By Dr Tafataona Mahoso

“(JUDGE Thokozile) Masipa found (Oscar) Pistorious guilty of culpable homicide after finding that the prosecution failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the athlete murdered Reeva Steenkamp. The judge reasoned that Pistorius could not have foreseen that his actions … firing four (gun) shots into a closed toilet door in the belief there was an intruder behind it … could cause the death of a person.” The Sunday Times, September 14 2014.
“Ngozi yerombe ijekakwese.”
“Ngozi yerombe igandanzara.”
The crime of a destitute with no relatives will cut everyone like a sword without a sheath — African proverb, Zimbabwe.
The bulk of African living law is the living law of relationships.
This was missing from the recent trial of Oscar Pistorius (South Africa) for the murder of Reeva Steenkamp, who was described as a live-in girlfriend. It was no accident therefore that the most consistent expression of outrage and dismay at the handling of the case as well as the verdict came from Africans in South Africa represented by the Women’s League of the African National Congress.
The African women sensed the glaring absence of any analysis (in all proceedings) of the nature of the relationship between Oscar and Reeva or between the couple’s families.
For many legal experts and most white people, what went wrong was Judge Masipa’s application of South African law.
But from the perspective of African relational ethics and living law, the problem was that the neoliberal legal system under South Africa’s so-called ‘Rainbow Constitution’ is an immoral mixture of Roman-Dutch-Deformed Law and the beastly science of North American behaviourism used to exonerate criminals by theorising about the mental state of the offender at the time he committed the crime.
From the perspective of African relational ethics and philosophy, this immoral mixture of Roman-Dutch-Deformed law and North American behaviourism and narcissism is distinguished by its contempt for the living law of human relationships to the extent that, in The Sunday Times excerpt cited here, a man moving from the bedroom he is sharing with a woman toward a toilet where she has locked herself behind the door is still presented as ‘the athlete’!
This is meant to foreclose any questions about the morality of the relationship in such a situation. He is the athlete. She is the model, as if their mothers gave birth to an athlete and a model, respectively.
The Verdict
How could the whole verdict of a decent court depend on the creation of a non-existent relationship between Oscar and an imaginary intruder while totally erasing the present flesh-and-blood relationship between Oscar and Reeva that night?
Who was Oscar to Reeva when they were alone? An athlete? Who was Oscar to Reeva in the three months they were seeing each other? Who was he to Reeva the night he killed her? Who was he to her parents? Who was Reeva to Oscar in the three months they were seeing each other? Who was Reeva to Oscar the night she was murdered? Who was she to Oscar’s family? All these questions matter in African living law.
Who was Oscar to the owners of the soil on which he committed this crime? What do the owners of the soil think of Oscar’s version of events leading to the murder that night: That he behaved according to an imagined relationship between himself as armed victim and an absent intruder as aggressor, while totally forgetting about his present-flesh-and-blood relationship with an unarmed woman spending the night?
And a whole court presided over by an African woman agreed to spend months, engrossed in this fictitious relationship between Oscar the lethally armed victim and the absent aggressor-intruder allegedly hiding behind the toilet door.
Examination of the physically palpable flesh-and-blood relationship between the armed Oscar and defenceless Reeva did not warrant analysis for lack of witnesses.
African Relational Law
Why do I say there still exists an African living law of relationships which would have approached the case of Oscar Pistorius and Reeva Steenkamp differently?
White Aggression Running on Tall Blades of Human Rights and Superior Civilisation
Pistorius and his defence team used the murderer’s lack of legs to mask his aggression and to cover up a rotten relationship between him and Steenkamp, a relationship priced on mutual aspirations for advancing their celebrity status in fashion and advertising (for Reeva) and in sports and advertising (for Oscar).
But in reality it was South Africa which hid its gun-culture deformities under the robes of its Roman-Dutch-Deformed legal system heavily influenced by the beastly and narcissistic science of behaviourism imported from North America.
While South Africa is no longer militaristic in its foreign policy like the US, at home both countries suffer from white racist aggression and violent gun-culture.
Running on tall blades of faulty constitutionalism and human rights, both South Africa and the US have succeeded in masking their genocidal histories and the white racist nature of their societies and legal systems which often turn reality up-side-down by presenting the perpetrators of terror as victims.
The trick depends on persuading the world to focus on a fictitious relationship in which the white male aggressor stands tall on blades of high civilisation and human rights while fighting off imaginary savages, intruders and terrorists who lack humanity and deserve to be repelled by maximum ‘shock-and-awe’.
Reeva’s mother, June Steenkamp, indeed published a book, too late, called Reeva: A Mother’s Story, in which she analysed that relationship which the court and the media replaced by that of Pistorius and the imaginary intruder in the toilet.
In the book, Mrs Steenkamp claims that on the night her daughter was murdered she had gone to Oscar’s house to end the relationship and that she had already packed her clothes when she was killed.
Now, in African relational philosophy, the law of courtship involves many more than just boy and girl; the law of marriage more than just bride and groom; the law of parenting more than just mother, father and children. Like the dariro, a relationship is radial and not linear.
It is a clearly deformed law which focuses on theorising what happened in the murderer’s head when the person he murdered had a relationship with him which remains unexplained as part of living human law.
The court recognised that lack of witnesses at the time of Reeva’s murder prevented it from making precise findings and yet the same court proceeded to entertain and indeed to hide behind the theory of dolus eventualis which allowed the defence and the judge to engage in narcissistic and speculative suppositions and conclusions about types of intention and what went on in the mind of the defendant at the time he committed the crime.
Dolus eventualis in this case became a tool for avoiding close analysis of the human relations and values in the case. I use African proverbs because the foundations of living law are not technical.
Rather, they are ethical, moral and relational, having to do also with matters of trust and betrayal, confidence and dignity, solidarity, fellowship and kinship.
If Reeva had gone to Oscar’s house to end her relationship with him, she should by all means have brought her best friend or friends to witness the break-up, according to Africans relational law. Just as friends are involved in the courtship process; they must be involved when the relationship ends. That is African thinking.