THE DEVIL MADE ME DO IT: Understanding occult crime in South Africa

190pp., paperback, Penguin Books, Cape Town, 2025

ISBN: 9781776390984

Why does the occult have such a grip on South Africa's collective imagination? In this vastly unequal country, with its crises of gender-based violence, child abuse, poverty and unemployment, where there are more than enough obvious dangers to our social stability, why are South Africans so quick to blame the supernatural for violence and misfortune? How do beliefs in occult crime intersect with problems of gender, race and class? 

Nicky Falkof examines the stories, beliefs and rumours behind the so-called occult crimes that have enthralled South Africans, including the murder of a child mistaken for a tokoloshe in the 1920s, the satanic panic that gripped the nation in the 1980s and 1990s, the Krugersdorp cult killings of 2012–16, and the muti murder of a six-year-old girl in 2022.

Nicky Falkof is Professor of Media Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, where she holds the DST-NRF SARChI Chair in Critical Diversity Studies and heads up the Wits Centre for Diversity Studies. Her previous books include Worrier State, risk, anxiety and moral panic in South Africa and The End of Whiteness, Satanism and family murder in late apartheid South Africa.