autobiographers-from-south-africa

"Indeed how can they help being so, forced as they are by the present political dispensation to observe us from a distance, which distorts and throws little light on our lives as we live them?"

"The mores that I was used to were neither purely Western nor purely Bantu. We were not ‘black Europeans’, yet I saw how we were not ‘white Bantu’ either."

"Since television series or films are often a dramatization of the events that happen in our lives, this has prompted me to launch my own YouTube Channel where I authentically speak about my experiences."

"I am somewhere in Mauritius, for example, at the Odysseo oceanarium where one can see the sharks swimming with other fish. Now to us, it’s a dangerous shark but to the other fish, it’s just another fish. It is dangerous, but not a monster, just a fish. This is an analogy of how serial killers are, they move among us; just another person going about their daily lives."

"I was a tool to help them perform their job of catching criminals and when they saw that my contribution was valuable, they taught me about investigation for I knew nothing about it. In return, I taught them about profiling, and this is how this whole idea came about to train and teach them. I founded the Investigative Psychology Unit of the South African Police Service and worked actively with the detectives I trained."

"Serial killers are not monsters; they are human beings with tortured souls. I will never condone what they do, but I can understand them."

"Serial killers exist there, and if one really wants to find them, that is where one has to look. One cannot begin to understand a serial killer's mind if one is unprepared and if one does not know what they feel. One does not have to be raped to acquire empathy for a rape victim. I did not have to kill to understand why others do, but I had to go through some harrowing experiences in order to understand."

"South Africa has the third highest murder rate in the world, with Colombia and Swaziland ahead of it. The high rate of murder illustrates the amount of work that a Murder and Robbery detective has to cope with, and yet South Africa holds the record for apprehending serial killers within three to six months of a special investigation team being established, provided the serial killer stays active."

"I was recommended and appointed, as I was writing my doctorate thesis about serial killers."

"They are not Artificial Intelligence (AI)--generated monsters or Marvel comic book superheroes as often depicted in fictional series. The majority are not mentally ill. They are human beings, they could be your neighbour. Many people would presume that serial killers would be super intelligent, but they are not. They are normal people with average intelligence; few are intelligent and most are not."

"One of the drawbacks we face today with the internet is the existence of clickbait or synthetic sensational information."

"Having trained the detectives, I told them that if we think of serial killers as enemies, it will be difficult but if we understand them, we will be a step ahead and able to arrest them. But, it isn’t about just arresting them, it is about gathering evidence to get them convicted."

"I never told my family about the full nature of my work. Years later, my father read my book and he was shocked, saying that this was dangerous. I had to reassure him that it was all in the past, and I was now safe. I resigned from the police with the rank equivalent to senior superintendent in 2000."

"I asked her where the posters in his room came from. She told me she had found some magazines in the forest at a spot where some soldiers had camped and had brought them home. This was shortly before the sexual murders started. I believe those pin-ups were the catalyst that triggered the fantasy that had been brewing inside Zikode since his childhood. His mother had unwittingly lit the tinder which had erupted into a blaze and cost many women their lives."

"I am living from a place of healing."

"Every human being passes through five psychosexual developmental phases. They are the oral phase, anal phase, Oedipus or phallic phase, latency phase and the genital phase. A person can fixate in any of these phases and failure to resolve the fixation would be cause for pathology. A layman’s term for a fixation would be a mental short-circuit. It is an individualistic reaction to being exposed to too much or too little of something."

"The motive is settled deep within the unconscious psyche, and the serial killer is unaware of this. By ‘irresistible compulsion’ I do not mean that serial killers have absolutely no power over the urge to kill. Many of them experience the urge as an external force taking control of their own will and forcing them to commit murder, a force they perceive they cannot resist."

"Good men and good women can stand together to fight injustice."

"As a professional psychologist, I therefore, through my YouTube Channel, offer authentic knowledge about forensic psychology. I want this platform to be inspirational and educational for everyone, free of cost and accessible."

"I had never thought when I did my work that someone would make a TV series about it."

"It came after the weeks of intense classes that I conducted in order to teach detectives. There was also an advanced course. At the end of it, I told them “Well, what are you waiting for? Go catch me a killer!” This is how it became the title of the book."

"When they were not working they had children without being able to secure a man they could really call a husband."

"The Black man must enter the white man’s house through the back door. The Black man does most of the dirty work… Black man cleans the streets but mustn’t walk freely on the pavement; Black man must build houses for the white man but cannot live in them; Black man cooks the white man’s food but eats what is left over."

"You’ll come back and be able to look after yourself and the two you’re leaving behind."

"We’d never really known father before. And now living close to him and seeing him at close quarters, I realised that his face was unlikeable."

"The Black man must enter the white man’s house through the back door. The Black man does most of the dirty work…"

"Now that the pass has gone"

"There are not enough mothers during the day to force the children to go to school and stay there for the whole day. The mothers are at work. Or they are drunk. Defeated by life. Dead. We die young, these days."

"Today, no one knows the name of the little girl found in a rubbish drum at the back of the butcher’s shop. They don’t know it today, for they never knew it then"

"once the white child reaches the age of five and has to start school, the black child becomes an embarrassment, a visible reminder of the inequalities endemic in the society"

"Instead of being kind and buying this and that for the maid, just translate the kindness to this woman’s wages […]"

"the morning paper, the Cape Times, carried the story of the child murdered on the beach. Front page, the story made"

"She would fulfil her obligations as she understood them and provide for them. The only way she could be a mother to her children, she saw, would be to leave them"

"Yet, even today we still laugh sad laughs, remembering our innocent incredulity. Our inability to imagine certain forms of evil, the scope and depth of some strains of ruthlessness. We laugh, to hide the gaping hole where our hearts used to be. Guguletu killed us . . . killed the thing that held us together . . . made us human. Yet, we still laugh."

"One boy. Lost. Hopelessly lost. One girl, far away from home. The enactment of the deep, dark, private yearnings of a subjugated race. The consummation of inevitable senseless catastrophe."

"Your daughter. The imperfect atonement of her race. My son. The perfect host of the demons of his."

"But now, my Sister-Mother, do I help him hide? Deliver him to the police? Get him a lawyer? Will that mean I do not feel your sorrow for your slain daughter? Am I your enemy? Are you mine? What wrong have I done you . . . or you me?"

"She was not robbed. She was not raped. There was no quarrel. Only the eruption of a slow, simmering, seething rage. Bitterness burst and spilled her tender blood on the green autumn grass of a far-away land. Irredeemable blood. Irretrievable loss."

"Yes, Mzukulwana,’ he sighed, ‘the biggest storm is still here. It is in our hearts — the hearts of the people of this land. ‘For, let me tell you something, deep run the roots of hatred here. Deep. Deep. Deep."

"No,’ the girl’s mother said quietly. ‘There were many people there. Looking. Some were even laughing. None stopped the crime, none. Until your son arrived on the scene."

"The sun went and died in the west."

"Unganyebelezeli, kuza kudlalwa!’ piped Mxolisi’s little voice, calling for daring and defiance. To look at him do the war cry of the Comrades, poised in a defiant stance, his tiny fist up in the air, couldn’t but send all those who heard him into paroxysms of laughter."

"Mxolisi turned one year. A part of me hated him. Not him . . . but what he was . . . had been . . . the effect he seemed to have on my life. Always negative, always cheating me of something I desperately wanted. I shrunk; because he was."

"There was nothing unusual about this. Mxolisi, now four years old, could already tell the difference between the bang! of a gun firing and the Gooph! of a burning skull cracking, the brain exploding."

"Tatomkhulu was a fund of facts that, although seemingly different, made a whole lot of sense of some of the things we learned at school. He explained what had seemed stupid decisions, and acts that had seemed indefensible became not only understandable but highly honourable."

"This is no time to talk of hedges and fields, or the beauties of any country. . . . Cry for the broken tribe, for the law and the custom that is gone. Aye, and cry aloud for the man who is dead, for the woman and children bereaved. Cry, the beloved country, these things are not yet at an end."

"I see only one hope for our country, and that is when white men and black men . . . desiring only the good of their country, come together to work for it. . . . I have one great fear in my heart, that one day when they are turned to loving, they will find we are turned to hating."

"The white man has broken the tribe. And it is my belief—and again I ask your pardon—that it cannot be mended again. But the house that is broken, and the man that falls apart when the house is broken, these are the tragic things. That is why children break the law, and old white people are robbed and beaten."

"I have one great fear in my heart, that one day when they are turned to loving, they will find we are turned to hating."

"We had two masters of the spoken word in South Africa, General Smuts and his lieutenant J. H. Hofmeyr, whose life I wrote. Smuts spoke in a high-pitched voice, not the kind of voice that one would expect from a famous soldier, but he too could hold an audience in the hollow of his hand, partly because he was Smuts, partly because he could say nothing trite or shallow, partly because he knew how to speak to ordinary men and women."