Dengl2: On The Death Of Diana Princess of Wales

When the news of the death of Diana Princess of Wales was given out, everyone remembered where they were when they first heard of the tragedy – just as happened 34 years earlier when President John F.Kennedy was assassinated. The two deaths were remarkable in another way – as Magnus Linklater the Times’ columnist has pointed out, in both cases stories, myths and legends sprang up as to the causes of such trauma. The ‘official’ accounts of who killed Kennedy and of Diana’s car crash were not universally accepted – dark doubts were expanded into tales, some extravagant but some simple, as to hidden and in many stories, nefarious motives and actions.

In 1965 I was in Nigeria and on one occasion driving from Lagos to Benin. The road mostly went through thick forest and I gave a hitch to a young Nigerian; two hundred miles gave much time for conversation. We talked about Kennedy and the young man asked me if I believed the official account – he emphatically did not. He declared that the then Vice President Lyndon Johnson was responsible – he had arranged a secret assassination. Why? What evidence had my companion?
(Evidence is our bedrock criterion in western ‘modern’ scientific, print literate cultures, to help us explain events).
My companion’s evidence (he might not have used that term) was that Johnson had the most powerful motive to do such a deed. He would get the Presidency.

I was in Nigeria as a social psychologist attached to Ibadan University and this conversation served as a prompt and an example to asking more about how people in many Nigerian (and other West African) cultures respond to the blows of what we call fate. In many cases they did (maybe still do) consult a diviner and that person (like a consultant Conan Doyle) looked for the motivational patterns around the event: who might want an event to happen? How might they prompt it to happen? If and when there is a plausible tale along these lines, the diviner (in his or her role as social healer) might suggest either a negotiation (or something more drastic …). The pattern, however, is that enquiry is more like a piece of playwriting than what happens in a laboratory. So, in this man’s mind, Lyndon Johnson was responsible for the death of Kennedy.

Where does this take us with Diana? I did not ever expect that (some) patterns of social explanation found in Nigeria might be found similarly in Egypt. I know next to nothing about Egyptian society. Yet perhaps that is true and that ways of thinking in village cultures are strong enough to be found in later generations now living in towns – among people who are perfectly literate and in many other ways thorough members of a modern “scientifically habituated” society.

So we find Mohammad Fayed’s early thoughts on his son’s death (and that of Diana) were that he, with she, had been murdered. He further inferred the person most likely (in his view) to gain from such a deed – and blamed Prince Philip. The scenario of the burdensome current inquest may therefore be a contest between “western” scientifically-based ways of thought and exploring causes and effects, and more antiquated pre-modern ways of such thought. We are seeing something like what happened in the enquiries into Galileo’s assertions about the moon going round the earth and the earth round the sun. Galileo may have lost that dispute in the short term – most reckon he won in the end. The jury in the "Diana (and Dodi) inquest" are likely, as people educated in modern society, not to see things Fayed's way; but we shall see.