Crying for my country

I watch the welts appear through the boy’s underwear. The boy’s head is caught between a grinning, stocky policeman’s thighs which imprison the boy and keep him bent over. In front of the boy stands another policeman, face furrowed in thought as he wields the cane. The cane comes hissing down on the boy’s buttocks again. The cane-wielding policeman uses his stick to point out a previous welt which is showing blood. Then he looks back at the policemen and onlookers in the detention cell for approval for his handiwork. There are six strokes altogether and not once does the boy wince or flinch. Each welt is purple through the almost transparent, torn underwear and some cuts bleed. The objective is to get the boy to bleed as much as possible.

At the end of the caning the policeman who is gripping the boy’s head between his legs steps away and the boy stands up and turns around. There is no pain on his face. His eyes and lips are wrinkled in a scowl and he is smouldering with anger and hatred. His face is so coal-dark with those emotions I wonder if he felt any pain. He walks out of the detention cell to freedom, head held high. I gather he and his companion were caught stealing and the court ordered this punishment.

A detainee myself, I have been “invited” to the detention cell next door by the policemen to watch the punishment. I have been trying to dodge compulsory military service long enough now and my efforts have got me into the police detention cells of Walvis Bay, far away from the military camp I was posted to in Heidelberg in the old Transvaal. It is 1982. Nobody cares any more what happened in South Africa in 1982. All that matters is 2010. Which is how it should be.

The boy’s companion, a few years younger, does not fare as well. He struggles to get away from the two policemen pulling him into the centre of the detention cell, then forcing his head between the two thighs of the policeman who now laughs quietly. Eventually the boy’s head is forced between the thick muscles which clamp tight around his ears and his pants are removed. The punishment commences. With every lash the child jumps and tries to yank his head away from between the muscular thighs. The officer’s hands handcuff his neck. The boy tries to cover his buttocks with his hands and for that sin his hand gets lashed on the next stroke and blood flows from his knuckles. He never tries to put his hands in the way again. The loud strokes are carefully, sensually and slowly administered. This, of course, vividly reminds me of the beatings I received at school. None were as bad as this. But I remember well the long pauses between strokes which let the pain build up to a white heat before the next stroke came. At the time, of course, I was confused by the sexuality implicit in the act, the slowness with which the beatings were drawn out.

Life is confusion. Words and ideas try to order things: dogmas, spectacular intellectual notions, great poems, newspaper editorials. They briefly and triumphantly glare, the white edges of shadowy waves, but only serve to pour salt on the darkness, to rub it in. Sometimes they clarify the pain. Pain does need clarification.

The sixth stroke, delivered as hard as possible, finally descends and the boy wriggles out from between the thighs, silently prancing on thin, emaciated legs, holding his buttocks, eyes bulging, then scuttles to where his companion stands just outside the cell door. The second boy’s face is anguished, but he does not make a sound. I wonder if he is a mute. The audience leaves while the policeman who “invited” me escorts me back to my cell. The spectacle, I assume, was a message to me. I want to throw up but cannot.

In 2010, the year that matters in South Africa, because nobody cares what happened in 1982, I still remember that first boy. How can I forget him or even want to? He never showed pain. One could believe he did not feel the pain the way I would. He celebrated the torture and used it as a source of strength. He did not acknowledge or submit to the suffering because those two, blood-dark, refined emblems of war, like taunting flags, were all he offered to us standing there: hatred and rage. The young warrior’s face was a black, silent fire. I was and am repulsed by it, attracted to it. Perhaps his was an act of wordless heroism. Yes: unlike me, this could be why so many turn to figures like the butchered, helpless Christ for solace and to adore. The silent, uplifted crucifix among the candles. No attempt to explain the dark or to rub it in.

I still shudder at the thought that perhaps I am the only one who saw the boy this way: a warrior. Equally, I am convinced that some of those policemen, especially the two punishment administrators, had erections during the canings and masturbated afterwards. One prison warden, when I was transferred to Swakopmund’s prison, beseeched me to let him whip me, even offered me money. I have to remember his face out of a sense of duty to humankind. But his face is not so easy, perhaps because it does not matter what happened in 1982. (2010 is all; we must firmly hold onto that.) The warden’s face was a sallow, wet cloth of skin, a rag tiredly thrown onto a hook in a latrine, and would soon fall to the ground.

Notes towards a memoir, a quasi-sequel to Cracking China