apartheid’s mad scientists
From boerbuls to sjamboks to Sasol, scientists in the old regime even considered turning white South Africans into blacks
Mungo Soggot and Eddie Koch
WHERE else but South Africa would dog fanatics successfully cross-breed a Rottweiler, a Dobermann and a bloodhound? Or enthusiastically market a dog called a boerbul – an 80kg creature so ferocious that even foreign pitbull fan clubs were this week baying for a ban on the beast?
Many of these canine freaks are among the fantastic creations of the apartheid regime, spawned by a symbiosis between science and white supremacy: a relationship which began with crude anthropological research to show blacks were dumb and which culminated in the development of state-of- the-art chemical weaponry during apartheid’s waning years.
The Dobermann/Rottweiler/bloodhounds were engineered to satisfy conservative whites’ mania for vicious and racist dogs, the population of which eliminates scores of (mainly black) South Africans every year.
The hounds first surfaced during the early 1980s in Farmers Weekly advertisements, paid for by the extreme right-wing Herstigte Nasionale Party. The adverts flagged ”racist watchdogs” bred ”especially for South African circumstances”.
As far as boerbuls are concerned, they are the subject of a thriving export traffic to France where they fetch between R12 000 and R17 000 each.
These star products of South Africa’s genetic engineering expertise are so spectacularly nasty that the French branch of the American Pitbull Defence Association was this week reported as saying: ”The importation of these boerbuls must be stopped immediately. They are excessively aggressive and virtually uncontrollable.”
But perhaps a more outlandish entry in the annals of apartheid science was the development of a wolf-dog to track down insurgents and guard the country’s segregated farms and suburbs in the 1980s.
This howling, yellow-eyed animal was the product of an experiment by the South African Defence Force to improve the stamina and quality of the patrol dogs used during its bush wars in Angola and Namibia.
Although bred to be superdogs, many of these animals suffered from an Achilles heel. For example, they had soft paws better suited to the tundra than the harsh Namibian terrain and had to be provided with custom-designed booties when they went out on patrol.
The wolf-dog, which has seen active service in the army, was the creation of Roodeplaat Breeding Enterprises near Pretoria.
Here, at the largest commercial dog- breeding unit in the world, a German-born geneticist, Professor Peter Geertshen, introduced Russian wolf genes into Alsatians in a bid to improve the strain.
The Mail & Guardian once went to visit Jungle, a strapping example of the Roodeplaat wolf-dog. Although Jungle was 11 years old, it took three strong men and a chain to secure him behind bars. His teeth were twice the length of a normal Alsatian’s, his bite considerably harder, and his stamina indomitable. Jungle also demonstrated a powerful dislike for humans.
Jungle’s father was a wolf called Big Red, who was imported into South Africa in the 1970s from the Ural Mountains in the then Soviet Union. Big Red was shipped out to the South African Defence Force training school in Bourke’s Luck, Mpumalanga, and was cross-bred with Alsatians with great success.
Geertshen encouraged Jungle to sire a dozen quarter-wolfs, which in turn bred dogs that were one-eighth wolf. Even they boasted five times the stamina of a normal Alsatian.
The Johannesburg traffic department bought five of Big Red’s offspring and used them in the back of their patrol cars as guard dogs.
Karen Strydom apparently indulged in the breeding of similar dogs while her husband, Barend, languished in jail for his killing spree in Pretoria’s Church Square.
During his stint in the army, Jungle put in sterling performances as a tracker and, enthused Geertshen, ”bringing people down.
”One problem is that he doesn’t like blacks because he was trained in the army – and he’s become temperamental in his old age,” the proud professor said at the time.
But Geertshen said Jungle’s pups were raised in a non-racial environment. ”Our dogs don’t discriminate – they’re trained to attack blacks, whites and women.”
The wolf dogs were pretty invulnerable. Their trainers were not and so chose to clad themselves in special protective clothing to guard against the dogs’ exceptionally long teeth. ”They don’t let go,” explained the professor.
While Geertshen was rearing its hounds, other dedicated scientists at Roodeplaat Research Laboratories developed special poisons, such as the one used in the attempted killing of the Reverend Frank Chikane, now an adviser to Deputy President Thabo Mbeki.
It emerged earlier this year that the centre also investigated producing concoctions to sterilise blacks and encourage the development of cancer and heart attacks.
The centre was part of the military’s chemical and biological warfare programme, the guru of which was Wouter Basson.
Basson’s main focus was to prime Pretoria for a chemical Armageddon. In its spare time Basson’s team plotted to distribute mandrax and other drugs to South Africa’s ghettos in a bid to subdue the enemy – a fantasy to which Basson recently admitted in the Pretoria High Court after being charged with selling Ecstasy.
It appears that the military’s dabbling in the drug business often drifted into never- never land.
South Africa’s most famous killer, Eugene de Kock, tells of how his commanding officer once informed him that the Centre for Scientific and Industrial Research was developing a pill which would turn whites into blacks, so enabling the master race to infiltrate the ranks of the enemy. De Kock suggested the development of a pill which had the opposite effect, to put an end to all South Africa’s troubles.
Roodeplaat Research Laboratories also lent its expertise to the development of poisoned T-shirts. Designed to kill the wearer, the T-shirts were earmarked for student activists in the 1980s.
If all had gone according to plan, the poison from the T-shirts would have entered the wearer’s bloodstream, eventually caused a blood clot before triggering cardiac failure. The idea was that a post-mortem would find that death had been caused by natural causes. The plan fell through when the police hit squads, charged with distributing the T-shirts, chickened out.
Another breakthrough for South African inventors in the apartheid era involved experiments in combining barbed wire and electricity.
Engineering companies pioneered the research, prompted by the need for expanded security at migrant-worker compounds in the mining industry.
Researchers attached small blades with inward-facing hooks on to strands of sprung steel and came up with razor wire: a product that is now a standard feature of, not only the mining industry, but many a suburban home and the South African landscape in general.
The police use it to run mobile barricades around scenes of unrest, and thousands of rolls have been exported to armed forces in countries around the world who are impressed by its ability to rip and hook into intruders in their struggle to escape from its grasp.
But it was a company with the incongruous name of Eclair that added a lucrative, but lethal ingredient to razor wire: electricity. Non-lethal electrified fences, which relied on short pulses of high voltage, were a common sight.
Eclair managed to create a structure that was able to deliver 3 500 volts at a continuous electrical current of 800 milliamps over extremely long length.
This won it a contract to install the ”Fence of Fire” along a stretch of border between South Africa and Mozambique. The device is reported to have killed more illegal immigrants in the 1980s than the number felled by the Berlin Wall.
Then there was South Africa’s highly sophisticated, and adventurous, nuclear warfare programme at Pelindaba. The Atomic Energy Corporation was able to produce physicists skilled enough to create seven atom bombs, now destroyed. But their ability to deal with radioactive waste was less impressive.
Last year The Sunday Independent exposed that the exquisitely named dump site for nuclear waste from Pelindaba’s reactors – Radiation Hill – was emitting radioactivity more than a 100 times over the safety limits.
Then there was the G6 Super Gun cannon; the Kasspir; synthetic fuel production – the first since the days of the Third Reich – in the form of Mossgas and Sasol; and, of course, the sjambok.
However, the M&G’s snap survey of the gadgets, inventions, medicines, poisons, bombs, weapons and fences that were devised by scientists determined to build a technological laager around the old regime has failed to locate a Boys from Brazil type programme to create a white super race.
But who knows what files lurk in the bowels of the medical front companies and government agencies at the forefront of apartheid science?