Desmond Tutu often caused bemusement when he said that apartheid oppressed us all – black, white and all the shades in-between – and that its end would free us all. The bewilderment that sometimes greeted his assertion was not difficult to understand. For, whatever curtailment apartheid imposed on whites’ liberty or life chances, it seemed scarcely to warrant attention when compared to the devastation that racism wrought on black South Africans. Yet a significant number of whites were, indeed, damaged by apartheid. And today we publish details of the suffering apartheid caused among one group of whites – homosexual men conscripted into the old South African Defence Force (SADF). Their suffering, like that of many other “troopies”,
resulted from the intolerance and authoritarianism that underlay apartheid. And that intolerance and
authoritarianism were greatly exacerbated as apartheid set about defending itself against people fighting for social and political justice. In few institutions were these characteristics more evident than in the SADF. There, anyone unable or unwilling to pay enthusiastic obeisance to macho values and a culture of brutality could be, and often was, deemed a threat. Unsurprisingly, the SADF viewed homosexuals as a particular threat. Here was a “difference” which seemed likely to undermine many of the attributes apartheid sought to inculcate into its soldiers. Not surprisingly, therefore, apartheid’s army meted out to homosexuals its habitual opening response to anything it identified as a threat: naked physical brutality. But apartheid’s intellectual class sought, as they did in other areas as well, to dignify their suppression of homosexuality with a veneer of science. Accordingly, homosexuality was classified not merely as difference in sexual orientation but as a form of deviance and as an illness. And forms of treatment – notable for both their barbarity and conspicuous lack of success – were dragged up from the murkier corners of psychiatry’s past to be applied on a category of vulnerable young men trapped in military uniform. In this project, apartheid’s instigators found enthusiastic collaborators in those psychiatrists of limited humanity and sordid motive who delighted in causing emotional pain. Others on the receiving end of this, our equivalent of the Soviet psychiatric prisons, included conscientious and political objectors; drug users; and those deemed, in the crazy reasoning of the SADF, to be pathologically gentle. Many is the psychiatrist and psychologist across South Africa who has tried, over the past 30 years, to help put these individuals back together again – not always with success.
Apartheid’s human destruction extended also to the thousands of conscripts who saw active service, and to the many blacks who fought on one side or the other of the apartheid
conflict out of conviction or economic necessity – and who, with their families, today suffer psychological disorders brought on by the high stress of those times. Here apartheid’s fellow travellers were not just psychiatrists,
but medieval-minded army chaplains whose readings from the Old Testament and whose rabid preaching against communism warped the minds of a generation of young white men. Many thousands of former conscripts have never sought professional help, keeping the damage bottled up inside. A number are not only dangers to themselves but, also, to our society.
As we build a nation, these people, alongside the others who suffered, need – and deserve – our sympathy and, where we can give it, our help. Just so, the hurried emigrant
psychiatrist Aubrey Levine, now working in the forensic psychiatry department at Calgary hospital in Canada, has earned our contempt. There is, however, a lesson in their experience for us. The legislative framework and the allocation of resources to ensure that the needs of the most vulnerable groups such as women, children and the disabled are addressed is primarily a decision of government, though it is influenced by our vote and the pressures we bring to bear on the politicians between elections. But there is a large area of engagement which depends on the personal attitudes we develop and the way in which we relate to those who are different from ourselves. And here we exercise a high degree of personal choice each day. Overcoming racial prejudice is likely to remain our major attitudinal challenge for many years. But this should not lead us to ignore our other commitments under the Constitution to respect people whatever their gender and sexual orientation. Whether we extend that respect is a matter of choice – a choice we can and should make conscious.
The kind of choice required of us is to tolerate social difference and to make of it no cause for fear. This is a notion embraced in our new national coat of arms, and in President Thabo Mbeki’s call for a “people- centred” society. The treatment of homosexuals and others by the old SADF provides an example – if at all another is needed – of just how quickly cruelty follows on the kind of thinking which holds that the fact of difference implies that another is deviant, dangerous or unworthy of our respect.
@ Verbatim “It was like an atomic bomb, a mushroom cloud in the sky.” – Resident of Gonesse, near Paris, after witnessing the crash of Concorde AF4590
“The plane hadn’t left the ground and already it was on fire. The flames were coming from the back of the plane. We were waiting to hear the explosion because we thought it was going to fall here [at the airport].” – Sylvie Lucas, of Paris, who was at Charles de Gaulle airport waiting for her children
“Many people died, but the symbol of the Concorde too. The Concorde is a huge national idea for France, a symbol of engineering pride, and the fact that it crashed, and so many people died, and on the soil of France, it’s a terrible shock.” – Fabien Tillon, trying to manage the crisis from the offices of the local council in Cergy- Pontoise
“Germany is shaken, Germany is stunned.” – German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder after attending a multi- faith religious service in Hanover for victims of the Concorde crash
“It’s awesome. I played well all week and putted well.” – Tiger Woods after his historic victory at the British Open golf tournament
“They earn huge salaries, but don’t deliver the goods. We are currently paying the players to lose. This is a business and no employer pays his staff to under- perform.” – South African rugby football union president Silas Nkanunu
“You must dig further and make sure that good news remains good news.” – President Thabo Mbeki, explaining to the Pretoria Press Club why the media should start taking a more positive attitude towards the government