Nicky Falkof presents her monograph:
Satanism and Family Murder in
Late Apartheid South Africa:
Imagining the End of Whiteness
Monday 18th January 2016
5pm-7pm Room 4429
SOAS - University of London
In the last years of apartheid, white South African society found itself in the grip of
previously unimaginable social and political change, which sometimes manifested in
morbid cultural symptoms. Nicky Falkof discusses two of those symptoms, a pair of
matched moral panics that appeared in the contemporary media and in popular literature. She argues that excessive reactions to the apparent threat posed by a cult of
white Satanists, never proven to exist, and to a so-called epidemic of white family murder reveal important truths about fear, violence and resistance, as well as fragmentations within the poles of white South African identity: nationalism, gender, history,
the family, even whiteness itself. Together, the Satanism scare and the family murder
‘epidemic’ draw a compelling picture of the psychic landscape of white culture at the
end of apartheid, revealing both pathological responses to social change and the brutalising effects that apartheid had on those who benefited from it most.
Chair: Dr Lindiwe Dovey (SOAS)
For more information contact [email protected]
All welcome