the eminent loss of ascendency, surely this is worthy of comment?

Falkof seems content to ascribe these events to an unhealthy internalisation of social and political change.

Undoubtedly plausible, I did not get the sense that Falkof’s lengthy treatise brought new insight to the issue. — Glenn Hollands