‘Satan has come to Rietfontein’: Race in South Africa's Satanic Panic

Abstract

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, as the apartheid system was falling apart, white South Africa was gripped by a powerful moral panic that played out, often hysterically, in the newspapers and magazines of the time. This Satanism scare revolved around fears of a large-scale conspiracy of evil that mostly involved white youth, and that threatened the spiritual health and even the continued existence of white South Africa. Rape, murder, cannibalism and all manner of atrocities involving virgins, animals and babies were commonly said to be part of Satanist rituals occurring across the country. Satanists, South Africans were told, were everywhere, and were as great a threat to their nation as communists. This article uses contemporary press material to examine three isolated yet related incidents within the scare: the Orso murder trial in 1992, when a teenager and her boyfriend claimed satanic possession as the motivation for the murder of her mother; the case of the ‘Rietfontein slasher’, also in 1992, when a group of white schoolgirls was apparently tormented by a supernatural force; and a single article about the alleged possession of a large number of black students in a school in the Atteridgeville township in 1989. It uses these three episodes to reveal how the Satanism scare was violently racialised, how the possibility of magic was both legally and culturally reserved for whites and how many white South Africans' literal fear of the devil fed into recurrent discursive narratives about black pathology and white responsibility.