To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world, before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape, and disease. The nakedness is not an error, nor pathology. The nakedness is the correct and intended result of policy, the predictable upshot of people forced for centuries to live under fear. The law did not protect us. And now, in your time, the law has become an excuse for stopping and frisking you, which is to say, for furthering the assault on your body. But a society that protects some people through a safety net of schools, government-backed home loans, and ancestral wealth but can only protect you with the club of criminal justice has either failed at enforcing its good intentions or has succeeded at something much darker. However you call it, the result was our infirmity before the criminal forces of the world. It does not matter if the agent of those forces is white or black - what matters is our condition, what matters is the system that makes your body breakable.

fifty

“That is not true in South Arica. The country has had its share of serial killers, but the mundane murders, so chillingly common, prompted me to think of South Africa itself as the serial killer. A society preying on the most vulnerable citizens, young girls, with impunity. That was the context. The plot hinged around the abduction of the seven-year-old daughter of Captain Riedwaan Faizal and his desperate search for her.

Yet shame by itself, Gilligan continues, is not a sufficient condition for the exercise of violence. In order to construct a comprehensive account of violence, one must consider additional factors. From a developmental perspective, for example, a person who has been charmed but has not yet developed the capacity for other feeling states - such as love, empathy, guilt or simply the fear of retribution - is more likely to project feelings of humiliation outwards. As for the social determinants of violence, a similar result can be expected when a person lacks other means of earning respect, such as formal education, occupational skills, financial options, or even some standing within the community. It is these social factors that prove decisive in highly unequal societies such as South Africa, for, without personal resources of any kind, one does not need to have been shamed as a child - whether the medium was physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse or neglect. As described in the previous section, a society can be sufficiently shaming all by itself for the affected individual to act out in horrific ways.

In fact, one of the things that people in this country find so utterly disorientating, is the banality of violence that surrounds them. The word ‘senseless’ is invoked repeatedly when describing violence in South Africa, which provides, paradoxically, an important clue for making sense of it. It is precisely the senselessness of the violence, in other words, that helps us comprehend it.

Perpetrators are so engulfed by their shame, “including over matters that are so trivial, that their very triviality makes it even more shameful to feel ashamed about them”. Shame envelopes shame: what appears to be ‘unprovoked’ violence is anything but that - and, as Gilligan reminds us, “[a] man only kills another when he is, as he sees it, fighting to save himself, his own self - when he feels he is in danger of experiencing… the ‘death of the self’”.