The news, as it so often does in our debauched age, arrives not from the staid halls of justice but from the tawdry theatre of celebrity. A beloved South African television personality, name now sullied beyond repair, has been hauled before the magistrate on charges of kidnapping. The alleged crime? A bizarre intervention in a love triangle, a ménage à trois of jealousy and desperation that would make a Roman satirist blush.
Let us be clear: this is not some barbaric forced abduction. This is the modern, bourgeois equivalent. The accused, it is said, ‘removed’ a rival in affection from a public space, presumably to engage in a spot of therapeutic persuasion. One can almost hear the sighs of intellectual decadence. We have reduced the grand passions of Othello to a car park kerfuffle.
The story, however, is yet more instructive for what it says about our national identity. South Africa, a nation with a real history of abduction and political crime, now titillates itself with the faux-outrage of a love-struck soap star. We have swapped the struggle for freedom for the struggle to keep a paramour. This is the trajectory of all empires: from epic battles to epic tantrums.
But the courts will, as they must, dispense their justice. Yet in the court of public opinion, the sentence is already passed. The accused is condemned, not for the crime, but for the spectacle. We demand our celebrities be either saints or demons. There is no middle ground. So we gawp at the mugshot, analyse the body language, and pronounce judgment from our sofas.
This is our inheritance from the Victorian era: a hypocritical morality that revels in the fall of the great. We create them, worship them, and then tear them down with savage glee. It is a cycle as predictable as the turning of the seasons. The only surprise is that anyone is surprised.
Let us hope the legal system remains a bastion of sober reason. Let us hope the accused receives a fair trial, not a trial by hashtag. But I will not hold my breath. In an age of instant opinion and eternal digital records, the presumption of innocence is a quaint relic. The true crime here, perhaps, is not the alleged kidnapping. It is the shameless spectacle we make of human frailty.
