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whipped up the public imagination to a similar degree, even though the protagonists had been unknown when their stories broke, revealed the powerful attraction that unresolved mysteries exerted, with or without the celebrity factor. One was the case of Madeleine McCann, the little British girl abducted in Portugal in 2007, never to be seen again. The other was that of Amanda Knox, the American accused by the Italian authorities of the murder of a British woman, Meredith Kercher, also in 2007. In both instances, millions of people felt entitled to pronounce with assurance about what had happened on the nights in question.
    One camp in the McCann case held that the parents, both of them doctors, had accidentally killed their child by giving her an overdose of sleeping pills, then disposed of the body and pretended to the world that she had been abducted by a criminal. Similarly, some observers of the Knox case said that the American woman, far from being innocent as she claimed, had participated in a satanic game of group sex that had led to her friend Meredith’s grisly death. Others maintained with equal conviction that the McCanns and Knox were telling the truth and had been grievously traduced.
    Carefully selecting the copious evidence provided by the news media to corroborate their views, what people on each side were doing would reveal more about themselves, their prejudices and motivations, than about what really happened, the truth of which wasknown only to the strangers in whose personal dramas they chose to involvethemselves.
    Another controversial case with which analogies were drawn was the celebrated O. J. Simpson murder trial in America. Global interest was also enormous, and the core allegation in both stories was a riveting one: famous athlete kills beautiful woman he loved. The majority view in the US, even before the trial began in Los Angeles in 1995, was that Simpson was guilty of the murder of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown. But there the similarities ended. The Simpson case followed the classic lines of a whodunit. A body had been found and it was up to the cops to discover the identity of the killer. Simpson was accused of murdering his ex-wife; the job of the police and prosecution was to prove he had done it.
    In Pistorius’s case the who, the when, the where and the how were not in dispute. And, thankfully for South Africa – even if it were no consolation for him – there was no racial element involved. In the Simpson case the accused had been black, the victim white, and American opinion divided accordingly. In the Pistorius case there was no clear division of opinion or splitting of sympathies along racial lines. As Justice Malala, a well-known black political commentator wrote, ‘For us South Africans, it is impossible to watch Oscar Pistorius run without wanting to break down and cry and shout with joy.’ Knowing this used to fill Pistorius with joy too.
    One thing he had been proud of as a South African was that admiration for successful national sportsmen, not just for him, was color-blind. Blacks and whites and all shades in between had taken the rugby players Francois Pienaar (white) and Bryan Habana (mixed-race), and the cricketers Hashim Amla (Indian and Muslim) and Makhaya Ntini (black), to their collective hearts. Sport, as Pistorius recalled Mandela saying, was a great breaker of racial barriers. Noone wished to be cut out of the celebrations when the national team won. All those sportsmen had inspired all their compatriots, just as he had done.
    What made Pistorius stand out from all the others was that because of his unique physical condition he exemplified the country’s continuing task of overcoming the hard legacy of the past. Every South African shared in his triumphs, seeing them as occasions to applaud what all races liked to see as the indomitable national spirit. Everyone had wanted to identify with him because he fed South Africans’ self-image as a never-say-die people. The