Robyn Bloch at CISA

FEELING SORRY FOR PRIME EVIL IS FEELING SORRY FOR YOURSELF: SOUTH AFRICAN PERPETRATORS AS VICTIMS

Once dubbed “prime evil”, South Africa’s perpetrator Eugene de Kock recently walked into the Franschhoek Literary Festival to support his biographer, Anemari Jansen, and her 2015 book Eugene de Kock: Assassin for the State. A white writer asked him to leave, but black participants felt this was an act of unearned moral outrage that served to mask the white audience’s own culpability with the past embodied by De Kock. Patterns in Jansen’s book, the third of its kind over 20 years, suggest her attempts to understand De Kock’s fall into exculpatory explanations in which he is humanised to the degree that he is represented as forgivable. If De Kock is forgivable, are all whites? Does the book show a demand for absolution? What does De Kock’s second banishment from the public eye suggest about the South African reading public’s relationship to the past? Robyn Bloch, PhD Candidate at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research. will present this seminar.