Sibokwane school squats on a dusty mound on the outskirts of ”Block A”, a village in the remote rural area of Nkomazi in Mpumalanga. The drab buildings and unkempt grounds speak of poverty and deprivation. When, as part of a study on men’s practices, grade seven boys were invited to keep journals, they responded with enthusiasm.
Boys eagerly claimed their blank books and began making notes detailing the burden of appalling poverty, violence and poor education. One is the journal of 14-year-old Boas*, a boy subjected to deliberate neglect and brutal attacks by his father, in a context where domestic violence and rape are endemic.
Boas’s diary challenges the notion that children are the helpless victims of the environment they grow up in, irreparably damaged and predetermined to repeat the violence that patterns their lives. In his writings he develops contradictory senses of himself, at once despairing and expectant, acutely aware that what he suffers is unjust and confident that he will do better.
His entries show a hesitant but satisfying sense of discovery. Six months into keeping the journal he writes, ”This diary I want to write about myself. I love the diary. When I write the diary I get knowledge.” He narrates the humiliating abuse and neglect he suffers, and here and there anger and sadness are revealed. He questions love and hate, the accountability of others, and reflects on freedom and oppression.
Forbidden by his father to play with other children, his diary assumes the quality of playing. He tries to make meaning of his family tragedy. His entries negotiate inner and outer, personal and social, life history and political context.
He selects extracts from his school books — stories of maternal care, the experiences of Nelson Mandela and a poem I Feel — to give expression to his hopes and pain. Boas describes the former president as his ”symbol” — a reflection of how Mandela has assumed the status of icon in many South Africans’ fantasies.
Boas’s father regularly refers to the boy as a barbarian. His diary contains extracts from Long Walk to Freedom, in which Mandela under different circumstances was also referred to as a barbarian. In Boas’s fantasies both of them share a humiliating experience, making the probability of common triumph and dignity more real.
October 14 2003: I like very much to write a diary because tomorrow I want to be a president of South Africa … When I come from school I do not go to play with other friends because father told me that if he sees me he will hit me. Father told me that I was barbarian and he does not want me at home. Father told me that he will beat me. When I remember mother he take sticks and beats me so much stronger.
Progressively Boas’s diary entries become more realistic. He shifts from speaking through other voices and from the magical fusion of his own life with that of his hero Mandela. Gradually he uses his diary to make connections between his thoughts and feelings, between his personal life and the external world.
October 26 2003: What is my father doing around the community? What are my neighbours doing about me? Maybe God has created all of this. It seems as if there is no love here at home. It also seems as if others are not practising this love at their homes. Maybe there is hatred at home.
December 7 2003: Teacher he teaches more about the Constitution book. And he told us that it is the highest book of the country. I want a Constitution. I want to know about the democracy government not a dictator because he puts himself in power and govern the country the way he likes.
December 10 2003: This diary is about my self and my heart. I want to know something new in myself … I have the rights to learn what is happening in our country. I have the right to go to school. My father told me I am a barbarian. This is not good.
December 11 2003: I feel very sad when I think of my mother’s life.
Boas’s diary allows him to symbolise terrifying experiences and painful emotions — one dimension of the complex of factors that protect against the risk of developing maladaptive responses to violence. But this provides no guarantee that he will eschew all forms of violence in the future, for violence is multiply determined.
He draws on narratives of rights and icons of freedom to symbolise his internal sense of injustice and to envision different modes of being. It is hopeful that emerging rights discourses give children such as Boas, for whom violence is the order of family life, the language to question why they are being hurt, to judge what their fathers are doing. Through this process of questioning they open the possibility of creating alternative principles.
This raises the question of how the external world shapes his interior fantasies of his mother — and in the long term what stance he will adopt towards women. Boas’s actual mother is entangled in a set of kinship practices that convey an assumption about women as the property of their fathers and husbands — as objects.
Could it be that in the interchange between his experience of his mother’s care and external narratives there is space for Boas to generate representations of his mother as a subject? And if so, what responsibility do we have to offer children like Boas narratives and symbols of women as autonomous, so that in the interchange between their personal fantasies and social reality children may create images of women whose integrity must be recognised and respected?
Tina Sideris works at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research. Fieldwork was conducted through Masisukumeni Women’s Crisis Centre with the generous support of AusAID and FHR. * Name has been changed