Lynda Gilfillan
‘I have an overwhelming rage at completely innocent things and people. Like my son jumping on my back in the pool and wanting to drown him because I get so angry, and the dog eating chicken eggs and me wanting to beat the dog to a pulp.”
Mark Coetzee (45) has a finely sculpted face with intense blue eyes and a smile that speaks of pain and sadness.
He has a passion for natural living and he and his wife grow organic vegetables, which he serves in a small, trendy restaurant on the Cape south coast. In George, to be exact, near Wilderness where PW Botha lives the man who has so arrogantly denied his culpability in the system that has made Mark and countless others like him casualties of apartheid.
Bosbefok or bossies, the South African variant of the post-traumatic stress disorder suffered by war veterans of Vietnam or Bosnia, is a condition that goes back to the first warriors in human history. But the healing rites that cleansed and reintegrated returning warriors into society were absent for Coetzee and others under ministers of defence such as Botha.
“We weren’t debriefed we’ve been neglected and this has serious consequences for us now,” Coetzee says bitterly.
He rattles off a list of classic post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms: “I suffer from psychic numbing. I can’t identify my feelings or tell my wife how I feel it seems boring and irrelevant. I’m hypervigilant when I sense a threat, I go into kill mode. And I have flashbacks to battle situations and I feel hopeless and out of control. I can’t empathise with people, especially those close to me. It all seems a bunch of bullshit and I don’t care how they feel and I don’t trust anyone. I don’t know what love means. I like solitude. I don’t do people.”
He is currently taking “time out” from his wife and family, responding to his need for “head space”.
But Coetzee and others like him have embarked on a self-healing exercise. “I hit the wall in 1997 and went on to Prozac for 18 months, but then met former paratrooper Marius van Niekerk, who started the South African Veterans’ Association (Sava).”
Run “by veterans for veterans”, Sava is a support group for survivors of the 1970s to 1990s conflict.
Van Niekerk, a film-maker based in Stockholm, currently coordinates Sava activities via a website that has had 2830 visitors since June 1997. The group has links with the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation in Johannesburg, World Veterans’ Association, Gun-free South Africa, the Russian Veterans’ Page and the Vietnam Veterans’ Organisation.
Among its aims is to set up “rap groups” as a means of self-therapy. Coetzee, who was a 19-year-old platoon Parabat commander under the notorious Major Joe Verster in Angola in 1976, has started the first such group in South Africa. It meets weekly at St Mark’s Cathedral hall in George and membership is “open to every veteran, but right now it’s a process of getting to feel the safeness of your comrades. Present members are from Koevoet, infantry, medical corps and the South West Africa territorial force. It would be difficult to sit around a table with [Umkhonto weSizwe] and [Azanian People’s Liberation Army] cadres now, when we need to talk freely about what we did.”
Healing and reconciliation are Sava priorities. As part of its 12-step programme, group members pledge themselves to “wipe out guilt and shame” by listing persons they have harmed, and making amends.
In the absence of a national programme of social reintegration, this small group of men are picking themselves up after having been “dumped in the street” by the military and the police.
Refusing the victim status that drives many to drug and alcohol abuse or violent crime, people like Coetzee are performing their own form of ritual washing, hoping to “clean out the last of the muck of war from our heads”.