Good Deaths and Bad Ones

Recently, the South African Mining magnate Brett Kebble was killed in what appeared to be a botched car hijacking according to police. He was shot in his luxury car while on the way to a dinner engagement and died on the scene. What happened next is quite intriguing.

Anthropologists working largely in the third world have often been interested in the different valuation of bodies – by bodies I mean corpses. Look at the international coverage of the Asian Tsunami last year. Tourists got far more coverage than locals, so much so that the problems seemed solved as soon as all the tourists made it safely back to their middle class lives back home. Some bodies are far more important that others. And we find this often quite disturbing and unfair. Take a look at what Brett Kebble’s father Roger had to say to the press:

We can't live in a society where these sorts of things happen at this kind of level. There is enough killing in the lower classes, let alone when you get into high-profile people.

His outrage here is interesting. By ‘these sorts of things’ he is referring to murder, and by ‘this sort of level’ he is referring to the super wealthy. But who is he referring to by the ‘we’ that begins the sentence. I think he may be referring to South Africans in general, but suspect he is probably talking about ‘high profile people’. And he is broadly implying that we can live in a society where ‘these sorts of things’ happen at a ‘lower’ level – among less ‘high profile’ people.

Social commentary from a man facing no less than twelve charges of fraud relating to share manipulation, for which he will presumably stand trial in October 2006. Charges against his co-accused, his son Brett have been dropped since the latter’s untimely death.

And even the mode of killing is something that becomes questionable to the still animated bodies on the same ‘kind of level’ as the deceased. While the police maintain that he died in a botched hijacking – a way in which many far less high profile South Africans have gone to the grave – Brett Kebble’s friends and family have repeatedly asserted that the murder must have been a planned assassination. A distinct possibility given his diamond dealings in Angola where he left some powerful former military intelligence business partners high and dry after what looks like some behind the scenes deals that squeezed them out of the picture. You can read more about this at Kebble, the gems and the general. Of course there is no link between these dealings and his death. And no evidence of any kind to contradict the police findings. What we are dealing with is a kind of myth making. A kind of accounting for contradictions that are untenable for the ‘high profile’ among us.

The point is that ‘these sorts of things’ must be the sorts of things that can only happen to the ‘high profile’ – assassination, the stuff of John Grisham. If this is true, then ‘we’ can continue to live in this society because it is a fair society in the eyes of the likes of Roger Kebble – death is proportional to ‘profile’. If however it is false, and the rich can die in equally banal acts of violence as the poor, then these fat cats have to accept being a part of broader society; they have to accept their substantial role as producers of the society in which the banality of daily violence has become so real. They become subject to their own creation; victims of a class system they both love and hate – subject to its logic – which seems to be a bitter pill to swallow. Incredibly bitter given the vast sums of money they spend on the security and the symbolic
material needed to distinguish themselves as separate from the ‘lower classes’. Like the Samurai of old, the deaths of the 'high profile' must be good deaths, even if it is only mythologically so. But unlike the Samurai, this is not about honour, it is about class.

Their deaths cannot be banal as death usually is. The ‘high profile’ is a kind of immortality. The death must have the quality of intrigue, so that the deceased and his associated can gain more profile, produce ever increasingly valued bodies.

These mythologies that lift the deaths of men like Brett Kebble out of the mire of banality and into the pages of John Grisham are a key ideological tool in the maintenance of the divide between the lower classes and the Brett Kebbles of the world. Death is no longer, it seems, the great equaliser. It has become yet another way in which the rich get richer.