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Scapegoats, Suspicion, and Truth

At first, it was only a change in the air around the farm. Conversations paused when someone approached. A glance held a little longer than usual. No one could yet explain what was wrong, but the quiet sense that something was unfolding had begun to settle over us.

Sometimes communities begin to change long before anyone can explain why.

A man surrounded by a crowd pointing at him, symbolising René Girard’s scapegoat theory and how communities assign blame.


The Atmosphere of Suspicion

When uncertainty spreads through a group, people begin comparing observations. A small remark here, an uneasy feeling there. Gradually, those fragments gather into patterns, and before long, suspicion begins to settle somewhere.

Looking back now, I realise how easily moments like that can drift toward something else entirely.

René Girard and the Scapegoat Mechanism

Years later, I encountered the work of the French thinker René Girard, who described what he called the Scapegoat Theory. Girard observed that when communities experience tension or fear, they often restore a sense of order by concentrating blame on a single individual. Whether that person is actually responsible can become almost secondary. What matters is that the group’s anxiety suddenly finds a focus.

Watching public conversations over the past few years, I have often been struck by how easily that ancient instinct still surfaces today — only now the crowd sometimes gathers far beyond the boundaries of a village or farm.

Standing in the middle of that farm community at the time, however, I knew nothing of Girard’s theory. I simply sensed the atmosphere tightening around us.

The strange events we were witnessing demanded explanation. If the truth had remained hidden much longer, the collective need for clarity might well have settled on the wrong person.

The Jonathan Moment

What prevented that, perhaps, was that one man had carried his own shadow from the beginning.

Jonathan had arrived with an easy confidence and a manner that suggested he already understood the rhythms of farm life. Yet there was something in the way he watched people — not openly, but just long enough to make you aware of it, as though he were quietly measuring the room.

When the truth eventually surfaced, and Jonathan was dismissed, the moment did not arrive as a dramatic revelation so much as a quiet recognition. The unease many had sensed suddenly found its explanation.

Looking back now, I sometimes wonder how different things might have been had the truth taken a little longer to appear.

When Truth Arrives Quietly

Perhaps the real lesson is that truth rarely arrives with a trumpet blast. More often, it emerges quietly, once the noise of suspicion has passed.

This small episode will appear later in my forthcoming memoir, From My Tribe to Yours, where many such moments revealed how easily communities can drift between trust, suspicion, and truth.

Some lives unfold between worlds, learning the language of both - I grew up in South Africa in a world far more complex than the one many people think they know. My life unfolded between cultures — from farms in the old Transvaal Province to KwaZulu-Natal, where I became fluent in Zulu, to working in townships around Durban during turbulent years and subsequently in a rural district in ministry during the final decade before South Africa’s democratic transition. Running quietly through those years was a journey of faith that eventually carried me far from Africa. What began as a five-year stay in the United Kingdom became an unintended exile, and today I live on the west coast of Scotland. My memoir, From My Tribe to Yours, is a personal letter across cultures — sharing the South Africa I experienced, that few in Western countries knew, from within. READ MORE:https://www.theafricanoddity.com/author-south-africa-memoir.html

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