Part 2: The paedophile in South Africa

The paedophile did not always exist as a psychological type waiting to be discovered. The second part of this article provides an overview of some of the historical factors that allowed for the paedophile's emergence. As Brett Bowman’s history has shown, white men who sexually abused children were increasingly being classified as paedophiles in South Africa of the 1980s, while the diagnosis of black men in this way only followed many years later. This had much to do with thinking of the period around who possessed a sophisticated psychology and who didn’t.

As a broad statement, black men were not granted personal histories and complex inner lives. Rather, their violence was ascribed to the simple fact of being black. White men, as the embodiment of the desired racial norm, did have a psychology – not least because their sexual violence, unlike that of black men, could not be explained by reference to their race. Instead, their deviance from the norm was understood by way of the abnormal psychology of the paedophile. This made white men pathological individuals, rather than representatives of a pathological race. It on this basis that White Nation can condemn the Dros rapist – he is a sick individual, rather than typical of white men as a group.

It took the ending of apartheid to make black paedophiles thinkable. In this regard the diagnosis of Fanwell Khumalo as a paedophile (and serial rapist) during his 2004 trial for 103 counts of kidnapping, rape and indecent assault may well have made a dubious sort of legal history.

Black Land First and White Nation thus sharpen and bring into focus the way race and rape have been joined by history – a history that Nicholas Ninow has brought painfully to life. That history needs to be acknowledged - as we simultaneously attempt to think beyond and outside of it. For in making the Dros Rapist shameful, disgusting and monstrous, we also make this rape especially shameful, disgusting and monstrous. Such intense stigmatisation, even if only directed at him, cannot but rub off on the victim, a seven year-old child who has been very badly harmed. To give her the task of also carrying the weight of this racialised history of rape is unbearable.