Litnet

Foto: Dieter Wolf op Unsplash

I must affirm that my first experience of the Nagligte in Wilgenhof was a major disappointment. I was in full expectation that my first encounter with one of the major agencies that performed the sadistic rituals sprouting from the dark wellspring of Afrikaner nationalism would be at least as existentially profound an experience as having your soul plucked out of your breast like a hard-boiled egg and devoured by Mephisto in the presence of all the fallen angels.

After all, here I was standing in a black “hool” marked 88. The number 88 was endowed with at least as similar a sinister numerical significance as 666 must have had for the mystagogue of Patmos, when the ramifications of the Apocalypse were revealed to him. This was the place where boys, like me, were humiliated and assaulted in the name of tradition. Here was the place (and the opportunity) where der Mann ohne Eigenschaften or a Sorrowful Junge Werther could start the journey of acquiring and internalising the at-first budding, then muscular, equipment that fulfils the primitive urgings of the soul to return to the amniotic fluid that nurtured mature Afrikaner nationalist identity.

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Room 88 was at the heart of the institutional engine that generated the Boere mafia, who built media empires and became tycoons in service of that ultimate incarnation of communal solidarity, the apartheid state.

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And, above all, an identity with roots. From here grew the taproot that could restore access for a young soul otherwise rendered alienated, anomic, disenchanted, deracinated, etc, by the machinations of Popper’s Open Society, to a Gemeinschaft brimming with meaning, purpose and collective solidarity. Here, in room 88, it was available and equipped with the ready means to implant it. In a world seething with indifference, it restored the will toward purposive power. It was called Wilgenhof culture and could be instilled by ritual inculcation. Room 88 was at the heart of the institutional engine that generated the Boere mafia, who built media empires and became tycoons in service of that ultimate incarnation of communal solidarity, the apartheid state.

So, why was I disappointed? Perhaps Hannah Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil can be pressed into service to explain my feelings. When you stand in a dirty torture chamber built as a replica of a building that, in the past, was used as slave quarters – with Ku Klux Klan paraphernalia, veiled references to Adolf Hitler dripping from the walls, and written and visible evidence to years of torture and humiliation – you expect a big deal. Because it is supposed to be a big deal.

But what do you get? Little more than a schoolboy would get in a British public school-type scolding from his Oxford-trained house masters, or the services provided by a typical medical hospital in Victorian England. The sort of thing that the Scot comedian Billy Connolly calls the “wire brush and Dettol” treatment. You have advanced cancer? Wire brush and Dettol are just the thing to start off the healing process. You present with haemorrhoids? Wire brush and Dettol. A nosebleed at the other aperture. Wire brush and Dettol.

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Here I was in Hool 88, naked and ready for the budding sadomasochist tendencies thrashing around in my ego to be awakened and driven into full bloom by rituals geared to enable me to thrust my Boere taproot deeply into the dark secrets concealed from me by a cunning id.

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Here I was in Hool 88, naked and ready for the budding sadomasochist tendencies thrashing around in my ego to be awakened and driven into full bloom by rituals geared to enable me to thrust my Boere taproot deeply into the dark secrets concealed from me by a cunning id. And what do I get? A band of harpies feeding me a Victorian laxative as soul food, and lectures on how to ennoble my superego by not pissing on the lawn. It was like digging a deep well to water the soul, and coming up dry. Of course I was disappointed. You expect the demonic form of psychotherapy exercised in 88 to reveal to you “where id was so that you could fathom where ego be”, and you end up with something not more gratifying than an episode of coitus interruptus. No wonder some people denounced Freud as a bloody wanker.

You at least expect the whore of Babylon to start the proceedings with a striptease show, in which one of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse rogers her and then mounts his pony before the antichrist in full papal regalia pronounces the Urbi et Orbi. But what do you get? The wire brush and Dettol treatment! Can you believe it? It is enough to let any red-blooded Boerseun lose the erection he has been working on in anticipation of something more picturesque. Until ED kicks in later in life, all Wilgenhoffers think of their penises as a bone. Like the ulna or the radius. Patriarchy rules, okay?

The Nagligte begin their “run” by throwing the main switch that controls the lighting system in the entire koshuis. Then they start prancing around the quad in their picturesque costumes screeching in high-pitched voices like a bunch of castrated bats, while herding the now naked members of the koshuis (who undress themselves in their rooms) they wish to arraign before the “sun of justice” in the chamber of horrors. The sun imagery is probably derived from the kweekskool motto, Sol justitiae illustratra nos. (They might have Hitler on the walls of Hool 88, but they carry Calvin in their hearts, as is evident from the number of tokkelokke in their ranks.)

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He holds a torch in his fist, shines it into the eyes and darker recesses of every poor soul he and his mob of thugs intend to humiliate and assault, and commands them to constantly stare at the blinding “sun of righteousness” in his hand. This, like the high-pitched voices of his gang of castrati imitators, is probably designed to shelter their everyday identities from detection by their victims.

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Once assembled in the den of iniquity, the castrati choir of rank and file Nagligte shut up and give the floor to the capo di tutti i capi of the in-house mafia. Given the Manichaean light versus darkness imagery that suffuses their cultural logic, and consistent with the pagan roots of their rituals, the capo di tutti i capi is called “The Sun”. He holds a torch in his fist, shines it into the eyes and darker recesses of every poor soul he and his mob of thugs intend to humiliate and assault, and commands them to constantly stare at the blinding “sun of righteousness” in his hand. This, like the high-pitched voices of his gang of castrati imitators, is probably designed to shelter their everyday identities from detection by their victims. You don’t want to insult, humiliate and assault your victims to the point where they are reduced to quivering jellies, ready to embrace the condom-encased taproot that you are planting in their souls with the Stockholm surrender syndrome technique, only to meet them the next day in a pub or in a loose scrum where they can use the “skop sy ballas fyn in die los skrum” technique on you in an act of retribution.

The Sun takes control of the proceedings. He calls out each hapless victim by name, and from a charge sheet reads out the transgressions of the Wilgenhof code of honour committed by each of them. The castrati choir of rank and file Nagligte join in the maltreatment and harassment of their defenceless victims by repeating each element in the indictment with the exaggerated acclamations typically found in a kangaroo court. The Sun delivers his condemnations in a kweekskool-trained “predikantstem”, overlaying the trademark “fyn stemmetjie” of the Nagligte Gestapo.

The list of transgressions is trivial. You were seen with a girl in public without a tie, with unpolished shoes and with your hands in your pockets. You were impolite to a waiter who served you an egg that was overcooked. You failed in your duty to answer the public telephone in the quad. You arrived at Sunday dinner dressed in a verkakte suit and with hair that appeared as if you had combed it with a firecracker. You played the 1820 overture in your room at such a high volume that your neighbour could not swot for an important exam he had the next day. You failed to respond when those fuckers from Dagbreek shouted “Bekfluitjie”, which allowed them to get away. You were seen pissing on the lawn when you came back from a booze-up at Tollies. Not exactly up to the level of crimes against humanity claimed by the Neanderthalers in Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at noon, as an excuse to tuck you away into the Hool 88 equivalents in the Lubyanka prison – but nevertheless furnished with the solemn ritual equipment that could make you think they were.

The Sun’s voice is, however, not thick with Calvinistic terror. His style reminds one more of how HH Munro (Saki) describes his character Reginald’s assessment of what passes these days as the fashionable way of venting one’s religious convictions. “The fashion just now is a Roman Catholic frame of mind with an agnostic conscience. You get the medieval picturesqueness of the one with the modern conveniences of the other.”

One can see that The Sun regards the Wilgenhof culture with a patronising affection – as if it were something that grew up in their kitchen garden. His Nagligte act in the service of making a gentleman of every Wilgenhoffer, and the afflictions he and his cohort bring down on his victims flow from the requirements of instilling noblesse oblige. The Nagligte are there to instil a bit of cultus recti in your pectora roborant.

Like Reginald, he believes that there are certain fixed rules that one observes for one’s own comfort. For instance, a typical homily one will hear in the chamber of horrors advises not to be flippantly rude to any inoffensive, grey-bearded stranger you may meet in pine forests or in the smoking rooms of hotels in Cape Town. It always turns out to be the king of the Zulu nation.

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By now, the process of trauma bonding is beginning to settle in. As the paint drips from their bodies, each of the victims begins to develop a deep emotional attachment to the Nagligte who are causing them harm.

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Only then does he cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war to harass, assault and humiliate the guilty victims.

Mr Brown strikes the first blow. He assaults the victim by wiping an easy-to-wash-off-under-a-cold-shower brown paint on the front of his body. Mr Black does the same by humiliating his victim by smearing black pant on his backside. By now, the process of trauma bonding is beginning to settle in. As the paint drips from their bodies, each of the victims begins to develop a deep emotional attachment to the Nagligte who are causing them harm. This bonding develops from a repeated cycle of abuse followed by positive reinforcement. They are told to thank their tormentors for the paint job, and they do so. The process of peeling away their resistance to the ennoblement of their conscience and implanting an organic identity in their psychic apparatus starts to pick up in tempo.

It is at this point that the wire brush and Dettol phase of the abuse kicks in. Mr Aloe steps forward, tells everyone to open their mouths, and inserts a couple of aloe crystals into their mouths. Each of the victims is by this time quivering – not from the cold, but from the deep emotional attachment they have formed with their tormentors. Mr Aloe is followed by Mr Oil, who deposits a spoonful of digestible oil into the same cavity. To make sure that they swallow both substances, they are required to face the floor and say “koelie koelie”.

Now. Anybody who is in the positive reinforcement business and knows something about the Stockholm syndrome, knows that you cannot utter “koelie koelie” without disgorging the contents of your mouth. Thus the suffering is extended. What was, in the wire brush and Dettol days of its career, regarded as no more than a good Victorian-style laxative, now begins to take on sinister qualities. The Nagligte don’t use castor oil. They are informed of the risks. When they torture anyone, they do it under the auspices of the best medical advice available. They administer their torture in a responsible way. For all we know, they might have copies of Dr Mengele’s notebooks on their reading lists.

The cunning way of the Nagligte now becomes apparent. They know that no one with paint on their bodies can return to their beds without first washing off the paint in a shower. And they have turned off the hot water supply to the communal showers. The sadistic ingenuity of the concept is staggering! The whole design principle of the disciplinary enterprise is to force people into a cold shower! With the evidence of the nazification of the Wilgenhof culture, as exhibited in Hool 88, one would at least have expected some non-lethal form of Zyklon B to spout from the showers.

The banality of evil!

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As they brushed past him on their way to the showers, one looked up at him with an almost homoerotic gleam in his eye and whispered, “I love you, mein Führer!”

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Van Zyl Slabbert, who when he was primarius of Wilgenhof and also acting in the role of The Sun for two years, once told me of an awkward experience he had after a late night session of dispensing justice to the great unwashed mob of Manchurian candidates trooping out of the chamber of horrors. As they brushed past him on their way to the showers, one looked up at him with an almost homoerotic gleam in his eye and whispered, “I love you, mein Führer!”

Slabbert reported that he found this rather disconcerting, especially after returning to his room and hearing exuberant voices coming from the cold shower room singing the Horst-Wessel-Lied. What he found even more disconcerting was the knowledge that the Jewish contingent in the Wilgenhof community might have been among them, as little scraps of shouts about “next year in Jerusalem” came floating up out of the melee resounding under the showers. He said it was then that he realised that the deep passion to preserve the organic community that was supposed to anchor your identity can take on vicious forms wherever you find it. At the time, he was preparing for a seminar he was attending on Zionism.

Enough is enough!