In the eyes of apartheid’s victims, that is, South Africa’s traumatic history has never been fully integrated into the life of the nation: it is not without reason, therefore, that sections of the public continue to call for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission ‘2.0’. From the perspective of a psychoanalytically inclined psychotherapist, a case can surely be made linking this dissociative amnesia to our propensity for committing and repeating the kinds of acts that are considered heinous by any moral yardstick - all in all, an unconscious attempt to master the original traumas inflicted by colonial and apartheid rule.

It is no wonder that the few who rise above their class cannot live with the shame of having distinguished themselves. They can neither be who they are nor stay where they are: many will marry outside their social circle; most will leave the neighbourhood for good. That is how class society operates: “In turning people against each other, the class system of authority and judgement-making goes itself into hiding; the system is left unchallenged as people enthralled by the enigmas of its power battle one another for respect.”

In an unequal society that professes equality for all, shame rears its head at every turn; for the poor and working classes in particular substance use becomes a ready consolation. Indeed, South Africa - with the second highest Gini coefficient for income inequality - also has one of the highest alcohol consumptions in the world.

According to sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, symbolic violence refers to a situation in which the oppressed cannot but assess their predicament through the terms of reference provided by the oppressor, and thereby unwittingly participate in their own subjugation. By contrast, the protests that have shaken South African university campuses over the last five years signal a conscientisation about the workings of symbolic violence. All the talk of intellectual colonisation, Eurocentrism, whiteness, privilege, epistemic violence and so on is university-speak for a perceived system of knowledge and an encompassing institutional culture that makes it impossible for black students and academics to participate as their white counterparts’ equals in intellectual life.

Still, as the Fanonian scholar Hussein Bulhan explains, colonisers are basically tragic figures. On the one hand, they need the colonised to remain in their place, to serve as the unquestioning repository of their projections - a fate that no human being will tolerate indefinitely. On the other, since the colonial relationship is effectively a recapitulation of the master-slave dialectic, the coloniser never feels recognised as a human - because the act of recognition is made by a slave and is therefore worthless. It is this hapless situation that creates what the Russian-born French philosopher Alexandre Kojève famously called the existential impasse of the master. Such an impasse confronts, arguably, many white South Africans today.

Middle-class students in South Africa, that is, are becoming increasingly adept at identifying what we now call epistemological - or symbolic - violence, while appearing oblivious to the problem of real, concrete violence. We cannot blame them, of course, because the burden of responsibility rests with us as their bourgeois teacher.