Blood-curdling yells. Crushed bones. Dismembered bodies. Selfies. There is crime and then there is higher, jaw-dropping degrees of inhumanity people inflict on each other.
In criminology, there are crimes that are described as mala prohibita, meaning they are bad and prohibited through laws. This is what we describe as normal crime. But there’s also mala in se, meaning crimes that are inherently bad — a higher, more disturbing, level of crime.
In the last few months, South Africans have witnessed hair-raising criminality that has forced many to pause and ask what has happened to that admirable quality, ubuntu or botho, that our law-makers saw fit to include in our supreme law of the land, our constitution.
This week, a Durban metro police officer, Sizwe Ngema, 27, appeared in the local magistrate’s court for allegedly stabbing his pregnant girlfriend, Yolanda Bianca Khuzwayo, to death — and then filmed her taking her last breath. Not only that, but he also shared this recording with a few people before putting it on social media.
Khuzwayo’s aunt, Nozipho Khuzwayo, told TimesLIVE this week that Ngema’s eyes were piercing, his actions evil. “What he did was not a mistake, he did it on purpose, and the video he made showed he was proud,” she said.
Many will also recall Boinehelo Lefefa, 43, a miner with Sibanye-Stillwater, Johannesburg, from Lesotho who attacked his colleague from Mozambique, Alcino Macovo, 51, disembowelling him, attempting to behead him and then taking a selfie and recording a video of himself with the corpse. The two were apparently involved in a human resource dispute at work. The egregious attack took place, according to the mine’s spokesperson James Wellsted, about midday outside miners’ quarters called Leseding and in front of informal traders and spaza shops.
What is clear here is that Lefefa, like Ngema, was not trying to hide his criminal conduct. Normal criminals attack at night, or in dark corners — not just in front of shops.
Why the showmanship? We revert to this later.
Others may remember Ntembeko Myolo, a student at University of Western Cape who also recorded himself stabbing his 26-year-old partner multiple times at a private student residence in Belhar, Cape Town. When Myolo is confronted by three men in the video, he drags her, trying to stab her even more. She survived the ordeal and he was arrested.
Recently, a 13-year-old grade 6 pupil at Primrose Primary School in Germiston shot the school principal, Noko Selepe, 50, who had to pretend he was dead for the child not to finish him off. Recalling his ordeal, Selepe says of the preteen who shot at him: “After shooting me he looked me in the eye to see if I was dead. I did not move. I could see he still wanted to pull the trigger again. I then lay motionless and pretended to be dead.”
The examples of macabre killings are many and different. Some victims are cut up and put in suitcases, as we saw in Fort Hare, while others’ dead bodies are stored in ceilings or refrigerators.
In war situations, as we saw in Freetown, Sierra Leone, over a decade ago, child soldiers are made to perform egregious acts with a view to “completely desensitise them and make them mindless killing machines.” That’s in a war.
What makes incidents of crime in our situation more morbid? What makes our 13-year-olds who look into the eyes of a 50-year-old principal to see if he needed to be finished off any different to child soldiers who are desensitised, mindless killing machines? At least those in war situations are conscripted.
THE BIOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY OF MURDER
But also, why record someone’s last breath? We do know the Hawthorne effect, in terms of which people behave appropriately when they know that the world is watching. But Ngema and Lefefa, for example, knew their actions were not simply prohibited, they were mala in se — inherently bound to upset society’s sensibilities — but still went ahead to exhibit their violence.
In a 2015 report on NPR, a professor of communication and psychology at the Ohio State University, Brad Bushman, said the advancement of communication methods meant killers will view recording devices as part of the “toolkit of murders” dying for attention. Dr Jeff Victoroff, a professor of clinical neurology and psychiatry at the University of Southern California, notes the cameras help immortalise aggression and serve as opportunities for gunmen to “show off,” in a bad way.
It may be plain stupidity or a growing tendency to not care what society thinks.
There are as many theories for different types of crimes as there are motivations for criminals to execute them differently. Some scholars say some people commit egregious crimes because they were born to commit crime. Their genetical composition predisposes them to shoot to kill principals or wield huge knives in front of students’ residences or attack fellow miners in front of spaza shops, for example.
Most scholars are agreed on Jeremy Bentham’s 1948 theory that people’s behaviour is motivated largely by either a desire to reduce pain or gain pleasure, often referred to as the pleasure-pain principle. In his famous 1789 work, An introduction to the principles of morals and legislation, Bentham says people are rational beings who hedonistically pursue pleasure and avoid pain. This is why he went on to formulate the principle of “the greatest happiness for the greatest number”, which often is erroneously attributed to John Stuart Mill. The point he seeks to make is that all laws that govern human conduct must seek to encourage the greatest pleasure or happiness for the majority.
It is upon this that much of the global criminal justice approach is predicated, viewing human conduct as the result of rational choice (unless in a war situation) — meaning those who kill, like our child killers, have made rational decisions that they want to become murders. However, this was modified by those who argued that the environment plays an important role in deciding if children will become mindless killing machines, druggists, or upstanding members of society.
Ingmar Franken and Peter Muris, in their 2005 study Individual differences in decision-making, quote several studies that “demonstrated that patients with frontal lobe damage (to the brain) have problems with reward-based decision-making: they often pursue actions that bring some kind of immediate reward, despite severe long-term consequences such as the loss of job, home, and family.” They say this helps us understand people with psychopathy, drug addictions or people with impulse control disorders like gambling.
Further, if approved drugs could heal mental disorders and obviate a person’s need to kill others or themselves, it therefore means the chemical composition that make up the bodies of sickly or deranged macabre killers could provide clues to why they behave more differently to “normal” people.
A failure to raise children appropriately could have costly consequences to people to those children and society at large. A lot of research has associated bad parenting to delinquent adolescent behaviour, with the assumption that many who end up as adult criminals started off as teen delinquents.
But other scholars believe it is misleading to limit the human motivation for out-of-the-ordinary killings to mere natural imbalances to chemical reactions in the body. That nature must be looked at against how the individuals were nurtured.
A failure to raise children appropriately could have costly consequences to people to those children and society at large. A lot of research has associated bad parenting to delinquent adolescent behaviour, with the assumption that many who end up as adult criminals started off as teen delinquents.
When police minister Bheki Cele suggested after the killing of youths at a tavern in the Eastern Cape that “parents must take accountability” for not being concerned when their minor children were not at home at night, society reacted with rage. Many felt he was redirecting attention away from police who needed to explain why so many children were killed and why police were not implementing the country’s laws that could have stopped the deaths. Launching operation Shanela in the Eastern Cape last August, Cele returned to the theme, noting: “The high number of children not going to schools pushes them towards criminality and gangsterism. This is why we again make a call for a whole government and whole society approach to fighting crime.”
And yet, sociology and criminology points to bad parenting as a significant contributor to premature deaths. Research also shows that aggressive children grow up to become aggressive adults. Many fail to manage emotions so they could modulate their aggression, says Barbara Krahe in the 2020 book titled The social psychology of aggression.
DISREGARD FOR CONSEQUENCES
In the end, the degrees to which we believe we are “normal” differ according to our biology and socialisation. Others may be ‘natural born killers’ while some may be successfully desensitised to society’s norms. It is also true that some people’s involvement in crime is triggered by a situation — like an HR dispute at work as was reportedly the case with Lefefa.
But many other people have HR issues in their places of employment but do not kill and also do not pose for photographs with corpses. Could it then be that Lefefa, for example, has problems with a rewards-based system and simply impulsively wanted instantaneous rewards “despite severe long-term consequences such as the loss of job, home, and family” and work, as per Franken & Muris’ 2005 study on Individual differences in decision-making?
Either way, there’s a lot more crushed bones, disembowelled bodies and blood-curdling yells as South Africans unleash macabre violence against each other as if we are desensitised, mindless killing machines.
Many believe that crime will end only when the threat of punishment seems plausible. In other words, when people believe the chances of arrest are high (as per Bentham’s theory), the police are not corrupt, the prosecutors are capable, diligent and as smart, if not better, than private lawyers money can buy and when hefty sentences are imposed.
Only then will the showmanship of self-recording criminals come to an end. Put differently, when the majority of criminals are given hefty sentences would this send a clear message to all and sundry, including those with frontal lobe damage, that crime, indeed, does not pay.
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