Justice, after all, is being done

“WHAT do other people in SA talk about? Those who don’t talk about the #OscarTrial?” tweeted Zelda la Grange, a former aide to Nelson Mandela. For weeks the country has been transfixed by the trial of Oscar Pistorius, a sporting hero with two amputated legs who killed his model girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp—by mistake, he says.

No newspaper is printed without Oscar news. Court proceedings are broadcast live, for the first time. A new satellite television channel dedicated to the case carries legal commentary around the clock. Eusebius McKaiser, a radio commentator, says: “The trial has become compulsory viewing or listening. Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our criminal trial live.” Public attention peaked when Mr Pistorius was harshly cross-examined, cried, vomited and broke down.

The questioning revolves around sex, jealousy, betrayal and the fast life of a boy born without fibulas who became the first disabled athlete to compete in an Olympic track event, two years ago, before he disappeared into a netherworld of gunplay, bottle-blondes and celebrity lawyers. “It’s beyond what I could have made up,” says Margie Orford, a Cape Town crime writer.

The main facts of the case are not in dispute. Late on Valentine’s Day last year Mr Pistorius jumped out of bed with his gun and fired four bullets into Ms Steenkamp, who was behind a bathroom door. Did he act out of rage after a tiff, or in fear of an intruder, whom he said he heard in the dark?

Interest in the case goes far beyond Mr Pistorius’s guilt or innocence. Campaigners highlight what they see as South Africa’s dangerous proliferation of firearms. The trial has brought to light several incidents when Mr Pistorius carelessly fired a gun in public, once in a crowded restaurant, another time out of his car’s sunroof after an argument with a policeman.

Some thus see him as a product of the country’s malignly macho gun culture. A string of South African men have recently shot family members after apparently mistaking them for intruders. But others point out that the number of guns in South Africa has fallen sharply since the end of apartheid in 1994 to 12.7 per 100 people, not least because stricter laws were enacted in 2000. In comparison, Americans on average own one gun per head of population. Britain has 6.7 per 100.

When Mr Pistorius declared in his testimony, “I shot out of fear,” he became the voice of many white South Africans. They tend to see themselves as living in the shadow of violent crime, retreating behind high walls, electric fences and steel doors. From there they can summon private security guards, who are twice as numerous as policemen, by pressing a panic button.

The trial has revived a long-running debate about other aspects of crime. South Africa’s murder rate is one of the highest in the world: 30.9 for every 100,000 people, compared with 4.7 in the United States. Yet the rate has fallen by half in the past 15 years. Rich whites, the most fearful among South Africans, are actually the least endangered. Most victims are poor and black.

Though both the accused and the victim in the Pistorius case are white, race is never far away. Ms Orford suggests that the case in fact involves a third protagonist, “the threatening body, nameless and faceless, of an armed and dangerous black intruder”. She detects and deplores the ghost of the “swart gevaar” (the black peril) that sustained apartheid in the past century—and is still around.

Some observers say that Mr Pistorius in his defence reflects the laager mentality of long-dead Afrikaners who felt they were up against the world. In an article headline, “Crossing the street to avoid white men,” Sisonke Msimang, a writer, invokes the spectre of “white impunity” and “violent acts perpetrated by white men against black people who were simply minding their own business”. She raises the possibility that “because we see whites as victims and blacks as perpetrators, our collective sympathies are always with whites.”

A racial dimension

Still more controversially, Sandile Memela, an advocate for the ruling African National Congress (ANC), wrote on a website, “Oscar would be a hero if Reeva were a black man.” Trigger-happy whites, he added, feel entitled to kill anyone on their property who is black. “You cannot trust a black man,” he wrote. “This is what white paranoia has driven some white men to do: shoot first and ask questions later.” Following an outcry, Mr Memela apologised.

But others have sought to ease racial tensions. Every day members of the ANC Women’s League come to court in support of the family of Ms Steenkamp, whom they see as a victim of domestic violence, another of South Africa’s biggest blights. Some see the trial as a referendum on the country’s willingness to confront it.

A recent study in Gauteng province, which includes Johannesburg, found that 50% of women experience violent abuse at home and 75% of men admit to dishing it out. Four days before she was killed, Ms Steenkamp, who was aware of the issue, tweeted, “I woke up in a happy safe home this morning. Not everyone did.”

Though less hotly debated, the most enduring legacy of the Pistorius spectacle may be its impact on the police and on the justice system. Flaws in both have been exposed. It turned out that one of the investigating detectives on the case was himself facing a murder charge. Evidence has sometimes been mishandled. Courtroom translation has been embarrassingly poor.

Yet on the whole the justice system has stood up to its televised scrutiny fairly well. The presiding judge, an impressive black woman, is treated with nothing but respect. Mr Pistorius calls her “M’lady”. His expensive white lawyers cannot shield him from the robust questioning by Gerrie Nel, a so-called “pit bull” who is himself something of a celebrity. South Africans watching may be reassured by the sight of a famous white man being attacked and defended in equally vigorous measure.