The Big Read: Simple is the way to answer

19 September 2014 - 02:09 By Jonathan Jansen
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Dolus eventualis is now a solid entry into everyday speech in South Africa. It is like the phrase "substantially free and fair", offered to us by a famous jurist in the wake of our nervously performed first democratic elections.

Cabinet ministers of the pre-1994 regime gave us sub judice as a standard defence against any inquiry into state corruption or extrajudicial killings - and our new leaders still use this escape clause today to get out of a fix. Somehow these potent expressions capture the public imagination and stick in our minds for they are shorthand for complex things and, well, they sound intelligent.

Here's my gripe. I have listened to countless criminal lawyers on television trying to explain dolus eventualis to us ordinary citizens, and I still don't know what it means.

Of course, I have a reasonable idea but my concern is with the inarticulateness of the legal profession to make complex things simple. In fact, after the first salvo of talking heads on television and loquacious lawyers on radio it was clear none of the criminal law experts had said the same thing, and it got worse when constitutional lawyers entered the fray.

One expert confessed that if somebody tells you they know precisely what it means, they are lying. Now that's very helpful. A well-known journalist, in mock frustration, apparently joked he would name his dog Dolus and pick up his eventualis.

This is the problem in all our disciplines, from medicine and philosophy to law. The experts speak to themselves, and yet with such a momentous event as the judgment in the Oscar Pistorius trial, there is available to the viewing and listening public a unique opportunity to teach and not only convey legal truths.

This in itself is a failure of education on the part of otherwise clever people; they talk to themselves and an opportunity is lost to teach possibly millions of adults, many of whom would otherwise never enter a classroom.

Of course there are exceptions, like Harry Seftel in medicine or Dennis Davis in law or the late TW Kambule in mathematics. Whenever I listened to these great pedagogues I was on the edge of my seat as they transformed into teachers on any stage, be it a lecture hall at university, a public television studio or a small audience gathered around them.

You have a sense that these great teachers are not trying to impress but to teach, and that they are confident enough within themselves as professionals not to have to use big words to bridge the divide between specialist knowledge and everyday understanding.

I asked my students on Facebook to come up with simple definitions of dolus eventualis. If they could explain the term as simply as possible there were books to be won.

"Fortune-telling," says Anneska, with a simplicity a child would grasp, "like knowing that if you put your hand in the fire, it will burn." Zintle is more formal, but still manages to keep it straight and simple: "It means you are responsible for the foreseeable consequences of your actions." Mariam brings a traditional, earthy touch to the meaning: "It means you do not have to throw the bones to know the outcomes of your actions."

Some of these folksy and admittedly incomplete definitions might make a criminal lawyer gasp, but they reveal the potential within all of us to arrive at simplicity on the other side of complexity.

Parents who encourage children to ask questions, and take the time to answer them, are good at making difficult things simple. Even better are those parents who stimulate questions from the young and then lead them through other questions to find the answers for themselves.

This craft of unpacking complex things starts early and with your own children. Parents who ignore children, tell them to shut up, or refer them to other adults -"go ask your father" must make any feminist squirm - tend to be inarticulate in public and unable to translate complex terms or events into accessible language.

When you cannot give children this gift of early understanding, they tend to lag behind peers at school and, in many cases, become inarticulate themselves in public conversation about the world around them. That is why the inarticulateness of my lawyer colleagues on dolus eventualis has such negative consequences for learning.

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