On the idea of evil and Zuma

What is evil? My favourite definition is that a person is evil if they cannot tell wrong from right, bad from good. As an extreme example, a man buys an apple and takes out a knife to peel it. He slits a child’s throat to check if the knife is sharp enough then proceeds to peel the apple and enjoy it. Remorse does not occur to him. No remorse for wrong actions, impulsive or otherwise, is also a good start for defining evil.

Does Zuma feel any remorse? Does he think he is guilty of anything that matters? I don’t think so, be it his behaviour towards women, his unwillingness to disclose about the arms deal, his apparent wish to see South Africa ruled by only one party, which means a choiceless dictatorship and no more democracy, which, well, the ANC used to uphold. Now this could be because the man is perfectly innocent. Or he sees himself as innocent (an interesting perception which we will come to later), or, he feel no remorse, because, like our apple-peeling killer, he cannot tell right from wrong.

On the subject of evil, I recently saw a superb movie, The Reader, set in Germany, some time after the Second World War. A fifteen-year-old boy, Michael, has an affair with a woman, Hanna, who is probably in her early thirties. She is every schoolboy’s dream and the sex scenes simply ooze with pretty posteriors. (This took me back to my horny schoolboy days when I was fifteen, an ardent fan of Scope magazine and I had lots of sex. Only a few years later did I have sex with another person, a woman.)

She loves him to read to her as she is illiterate. He reads from Homer, Mark Twain, Goethe, Tolstoy, DH Lawrence and even Tintin and she thinks he reads beautifully. Their relationship is made authentic with shouting matches and differences. One day he comes to her apartment for a typical, horny after-school session (god this brings back memories of schoolboy fantasies) and she has moved out, disappeared, no reason given.

We go forward in time to 1966 where Michael is studying to be a lawyer and he goes to observe a trial of recently nabbed Nazi war criminals who were guards at a concentration camp. With a shock he sees his old lover, Hanna, in the dock, on trial. She does not see him; her back is turned to him. Hanna is asked by the panel of judges why she killed Jews in the concentration camp. She says there was no room left in the camp and, of course, she exclaims with some bewilderment, they had to kill some to make room for the newcomers. The look on her face borders on incredulity as to why she was being asked such a silly question, and a different incredulity is mirrored in the questioning judge’s face. She cannot tell right from wrong; she is evil, according to the above definition.

But Hanna is honest, unlike many politicians. She confesses to killing many people (fine point: she does not say she is guilty, but admits to the killing), unlike her horrified co-accused, who have all denied complicity, or, if you will, guilt. (Starting to sound familiar?)

Her co-accused, all women, turn on her. They say she was the worst and would take Jewish prisoners back to her rooms and they believed she did lesbian and unsavoury things with them (I assume lesbianity was regarded as unwholesome and I make it clear this is not my view at all). It turns out she only asked the prisoners to read books to her.

At this point in the court room Michael, who also often read to Hanna shudders violently and is almost sick. This reflects the first time he met her; he was sick and she took care of him, this evil person. Her co-accused frame her: they say she was in charge and wrote out the orders for the mass killings. The documents are presented as proof to the court room. A pen and paper is brought so she can write and they can authenticate that the writing is hers. She refuses to write and admits to carrying out the orders, even though she, illiterate, could not have written them.

Mysteriously, she lets herself be the scapegoat for her enemies, and there is something ineffably and authentically Christ-like about her action. She gets life imprisonment and the other women just get a few years each as they were allegedly only following her orders.

Michael could have helped and been a witness, testifying that she was incapable of giving the written orders as she was illiterate. But he was unable to do so as this would betray their clandestine love affair; friends and family would have been horrified that he had been in bed with a Nazi war criminal at the tender age of fifteen. His silence comes across as ridiculous, self-centred and also poignant as the tears stream down his face while the judge reads out her life sentence. Is he not evil? No, because he does feel remorse, or so our definition goes.

Many years later, in the 1990s, after his divorce, which makes him think of his earlier years and his desertion of Hanna in her time of need, Michael sends to Hanna in prison a box of tapes on which are recordings of the books he once read to her. Her last memory of him was that raunchy, romantic summer when he was fifteen and she is now in her sixties. She recognises the voice on the tapes immediately and, startled, switches off the tape deck to recover. She then starts listening to the tapes and uses the tapes and books from the prison library to become semi-literate and sends him poignant, one or two sentence letters. I won’t spoil the ending for you but take along the tissues if you are a cry-baby like me.

Hanna is evil — according to our definition. But she is also so human and, as a viewer I was sad for her and felt fond of … a Nazi war criminal. Sure, this is the result of the way the film was presented. I do not see her killing innocent people. I see her being read to by her young lover, and who gets read to in bed? Young children. Who can do some pretty cruel things to their peers and animals and take delight in causing suffering? Children, because they have not yet distinguished between right and wrong. Although there is something very hard and tough about Hanna when she was with her fifteen-year-old lover, she was childlike when he read to her. She sobbed over Tolstoy, wailed with laughter at the antics in Huckleberry Finn and Tintin’s Captain Haddock. Though she loved sex, she prudently turned her nose up at Lady Chatterly’s Lover.

The film invites us to dig deep and ask many questions. Is it an inescapable part of the human condition that we have to restrain our evil nature? Does Hanna see herself as innocent? I think so; she just carried out orders. (The film finely holds in balance that the Holocaust per se was a great evil; we are not invited to see that as otherwise, thankfully.) So, does Zuma see himself as innocent? Or as an entity who transcends definitions such as innocent, evil or guilty, as he is simply “the will of the people”, not a product of his own choices?

This brings us, as I close, to this issue of genuinely perceiving oneself as innocent, like Hanna, and therefore not “guilty” or “evil”. Is it denial, or is there something more complex, perhaps ineffable, about us, such as the brilliantly portrayed, mysterious Hanna? Zuma is brilliantly portrayed for the people by the people, and it is a mystery as to how he gained so much power and influence. There are, after all, many others in the ANC who could take on his role.