Teenage Angst in Apart Hate South Africa

“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light but by making the darkness conscious” Jung

“The family has to follow rules”.

Mr. Visser - our Guidance teacher - looks around at the faces in our standard eight class.

“One day you’ll vote for the same party as your husband”, his eyes are focused squarely on Estelle.

“And the best party to vote for is the Nationalist Party”. They’ll keep the “rooi gevaar” (communists) away.

Est glances at me her eyeballs rolling. And later that week when Mr. Visser catches us smoking behind the bathroom, I forget to be remorseful. This time he stares with glinting brown irises and asks:

“Are you a stranger from Jerusalem?”

What?

I have no idea what he means. But he takes us off to the office for punishment anyway.

On Monday morning early, we gather outside the assembly hall at the Pretoria Art Ballet and Music school for regular underwear inspection. Royal blue underpants are school regulations for girls - if you forget them, you receive one whole afternoon in detention.

The boys escape this ritual but as if to balance the unfairness, most are summonsed to attend a lecture on the benefits of organized religion when they turn up at the year dance wearing mascara and hair gel, their male partners hanging behind, each holding on to one of the un-partnered girls.

Teachers - horrified at our “sins” - litter the week following the dance with threatening lectures; some of us had dressed out of context according to our natural gender while others had embarrassed the school by becoming intoxicated. No one had anything positive to say about that night, least of all the students.

These days were stained. I poured it all out in a daily journal. Initially my parents bought into the theory that I was at fault, completely, until that day. Mrs van Wyk was standing on the platform, lecturing in a shrill voice, during school assembly. I was not listening and had missed the gist of the speech once again, until I heard my name. “Children who do not listen will be punished. If you brush your hair with a egg beater like Karin Socks does, you will get detention every week.”

Later, after assembly, van Wyk makes me brush my hair into a style resembling an organic mass of cotton wool. Those with naturally curly hair will understand how that happens. Then she demands that I stand in the corner. I could have perhaps let this go had I been five years old.

“You are not allowed to perm your hair Kaaaaren!”

She is wrong on two accounts; my name is not “Kaaren” and my hair is not permed, not that this should matter in the big scheme of things.

The small scheme of things does however, surely point towards a bigger picture.

“Your IQ is too high, you can be anything you want!” Van Wyk glares at me, black eyeliner stretched across her eyelids, red lipstick bleeding into furrows, her dull lacquered yellow bobbed hair dampened. She sits firmly planted, flesh seeping into the desktop in front of me. It certainly did not seem to me that I had a choice to be what I wanted. What was preventing me from becoming “anything”? There were a few directions I would have liked to follow. I would like to live in the wild if possible, be a vet or follow any road that would ensure a life lived to serve and be with animals. However, the area of nature conservation not only marginalized women but it advocated hunting and studying veterinary science required a fair amount of vivisection. I had looked around. No career that linked one’s path with animals seemed to be free of exploiting them.

The concept “I.Q’ was also puzzling. Unconvinced about using human intelligence – whatever that means in the multiple-species-world - as a barometer for measuring anything relevant, I secretly wonder if my IQ results have more to do with being clairvoyant. If I had the ability to somehow know the answers to the questions of the test without thinking much about it, which had seemingly happened, would I not be simply intuitive. I’d find that ability useful; it’s one I’d embrace. I keep all these thoughts to myself, but silence seems to make van Wyk angrier. The sweat marks on her pastel pink blouse have grown, her nostrils flare emphatically, and permanent furrows between her brows deepen.

Over lunch, I relay this story to my mum:

“She said what?” Suddenly my mother wakes up, this is not right; this has nothing to do with schoolwork.

“Her husband is mostly away - on those boys-only hunting trips” Est offers as the reason behind van Wyk’s sour expression.

In spite of my parents finally understanding a small part of my school life now, they still agree with van Wyk on one issue. I am different. I do not obey. I question everything they tell me to do, needing constructive reasons before following their advice. All, yes all, I had to do to make life easier was to follow their rules, to take in the stuff they taught and regurgitate it in a way that showed enthusiasm and success. But it didn’t make sense. There appeared to be little meaning in the direction they pushed me; homework, lessons, force feeding myself useless information so that one day I would be moulded for the “good life”. Was this worth it? It didn’t seem so.

What they wanted would require a deep death of the self, or so it seemed, and I did not know how to do that. I was too inexperienced to fully grasp the source of the spiritual prison I felt I had been born to. It would be many long years before I would realize to what extent our tamed lives fought with an inner truth; an un-named knowing that had yet to live in the light. The only way to walk towards freedom as I understood it would be to leave the bars of "the human condition" with its projected ideas about reality, behind.

Around this time, while on a holiday in “Rhodesia”, I discover for the very first time what Nelson Mandela looks like. His photograph is banned in S.A. I have not been particularly aware of who he is, where he is or what he stands for.

There is no way of knowing, no one ever mentions his name, and this information is almost impossible to stumble on.

Salisbury’s streets have numerous larger than life reproductions of Nelson’s face. I stare in wonder, taking in the serene wisdom in his eyes, wondering how it is possible I’ve never seen his face before.

What else has been hidden?

Schooldays; “the best time of your life”, had stolen something it seemed; I felt like a zoo-otic lioness in a concrete cage, restless, pacing, unanchored and one hundred percent controlled. Relief arrives quarterly when our family goes away. Mostly we head off to the bush. Sometimes we travel to St Michaels on Sea on the South Coast in Natal Province.

Shiny-skinned young Zulu men line the tarmac’s edges, their sharply muscled torsos’ and somber faces hinting at mysterious cultural depths that we cannot possibly fathom. Stretches of sand dotted with saturated umbrella tops are watched by pubescent lifesavers lounging next to surfboards, their herb-soaked eyes gazing at the horizon. All are deeply tanned with wheat-bleached hair, as if belonging to one tribe.

From a distance and the perspective of inexperienced youth, and changing, turbulent hormones, they temporarily hold our attention for long enough, a sweet escape from school, and a thankful detour from pressing world issues; I’d recently joined a couple of organizations - B.W.C (Beauty Without Cruelty) and S.A.A.A.P.E.A (South African Association Against Painful Experiments on Animals).

“Primates cannot just be dismissed as simple creatures. Their abilities go far beyond the basic skills of food finding and nest building. These are animals that teach each other negotiating skills, learn to operate computers, recognize their kin from photographs. They are intelligent, capable, quick learners. They are like us, complex beings.” Deborah Blum – The Monkey Wars.

The lives of monkeys, edge closer. I collect all the literature available and am led into the world of vivisection where animals undergo live experiments. Beagles, Rats and Rabbits are some who endure horrific acts widely hidden from the public in the alleged interests of scientific progress or cosmetic refinement. Primates are considered apt substitutes for humans because of their close physical and emotional similarities. This similarity is apparently not a good enough reason to exempt them from torture. This is the first time in my life these facts have been revealed to me. I am horrified and hurt.

The nervous systems of monkeys are more delicate and fragile than ours suggesting that they are able to suffer extensively yet they are sacrificed, mutilated alive, administered electric and psychological shocks and other procedures. If these practices had been forced on humans, they would surely be considered criminally insane.

And the media with its reliance on advertising seems to magnify these very crimes. It is everywhere I look, magazines, newspapers, television, and movies.

Harry Harlow of the University of Wisconsin became well known for his maternal deprivation experiments performed on infant monkeys. “It is much more mature intellectually than a human at birth, and it has a degree of motor control that a child takes months to acquire…Most individuals can be tested for several hours week after week, year after year…We can submit them to long periods of social and sensory deprivation…. We can also damage their brains.”, he said. It was not merely animal rights activists that used Harlow as a sadistic example of his profession. Even William Mason – a contemporary at Wisconsin Laboratory - said that Harlow’s later writings made his flesh creep and revealed his apparent enjoyment at the animal’s suffering as if “he couldn’t wait to take these monkeys and destroy them.”

It was the seventies. This was South Africa yet the hippie movement, albeit rather late, had seeped into our pubescent lives in subtle but intoxicating ways that intermingled with our particular S.A brand of oppressive politics.

Every Friday night my parents held a dinner.

There’d usually be six couples. This particular night there were eight. Joan van Dyk’s satin green dress cost R400 she announced as she crossed the threshold, her hair has been professionally bee-hived, 4-inch high stilettos left perfect small round dents on the plush carpet as she made her way into the dining room where she proceeded to flash re-arranged teeth:

The men were suited.

I was growing - growing up in this environment and whether I chose it or not, this was my life too.

Indirectly or not, we were all responsible for the buried truth, all of it.

Coats were hung in the white cupboard next to the front door as each visitor made their way to the dining room where they would wait to be served. Lizi limped around the round table, her large frame bumping chairs along the way, her angelic dark skinned face lightly glowing. She would smile at each and every visitor as she placed the first course of dips and whole-wheat breads on the table. On my way to the bathroom I once noticed Zelda Moss pass a silky red-brown fur coat that looked suspiciously like freshly, killed mink to my father. Zelda Moss had told me that she refused “to give donations towards animals”. The next morning at breakfast my mother wanted to know why I had plastered a SAAAPEA pamphlet on the Moss BMW window - “her fur was fake you know”, she moaned.

Slaughter of the Innocent by Swiss author Hans Reusch, remains a haunting book to this day. Published in 1978, it claimed beyond any doubt or argument, that vivisection is scientifically fraudulent – a practice fuelled by economics rather than human progress. This book had been first been handed to me by Sonya Glenny, an animal activist, artist and good friend. Together we would help at various demonstrations or stalls, hoping to educate people about the hidden crimes of vivisection. “So if you had Cancer, you would rather just die then?” a middle aged ashen faced, emaciated man asked. Sonya knew this book well, and cancer was no stranger either. She turned to the young man in front of her: “There is no reason at all for these heinous acts done to animals, not even if you believe that animals should be sacrificed for medical science, because experiments done on animals cannot be extrapolated to humans! Look here on page seven” she continued: then read out loud: “Those who hope to find remedies for human ills by inflicting deliberate suffering on animals commit two fundamental errors in understanding. The first is the assumption that results obtained on animals are applicable to man.”

Her passion and flashing khaki eyes had made their point.

People began to move closer.

It was a difficult task to tempt passers by to stop. Behind our table, a large board with vivid photographs of laboratory animals in various tortured positions loomed like a multi–dimensional horror exhibit.

I could barely look at this myself.

People passing would glance, and then quickly turn away. I had the feeling that it was not that no one cared but that these crimes were too enormous to confront. If I had looked a bit closer, I may have noticed that I too could not absorb all of it, not without paying. Insomnia became my close companion. I would lie awake at night, hour after hour, slowly passing the early morning hours, wondering how we could save every animal in every research laboratory.

At the time I was unaware that closer to home during the eighties, chemical and biological weapons to be used against the black opponents of Apartheid were undergoing development.