Urban anxieties and growing up white
- Wits University
Professor Nicky Falkof explains ‘the devil made me do it’, anxiety in Joburg, and her pursuit of compassion.
With research interests in race, anxiety, media, and gender, Professor Nicky Falkof is an ideal choice for the SARCHi National Research Chair in Critical Diversity Studies and Director of the Wits Centre for Diversity Studies.
But the path to an interdisciplinary PhD in Humanities and Cultural Studies from the London Consortium, University of London, and later a research Chair, was a convoluted journey during which she traversed provinces, continents, scholarship, anxieties and identify angst while garnering experiences that ultimately brought her home.
“I grew up in Joburg,” she says. “I left Joburg and went to UCT and did my undergrad and honours at UCT, in English and Drama.” She also did a Performance diploma.
This was South Africa, 1995, and like many of her generation, Falkof then set off for the UK. She would stay there for 11 “very formative” years.
While living in England in the ‘90s, Falkof was “really enjoying not having to be white South African—the ideological and emotional burden of being a white person and growing up during the end of apartheid in the new dispensation. All this kind of moral responsibility and this weight and this complicity and this guilt…in London, it’s all gone.”
Armed with a scholarship, she wanted to do a PhD in Film, but the preliminary material proved uninspiring. She changed topics, intending to propose “other really cool topics about monsters and science fiction”, but her funders didn’t buy it.
Even though she’d left South Africa behind, Falkof had to find a PhD topic about her homeland. “I had to find something to write about, that was about South Africa, that I was interested in, and cared about enough to do a whole PhD,” she recalls. “There were all these crazy panics around satanism going on at the time when I was an adolescent. By the time I was at university, no one was really talking about it anymore.”
Strange white culture
These apartheid demons, located in the zeitgeist of satanism, would set Falkof on her academic trajectory. “Everyone remembers it. There was this panic around satanism—which is half of my PhD—and there was this other thing, a so-called ‘epidemic’ of white family murders that we got into in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. That white Afrikaans men were all going mad and killing their families.”
Falkof says that there were strange things that were happening to whiteness and white culture. “And when I started looking into it, the thing that I've been running away from for so long, this thing of being a white South African is so uncomfortable that it’s actually the thing I need to be looking into. I've gotta jump back into that dark hole. And that's what I've been doing ever since.”
A lot of Falkof’s research has been to understand what she used to call “pathologies of whiteness” – a provocative but useful term. “What are these strange social and cultural habits and beliefs that you imbibe and that make you behave the way that you do? Then you end up justifying your continued victimhood, and racial thinking, and lack of compassion and all of these things that we find so prevalent among white people and white communities.” A lot of which worries us. And not just white people.
Urban anxieties
These days, Falkof is talking about race more broadly, because “talking about whiteness and white people as though they're somehow separate from other concerns about race doesn't work”, she says. “Because whiteness makes blackness and blackness makes whiteness, things are completely intertwined all the time. You can’t talk about separately.”
And she’s shifted to framing race around anxiety.
Falkof says that more than 30 years after democracy, white people still allow deep-seated, intrinsic fears about race to define how they live in this city. “How they use their resources and whether they approach the world with empathy and compassion or victimhood and resentment, people's anxieties and feelings structure their lives.”
At her inaugural lecture in August 2025, Falkof explored how anxiety works as a social, political and racial choice that impacts how people choose to live and allocate their resources in this dangerous and complicated city. And this isn’t just about white people; it affects everyone. “For me, I think anxiety is a more useful frame,” she says.
Worrier state
Falkof’s book Worrier State: Risk, Anxiety and Moral Panic in South Africa (Wits Press, 2022) is very much about anxiety as a social force. “So I'm not only talking about white people anymore, which makes me really happy,” she remarks. “The thing that's animated me for such a long time is how do I think those fears make us behave the way that we do and therefore shape the social and political worlds that we live in?”
As a self-professed white privileged mother but also anti-racist but also a mother in a dangerous city, Falkof delves deep into the myths, narratives, stories and theories that we all develop to help us mitigate and manage the overwhelming sense of fear that we have.
Revisiting demons
When Penguin Publishers approached Falkof to write The Devil Made Me Do It: Understanding Occult Crime in South Africa (Penguin, 2025), she suspected the publishers were after some Netflix sensationalism.
Rather, the book is part horror-shock and part true crime case studies. “There are satanist murders, there are muti murders, there are abusive priests, there are manipulative cults. There's all sorts of horrible stuff,” says Falkof. The argument Falkof is trying to make is that of “misrecognition.”
“We have a habit, because we're such a heavily Christian country so immersed in narratives of good and evil and in these kinds of apocalyptic ways of thinking.” The habit is our tendency to explain away terrible things with “the devil made me do it”. “What that does is it allows us to misrecognise,” says Falkof.
“What I’m trying to do in this book is show how often these kinds of narratives of occult panic, these ideas that the devil is behind these things, how often these intersecting forms are different, how often there's something in there about race. Or about class or about gender.”
She argues that as soon as there’s an approved reason – like ‘satanism’ or ‘muti murder’ – to define a crime, “it gives us a framework that excuses us from interrogating it. There are harmful social consequences to that. What we need is evidence and research.”
Falkof cites a case study in the book that’s about a ‘satanic murder’ (as it was reported in the media, by police, the families). “It was murder,” says Falkof bluntly. “And no one thought to go, OK, a young woman has been brutally murdered. We need to think about this in terms of gender-based violence.”
Her SARCHi Chair in Critical Diversity Studies does just that.
The value of difference
It was Emeritus Professor Melissa Steyn who founded the Wits Centre for Diversity Studies (WiCDS) and secured the SARChI Chair in Critical Diversity Studies. Falkof was seconded from Media Studies to run the centre. Funding is critical to sustain WiCDS and the Chair, but “In the age of Trump, trying to find funding for the word ‘diversity’ is very tricky…” she says gloomily. It weighs heavily on her.
Despite Trump, many WICiD scholars are funded by the Ford Foundation. Honours, Master’s and PhD programmes are run under the auspices of the Chair. “So we teach a lot,” says Falkof, who at her inaugural lecture in August 2025 said that “teaching these students has been the over-riding joy of my life.”
The Chair also does arbitrage and works with NGOs. “We try and take the work that's done in diversity studies out of the academy as much as possible,” she says. This has included diversity consulting to the National Research Foundation, Netcare and Discovery.
Falkof says they’re trying to move away from “a model of diversity which is like if you hire enough queer black disabled women, then your organisation will get a tick and be called diverse”. The focus is on more meaningful training, based in scholarly research, where understanding is the objective, on imbibing “the value of difference and the value of different perspectives and different life experiences and the ethics of diversity.”
One of the outcomes of funded diversity projects is often a practical component, for example a toolkit booklet for social work. “We're basically trying to make and disseminate free, accessible information that helps institutions, organizations and people understand the value of difference.”