It is Halloween eve as I sit down to write this piece. The word ‘Halloween’ is a contraction of All Hallows Evening, which means holy evening. It is Christian in origin, dating back to about 1745, and is still celebrated in several countries on October 31.

No matter how hard I try, I am intermittently distracted from my laptop, and I find myself staring out of my window at the adjacent Qalat Al-Hamra, a fortress citadel originally constructed on the remains of Roman fortifications in AD 889. Like the Moors from centuries past, I use my elevated advantage to observe ‘monsters’ of all shapes, sizes and themes – zombies, werewolves, witches, and so on – from a safe distance, without engagement. The ‘monsters’ are out in full force tonight, united in their endeavour to, at the very least, startle those around them. As I look into the neighbouring buildings, I am confronted with pumpkins whose eyes and mouths emit fire as candles burn within their hollow confines. Suddenly, noisy children, with their parents in tow, shout “trick or treat” as they pass below my window. If you are not familiar with the tradition of Halloween, the ‘trick’, usually, is an idle threat to perform mischief on the homeowners or their property if no ‘treat’ is given to them.

The cynical among us may equate the actions of South African university students in their recent violent protest as a destructive form of ‘trick or treat’. But that is not all that, in the Halloween tradition, is reminiscent of present-day South Africa – the country is in the grips of ‘monsters’ of all shapes, sizes and themes that are intent not only on merely startling but also, at the very least, scaring and petrifying us. Only a few days before I wrote this piece, a leading businessperson and former politician remarked that “the monster of corruption must not be allowed to take root and overwhelm the good work achieved since 1994”. No one was identified as the monster; thus, one can conclude that the monster is simply the manifestation of the actions of the perpetrators. So, as with Halloween, the monster is faceless.

Allow me to digress for a moment: What is considered to be a monster? By definition, a monster is large – it is a thing of extraordinary or daunting size that is ugly or a frightening imaginary creature. The word ‘monster’ is derived from the Latin monstrum, which means an aberrant (departing from an accepted standard) occurrence that is usually biological in nature. This was taken as a sign that something was wrong within the natural order. The word ‘monster’ usually connotes something wrong or evil, and a monster is generally morally objectionable. The word can also be used figuratively to refer to a person who does horrible things.

So, how does one conquer a faceless monster? Well, if the monster is a collective representing many perpetrators, then, in theory, it should be possible to defeat the perpetrators one at a time. But how does one defeat a monster? For once, my favourite search engine failed me, indicating that this is an ‘unGoogleable’ question.

This made me wonder: Why do we create monsters? The answer, quite simply and unsurprisingly, is to scare us. Monsters of human creation, such as vampires, zombies and witches, are apparently intended to help us cope with what we dread most in life. How do these monsters achieve this? Through the harnessing of fear. You would not be surprised that fear of the monstrous has brought communities and cultures together over the centuries and serves us as well today as it did in the Dark Ages.

But we sometimes create monsters that we later abandon, doing so at our own peril. The most infamous example is that of Dr Victor Frankenstein, who creates his monster and subsequently abandons it, only for it to be persecuted and ostracised. But, once the monster understands what his creator has done to him, he seeks out the doctor. You know what they say about payback?

So, do we South Africans not shoulder responsibility for the monsters that we have created? My grandfather taught me that there is no such thing as a self-made millionaire or even a self-made billionaire. Contrary to popular belief, “no man is an island”, as John Donne’s poem reminds: “No man is an island, Entire of itself, Every man is a piece of the continent, A part of the main . . .” In other words, no one is self-sufficient – everyone relies on others. You might want to take a minute to contemplate your part in the creation of the monsters prevalent in South Africa today. You might also ask what your role has been in sustaining and ensuring the survival of the monsters.

But it is not only our created monsters that scare us – we also have inherent fears, or phobias. The top ten phobias are said to be arachnophobia (fear of spiders), social phobia (fear of a hostile audience), pteromerhanophobia (fear of flying), agoraphobia (fear of an inability to escape), claustrophobia (fear of enclosed spaces), acrophobia (fear of heights), emetophobia (fear of vomit or vomiting), carcinophobia (fear of cancer), astraphobia (fear of thunder and lightning) and taphophobia (fear of being buried alive). Can you associate with any of these? Just to remind you, a phobia is an extreme or irrational fear of or aversion to something.

So, as humans, we have inherent fears or phobias and we also create monsters to scare us. What scares me even more in South Africa today are those (who might well be monsters themselves) that seemingly want to fight other monsters by getting others to support them in their endeavours against their perceived monsters. In such endeavours, the words of Friedrich Nietzsche should be heeded: “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.” We should also heed Primo Levi when he says: “Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.”

In my humble view, a monster is in the eyes of the beholder. I share Gerald Seymour’s observation that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter”. In South Africa today, there are many monsters operating in all spheres of society. What they have in common is that they are self-interested – they are driven by a desire to achieve personal gain, at the very least.

When they fight among themselves, monsters tend to polarise public opinion and sentiment in an effort to pit their supporters against those of their adversaries. Like the planets, South Africa’s monsters have aligned themselves. Unfortunately, I cannot think of anyone in South Africa today who is really fighting for South Africa without any self-interest. Forget about asking what they can do for South Africa, but rather what South Africa can do for them, to paraphrase John F Kennedy.
Maybe South Africa today is what Steven King meant in his horror book, The Shining, he really does not write anything else: “Sometimes human places, create inhuman monsters.”