As a media studies scholar, I’ve written extensively about white fears of the occult in South Africa. But it’s not only white people who exhibit this anxiety. My new book The Devil Made Me Do It shows how beliefs in the danger of the occult perform a social function across race and class.

They provide a convenient story that can be used to explain misfortune and catastrophe, which otherwise feel dangerously random. They offer a sense of agency in the face of disaster. Communities can come together and try to pray the problem away.

What beliefs in occult crime don’t do, though, is help explain how and why violent crime happens. They also don’t teach us how to fight it in any meaningful way. Uncritical beliefs in the power of the occult and supernatural can actually make a society more precarious. Vulnerable people are laid open to exploitation by unscrupulous grifters who claim spiritual power. And in South Africa, fears about the occult often mask anxieties about race, power and precarity.

In the book I discuss numerous cases of so-called occult crime over the years and across communities. Below I highlight five.

1. Rex v Mbombela (1933)

The tragic story of Dhumi Mbombela is one of the most cited cases in South African legal history. In 1933, during the height of the British colonial era, Mbombela was sentenced to death for the murder of a child. He had mistaken the child for a tokoloshe, a mischievous supernatural trickster that was understood to be common in the Eastern Cape where he had lived his whole life.

Belief in the tokoloshe was, for Mbombela and his community, a normal, albeit frightening, part of their understanding of the world. But even so the judge insisted that it was not “reasonable” for him to have mistaken a child for a tokoloshe. While his sentence was commuted to culpable homicide (a year’s imprisonment with hard labour), the legal standard for what constituted a “reasonable person” had now been set, according to what seemed reasonable to a white Christian mindset. A colonial court put African worldviews on trial – and dismissed them entirely.

2. The missing murdered babies (1991)

In the early 1990s, during the last years of apartheid’s white-minority rule, white South African society was gripped by a powerful moral panic about satanism. It manifested everywhere from educational policy and political pronouncements to lurid newspaper headlines. As in other satanic panics, the scare was driven in part by evangelical Christian police officers who made scare-mongering pubic pronouncements about satanic crime and violence.

One of the most vocal was Leonard Solms, then head of the Cape Town Child Protection Unit. In 1991 Solms held a press conference in which he told astonished journalists that he personally knew of 11 babies who had been bred for satanic sacrifice and murdered in a ritual that included cannibalism. Despite much panic and outrage, Solms was never able to produce any evidence that the babies existed. He eventually admitted that his information had been gleaned from interviews with self-proclaimed satanists, rather than from any actual detective work. But the seed was planted, and South Africans began to worry about murderous satanic paedophiles.

3. The prophet of doom (2016)

While it might not seem like a straightforward example of occult crime, beliefs in the supernatural were the driving force behind the rise of Prophet Lethebo Rabalago of the Mount Zion General Assembly Church. In 2016 Rabalago, dubbed the “Prophet of Doom”, became a media sensation after footage emerged of him spraying Doom insect killer into the faces of willing congregants in his church in Limpopo province. Rabalago insisted he was anointed by God, and that, in his hands, Doom went from a dangerous substance to a magical healing tonic which could cure everything from Aids to ulcers.

The manufacturers of Doom, the Cultural, Religious and Linguistic Rights Commission and a collaboration of 88 churches tried to pressure Rabalago to stop these harmful practices. But he continued until the state stepped in and charged him with grievous bodily harm. (He was finally convicted of a less serious charge.) Rabalago is still active and extremely popular as a pastor. His followers continue to insist that he is capable of performing supernatural acts, and that his abusive practices should not be regulated by human laws.

4. The Krugersdorp killings (2016-2021)

In one of the most sensational episodes in South Africa’s obsession with occult crime, Cecilia Steyn’s reign of terror in Krugersdorp led to the deaths of 11 people between 2016 and 2021. The murders were masterminded by Steyn and performed by her enraptured followers, including Zak Valentine, who facilitated the brutal killing of his wife Mikaela, and Marinda Steyn, who encouraged her teenage children to participate in them.

Cecilia Steyn had long insisted that she was a high-level witch and recovering satanist, constantly under threat from the evil groups she had abandoned. These wild claims were so convincing to police and to the evangelical groups she targeted that the murders were simply blamed on satanists. Steyn and her acolytes evaded suspicion for years, leading to the deaths of more innocent people. The killings have been the subject of a best-selling book, numerous podcasts and the award-winning documentary series Devilsdorp.

5. Bontle Mashiyane (2022)

Bontle Mashiyane was just six when she vanished from outside her family’s home in a town in rural Mpumalanga province, in 2022. Three weeks later, her body was recovered in the nearby bush. She had been raped and mutilated before her death. Some acknowledged her death to be part of South Africa’s ongoing crisis of gender-based violence. But, in general, Bontle was seen to be the victim of a so-called muti murder. This is when someone claiming to be a sangoma tries to make magic with human body parts, often removed while the victim is still alive.

Of the five arrested for the murder, one had publicly claimed to be a sangoma; one had a documented history of violent crime and was on bail for murder; and one, shockingly, was a female friend and neighbour of the Mashiyane family.

Each one of these cases, and the others discussed in my book, is shocking or tragic in its own right. In some instances lives are lost; in others, communities and families are torn apart by rumour, suspicion and fear.

In all of them, we see how South Africans’ deep collective investment in the power of the occult masks other, more pressing realities. They offer easy explanations that defer the real causes, and the real responsibilities, for the crime, violence and insecurity that plague daily life in South Africa.

Written by Nicky Falkof, Professor, University of the Witwatersrand and author of 'The Devil Made Me Do It'

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.