ABSTRACT
This chapter continues to address the question of ideological indoctrination by bringing it to the context of the South African apartheid regime. It focuses on the representation of white children internalizing the ethically questionable rules of the apartheid society in Michiel Heyns’s The Children’s Day. The novel shows how the child narrator, Simon, through his class privilege and internalized normative social codes, becomes implicated in wrongdoing. This chapter further complicates the Arendtian understanding of the banality of evil by turning to Žižek’s reading of it: he argues that a subject can turn away from ethical questions by drawing on a superior will that he has to obey. Heyns’s Simon is shown to act accordingly, as he has internalized the logic of the repressive era and turns in his school friends. At the same time, along Žižekian lines, he can enjoy this obedience as he can target the other pupils without needing to take responsibility for his actions. The novel brilliantly shows how the prevailing apartheid logic teaches children and adolescents to “hide behind the unjust law.” Furthermore, Heyns’s narrator-protagonist fails—until the very end of the novel—to experience appropriate feelings of guilt or condemnation for his unfair actions toward others, which distances Heyns’s narrative portrayal of white childhood in apartheid South Africa from texts written by many other white authors, who use their writing to condemn the earlier era and distance themselves from its corrupted politics. Instead, Heyns shows how children’s analysis of their own experiences fails to remain immune to the prevailing social norms. At the same time, Heyns shows how such a childhood renders children vulnerable to adult violence, as children are taught to blindly follow authorities. Simon, a victim of such adult violence, fails to understand it as a crime committed against him due to his own childhood naivety, as well as his shame and guilt concerning his emerging feelings of homosexuality. Heyns thus further illustrates how childhood confusion, pain, and complicity are deeply intertwined experiences.
