Social Neurosis and Hysterical Pre-Cognition in South Africa: A Case-Study and Reflections

Abstract

It is a commonplace that white people in South Africa have frequently manifested phobic responses to their black compatriots. The twentieth century has teemed with taboos, often legislatively sanctioned, which testify to this: there have been restrictions on sexual relations between blacks and whites, upon marriages between them, upon their being residential neighbors, leaming together, sitting together on public transport, using the same ablution facilities, enjoying places of leisure together. The list is endless. A history of touch-of the modes of physical intimacy and avoidance-would be a powerful if mercilessly disturbing chronicle of the relations between the races and the tortured sensibilities intrinsic to them. Nor have the phobias been restricted to everyday life. They have sometimes reached the level of mass political hysteria: the 1929 general election has gone down in history as that of the 'Black Peril' or 'Swart Gevaar'; that of 1948 saw the articulation of a widespread fear that black people would oorstroom (inundate, over-run) the cities. Historians have sometimes used direct material determinants to account for white fears. Thus, Charles van Onselen has correlated outbursts of hysteria over the 'black peril' on the Rand in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries with moments of economic recession, political uncertainty, and industrial turbulence.1 Shula Marks has suggested that one of the factors which might explain the white sense of being imperilled in 1929 was the combativeness of rural blacks who had, in the latter half of the 1920s, been mobilized against white farmers by the Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union.2 As for [t]he great bogey of the oorstromirlg . .. of the cities by native hordes in 1948, Dan O'Meara has argued that this appealed to those strata of white society which felt threatened by the rapid growth of a black urban proletariat in the 1940s, a proletariat increasingly cut adrift from its impoverished rural base and fighting for a human existence in the towns.3 In the spirit of the studies mentioned above, this essay seeks to lay bare the material matrix which nourished a particular moment of acute anxiety amongst whites in a region of South Africa. At the same time, however, it posits other elements more properly pertaining to social psychology which might be included in a general account of white fears of black people. I have conceptualized these elements, as 'hysterical pre-cognition' and 'social neurosis'. The first of these concepts owes much to Ernst Bloch, the German socialist philosopher whose work has not received the attention it deserves from historians, despite Eric Hobsbawm's early signalling of the magnificence of its range and achievement.4 'Social neurosis' obviously has a Freudian lineage. (A cautionary note might be added here: the analytical model used to survey the collective psychological phenomena discussed in this essay should not be misinterpreted to contain any notion of Jung's 'collective unconscious', the mysticism, anti-