If preliminary reports are correct, the terrible tale of how a car thief died in a cesspool on the University of Technology campus should be the occasion for a national examination of conscience. A young man, part of a gang breaking into cars at night on the grounds of the university is caught in the act by student owners of the vehicles. Forming themselves into a mob, they chase the thief who takes refuge in an open cesspool. He tries to hide by ducking under the fetid water. The angry mob surrounds him, pelting him with stones whenever he surfaces. The grass surrounding the cesspool is drought-dry, so the students set it on fire, creating a ring of flames around their captive to prevent his escape. When he throws up his hands and offers to surrender, they continue to stone him until he drowns.
This has all the elements of Greek tragedy, dramatising the eternal struggle between primitive impulse for personal revenge and the civilised mandates of the rule of law. It is a tragedy focused not only on the loss of a single life, but the collective criminality of the students who seemed not to feel that the punishment should be proportional to the offence, who in their blood lust for vengeance lost all control of conscience. Even when the culprit offered to surrender, they were not prepared to turn him over to the police for legal due process to take its course.
Coming on top of escalating violence at our secondary schools, is this another example at the tertiary level, of our descent into moral depravity? In terms of poetic truth, this event raises the terrible prospect that a cesspool may now be the appropriate metaphor for our ethical values.
Another aspect of the tragedy is that the same hands that hurled the stones and lit the fire are those being trained at the university to map the future of the nation. How, we wonder, will each participant come to grips with his or her guilt or will the affair be brushed aside as some sort of game? And what of the response of the wider society? Has it become so gross and hard-hearted that it will condone the actions of the students as youthful exuberance.
What is lacking in the national psyche is a developed imagination, that faculty which can see what is likely to happen in the future before it actually occurs. In ethical terms, an active imagination allows us to put ourselves in the footsteps of another and thus avoid the destination to which they may lead. If the students had been able to imagine the last, agonising moments of the thief, perhaps they would not have been so intemperate. The march of civilisation is signposted by the advance from lynching to the eventual abolition of the death penalty. On this basis we have a long way to go.
THE OPINIONS ON THIS PAGE, EXCEPT FOR THE ABOVE, DO NOT NECESSARILY REFLECT THE VIEWS OF THE GLEANER.
