GARETH VAN ONSELEN: The increasingly abnormal norms of life in SA

The past fortnight has been, shall we say, interesting. Let us try and summarise some of the more eventful issues:

In KwaZulu-Natal, a man casually walked into the Estcourt community police station and said he was, "tired of eating human flesh". It is alleged he and two accomplices killed a woman, cut her up and ate her. Reportedly, their modus operandi was to find a woman, rape her, murder her and then consume her body.

August is women’s month. Therefore, normally, you would suspect the victim would become the focal point of any subsequent attention. But the nature of the crime precluded that. Cannibalism tends to have that effect.

Subsequent reports suggested as many as 300 people had likewise knowingly eaten human flesh in that particular community, all prescribed by a local nyanga. Police later denied the number, but only on the grounds that no one had come forth to confess.

Given that they were only alerted to the possibility of mass cannibalism in their own community when a person literally came to own-up face-to-face, the Estcourt police seem to rely a lot on confession to do their work. They are now, apparently, "investigating".

After all of this, the ANC felt it necessary to put out a statement. Among other things it said that the incident "exposes the extent of our social challenges" and that "the idea that there is any supernatural solution from eating the meat of another human being has also been uncovered to be untrue and fallacy."

Cannibalism did not come up at the ANC’s recent policy conference. But it is good that in the year 2017, two decades into our constitutional democracy, we now have an on-the-record position. It is important to clear up these kinds of basic misunderstandings so that we can refocus on things like economic growth and the public-sector wage bill.

Elsewhere, the President, with the same kind of casual detachment, remarked in a speech that he had survived an assassination attempt. "I was poisoned by witches who were trying to finish me off in broad daylight," he said. "If I didn’t have friends overseas, today you would be saying there was a man from Nkandla but he died."

—  Assassinations, attempted or otherwise, seem to be about as common as potholes in SA

Typically, you would think that kind of statement – the attempted assassination of a sitting president – would stop the press. Especially because it was the first time Zuma had confirmed it. But then SA is currently host to a formal commission of inquiry into political killings. Some 90 people have been murdered for political reasons in KwaZulu-Natal alone since March 2016. Thus, it is perhaps not the singular sensation you might first think it to be.

Besides, this past weekend it emerged there were plans afoot to assassinate the minister of police too. According to the City Press, the minister key staff and their immediate families are now "being guarded around the clock by officers of the police’s VIP protection unit". So, the president’s admission was really a run-of-the-mill affair. Assassinations, attempted or otherwise, seem to be about as common as potholes in SA.

And then there was a small incident with the first lady of Zimbabwe, who allegedly beat another lady in the face with a cable in a South African hotel. She was due to be arrested, then to appear in court and, when neither came to pass, to be held up at any port of entry by which she might try to leave.

She left anyway. But not after she had secured from the South African government, diplomatic immunity. The minister of international relations described the decision as "painful" but, as someone pointed out on Twitter, presumably not as painful as getting lashed on the head with an electric cord.

Later, an ANC MP, one Loyiso Mpumlwana, said of the first lady’s retaliatory assault, "It is expected in the African culture." He went on to elaborate, "You can ask any African. I find a boy in the house at 2am, sleeping or whatever they are doing with my daughter; I beat them up. That is our culture." That’s good to know.

Mpumlwana didn’t quite say where beating up women in nightclubs fits into African culture. Presumably because it doesn’t. At any rate, he did not address the behaviour of the former deputy minister of higher education, who was videotaped beating up on a woman.

He wasn’t arrested either. The police minister, presumably somewhat embroiled in his own potential death, couldn’t really explain why, but unlike the Zimbabwean first lady, the deputy minister did appear in court.

For about 10 days after the incident came to light, the president looked on and only when the deputy minister resigned did some moral conclusion to the saga manifest. He faced exactly no political repercussions beyond those he later inflicted upon himself.

He was, however, defended in the interim by the head of the ANC Women’s League who, instead of condemning him, suggested people look elsewhere first.

So, this has not been the most successful women’s month.

On the back pages, you would’ve read about the 19 people that died in yet another taxi accident. One veered off a bridge and rolled down an embankment just outside Pietermaritzburg. These kinds of things are just another regular occurrence in SA, a land where the normal and abnormal have long since traded places. But there was no space on the front pages for these deaths. Death is not news in SA.

Hate is news. There is a lot of that. Andile Mngxitama tweeted, "For those claiming the legacy of the holocaust is ONLY negative think about the lampshades and Jewish soap." The director of the South African Holocaust and Genocide Foundation pointed out that while the turning of Jews into lampshades and soap was a myth, "in some camps the ashes from the burnt bodies were used as fertiliser and that hair from the bodies was shaved off for filling beds, and in some cases the gold fillings in their mouths would be plundered."

Mngxitama stood by his tweet, saying, "I will not take the tweet down, I will not apologise. If anyone should apologise it is them (the SAJBD and the Jewish people)". His tweet is one of those things that is hard properly to digest. It is so profoundly sick and diseased you sort of gloss over. But contemplate it for a moment and a pit of hate opens up before you, so deep and black that unless you look away, it will suck in your soul. At the bottom of it you will find Mngxitama, wallowing in this own amoral filth and slime.

In the world of business, Jimmy Manyi bought The New Age newspaper and ANN7 for around R450m. How he managaged this, no one quite knows. It seemed to involve the seller – the Gupta family – funding the buyer – Manyi. Something called "vendor financing". That would seem to be a distinctly South African arrangement. There is, however, something apposite about it all — the former head of ANC government communications running a media franchise, that from the get-go has positioned itself as pro-government. Full marks for honesty.

And so it goes. Just another week in SA. Quite what this country would be like to the proverbial space alien who dropped in for a short time without any context, is anyone’s guess. It must appear to a detached onlooker like some kind of game, where the pretence of a constitutional democracy battles daily with a far more savage reality.

We have something called women’s month, an appeal to the high ideal of equality, but during which a woman is raped and eaten, while others are beaten on camera and lashed with cables without consequence. We have political party leaders that mock genocide. We have a transport system that delivers death, and a president who is poisoned by witches. It’s like the Brothers Grimm are writing our grand democratic journey.

At least we have the pretence to keep us all safe. The illusion that everything, analysed and reported on in silos, is just an anomaly; an isolated piece of madness we can file away in the requisite draw and allow us some comfort that it has a name and a place. We even have a file on cannibalism now.

During apartheid, one of the ANC’s more famous boycott phrases was, "there can be no normal sport in an abnormal society". Ironically, we have normal sport now. Whether or not our society is normal, however, is more difficult to say.