Satanism and Family Murder in Late Apartheid South Africa Imagining the End of Whiteness

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. This book considers two of those symptoms, a pair of matched moral panics that appeared in the contemporary media and in popular literature. It 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.

Nicky Falkof was born and raised in the Johannesburg suburbs during the last years of apartheid. She holds an MA in Critical Theory from the University of Sussex and a PhD from the London Consortium. She is currently Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.

Introduction: Dark Tales, White Wolves
PART I: SATANISM
1. Excavations
2. Anatomy Of A Moral Panic
3. History And Identity
4. Older Anxieties
5. Resistance And (Bio)Power
PART II: FAMILY MURDER
6. A Death In The Family
7. The Afrikaans Family Romance
8. A 'Bloody Epidemic'
9. The Righteous Path
10. The Whitest White
Conclusion: The End Of Whiteness