Sex and the Devil: Homosexuality, Satanism, and Moral Panic in Late Apartheid South Africa

Abstract

This article discusses the discursive and narrative intersections between two moral panics that appeared in the white South African press in the last years of apartheid: the first around the claimed danger posed by white male homosexuals, the second around the alleged incursion of a criminal cult of white Satanists. This connection was sometimes implicit, when the rhetoric attached to one was repeated with reference to the other, and sometimes explicit, when journalists and moral entrepreneurs conflated the two in public dialogue. Both Satanists and gay white men were characterized as indulging in abnormal practices that were dangerous to the health of the nation, using a long-standing colonial metaphor of sanitation and hygiene. I argue that fears of homosexuality and beliefs in Satanism operated as social control measures for disciplining potentially unruly groups whose sexual or personal practices were not admissible within apartheid’s injunctions on homogenous conformity among whites. The connection between homosexuality and Satanism, like the connection between homosexuality and communism, served to pathologize whites whose disobedient bodies and beliefs were considered treacherous.

A struggle for definition: explanatory models of satanism in sociology

“…For example, it was said that the satanic communities were involved in necrophily, abused women and children, and sacrificed babies to Satan (DeYoung 1996). Satanic panic has also been interrelated with other moral panics directed at gay people (Falkof 2018), aliens (Paley 1997), the mafia (Albini 1993), and terrorists (Dillinger 2004).…”

Afrikaner nationalism and the light side of the colonial/modern gender system: understanding white patriarchy as colonial race technology

“…The fifth, and perhaps most obvious, aspect of Afrikaner nationalism and apartheid rule that reflects the ideological dependence of Afrikaner whiteness on a gender system that is binary, hierarchical and heterosexual is the apartheid government's harsh clampdown on homosexuality. In analyses that strongly bear out Lugones's understanding of what happens on the 'light side' of the colonial/modern gender system, scholars like Susanne Klausen (2015), Kobus Du Pisani (2001), Glen Retief (1995) and Nicky Falkof (2019), among others, show how, at the most basic level, homosexuality as deviation from the sex code and the rigid gender script through which whiteness was performed (see Klausen, 2015, p. 59) was construed as a threat to the Afrikaner people (along with communism, black political opposition, satanism and liberalism), reflecting its acute racial anxiety. The ideological linkage between compulsory heterosexuality and the violent project of entrenching Afrikaner whiteness can, for example, be seen in the way in which the apartheid government stigmatised the End Conscription Campaign 8 by accusing the members of homosexuality (Conway, 2008): resistance to the apartheid regime and its violence was branded and dismissed as a product of sexual 'deviance'.…”

On Moral Panic: Some Directions for Further Development

“…7 There has been far less focus, however, on other reproducible elements. I have discussed elsewhere the discursive overlaps between moral panics about Satanism and about homosexuality in late apartheid South Africa (Falkof, 2018). Without calling it a moral panic, Rogaly and Taylor (2010) show how white working-class people in contemporary Britain demonise Muslims by drawing on pre-existing narratives about the threat posed by colonial ‘others’.…”