DM168 DEEP DIVE: What’s wrong with us? Inside the mind of South Africans

Diagnosis: severe trauma and alienation. Remedy: build a bridge to the outside world and others.

“Whether in relation to the state, communities, institutions, working environments, families, spouses — even one’s sense of self — it appeared to me that South African protesters were raging against an abiding disconnect between internal desire and external reality,” writes Long. After taking up a position as director of the Child Guidance Clinic at the University of Cape Town in 2017, Long says he witnessed “a cocktail of trauma, deprivation and destructiveness in the lives of many individual patients” who passed through its portals.The more he listened, the more he came to understand that “nested” symptoms of dysfunction played an enormous role in the mental health of South Africans, particularly black South Africans, the working class and the poor.

And it is here that history and its burdens of shame, envy and impasse combine into a toxic stew, according to Long. “Day by day we read headlines about violence and corruption, but these are only descriptions. They do not explain why we lurch from one crisis to another,” the author said. “Unable to challenge the system from the inside, the protest strategy is to disrupt business as usual by making the universities ‘ungovernable’,” writes Long.

Longs asks the reader to recall Fanon’s “reluctant admission in the opening pages of Black Skin, White Masks — that the only real destiny for black people is the colour white”. The author writes, when fallists exclaim “We can’t breathe!”, it reveals this as “a classic symptom of a panic attack — whiteness having now been converted into a phobia”.

“The breast upon which the infant is so utterly dependent must be destroyed because of that dependence,” notes Long. Students felt persecuted by an institution “experienced as massively shaming”, and this shame turned into resentment, which, in turn, morphed into envy. With regard to attitudes to industrial-scale corruption, Long notes: “Just as activists acknowledge the relationship between inequality and violence without ever identifying the connecting tissues of shame, resentment and envy, mainstream analyses of corruption are similarly lacking in psychological understanding.”“After all, there is something to be said about corruption — or unregulated consumption — in a social landscape scarred by centuries of deprivation.

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