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THE KARMA OF VIOLENCE

GLEN RETIEF

When I was twelve years old and skinny as a grasslands cheetah, my parents sent 
me away to boarding-school. They had no choice in the matter. We lived in a 
staff village in a game park more than an hour away from the nearest secondary 
school, so boarding-school was both an unavoidable and unremarkable rite of 
passage for all of those entering Standard Six (eighth grade). One baking hot, 
glaring Monday afternoon in January 1983, the day before the start of the school 
year, they drove me to Nelspruit, a shady farming town on the main road between 
Johannesburg and Mozambique. Here, they dropped me at a complex of red 
brick buildings in a newly-built first-floor dormitory still smelling of concrete dust, 
builders’ tape and paint, and lined with metal lockers and identical blue-and-
white-quilted beds.

It didn’t take me very long to get into trouble at my new school. That very first 
afternoon, after the parents had left, all of us had to stand, according to boarding-
school tradition, in the downstairs showers and wait for our two seventeen-year-
old dormitory prefects to finish soaping and rinsing themselves. After a minute or 
two one of them, a skinny blond muscular boy named John, with bright red acne 
all over his face, announced an initiation ritual which involved dropping our towels, 
placing our hands on our heads, and singing an athletics song while jumping up 
and down in the nude. At some point he caught me looking at his groin.

“You,” he said, beckoning me to come to the front.
He asked my name, then told me to bend over. From somewhere he produced 

a cricket bat. He proceeded to give me six hard strokes on my bum. I remember 
that he put tremendous force into them, swinging back on his strokes so that the 
cracks echoed through that stark concrete bathroom. I also recall that the burning 
on my buttocks was absolutely extraordinary, a fierce, searing agony that caused 
my throat to harden and my eyes to mist up. I was terrified. Bile rose in my 
mouth. It was tough to breathe.

“Let that be a lesson to you, Standard Six,” he said when he was finished. “We 
are fighting a war in this country, and there isn’t any room here for queers and 
weaklings.” He actually used those words—queers; weaklings. After my whipping 
I had to ask Martin, the skinny freckled boy who slept in the bed opposite mine, 
to explain to me what queers were; when he told me there were men in the world 
who lived together and had intercourse, at first I refused to believe him.

“It’s true,” Martin said, “and John thinks you’re one.” And so many other boys 
all agreed that Martin was right, that in the end I had to bow to their superior 
numbers.

Unfortunately, that was just the beginning of it. Over the next ten months, 
and especially during the first three of them, when John lived in the Standard Six 
dormitory with us, I, along with to varying extents the other Standard Sixes in the 
dormitory, would, in the name of “initiation,” face an avalanche of sexual violence 
and torture. I would be given hidings with a cricket bat for walking past candy 

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wrappers lying on the floor or not greeting a matric (twelfth-grader) energetically 
enough when I saw him. I would receive electric shocks to my genitalia and be 
beaten with pillowslips full of athletics spikes; for laughs I would be made to 
pretend that my penis was a drill bit and I had to plow through the concrete floor 
into the building foundations. I would have my food and snacks confiscated from 
me; on an afternoon when the temperature in the shade was more than a hundred 
degrees, I would be confined to my bed under a pile of blankets, with the rest of 
the Standard Sixes forbidden from bringing me water. By the end of that calendar 
year – easily the worst year of my life to date, and certainly my closest brush 
with the kind of oppression that society usually metes out to those on its furthest 
margins—I would be gaunt and skeletal as a stray dog; so petrified, fragile and 
shell-shocked that I would spend afternoons hidden away in the toilets, lying with 
my head on my hands and listening to the water drip into the septic tank; and 
touched, for the first time in my life, with a kind of existential sadness that has 
never quite left me, a sense that something was fundamentally out-of-kilter both 
with myself and the larger world, and that whatever this thing was, it wouldn’t be 
easy to restore to balance again or put right.

These memories are hard to summon up in the daylight. They lurk, somewhere 
in the shadows of my mind, as much a part of me as the freckles on my arms or 
the oval-shaped birthmark on my left thigh, but in some mysterious way they also 
seem separate from me, disassociated film clippings of things that happened to 
someone else. On rose-tinted South Florida mornings, when I drive to the private 
high school where I teach, and I see the tranquil school buildings surrounded by 
the banyans and poinsettias, the lawns and sports fields and neat little wooden 
benches where the students sit at break and eat their sandwiches, the thought that 
crosses my mind is: None of that was real. All of that porn-flick, Abu Ghraib-style 
stuff was just a bad dream.

In my daily sequence of high school English classes, there is little to remind me 
of my past. At this school, which is attended mostly by the ultra-wealthy sons and 
daughters of investment bankers and mogul land developers, a strict anti-bullying 
policy makes even the slightest suggestion of physical violence or intimidation 
punishable by detention, suspension, or expulsion. All over campus, rectangular 
brass and steel plaques remind students of their contractual obligation to report 
all instances of hostile teasing to the administration. According to my tenth and 
eleventh graders, students here settle their differences either through conversation 
or through threats, humorous or actual, to contact their fathers’ hot-shot lawyers. 
“If one student really bullied another here, there’d be a lawsuit before you could 
dial 911,” they tell me, and I believe them, these fresh-faced, optimistic ruling-class 
denizens of the world’s richest and most powerful country.

There are times, watching my students, that I pity them for living such sheltered 
lives. The gleaming SUVs bringing them to school seem obscenely far from the 
barefoot African children who trudged to school near where I grew up. (“Don’t 
forget how much harder the black people have it,” the teachers said whenever 
we complained about our own rough boarding school, and of course, in a sense 

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they were right). The case management meetings called for every flunked test 
or irritable outburst by a student in Math class, where a thoughtful, sympathetic 
school counselor suggests anger management strategies or procrastination-beating 
mental tricks—these seem from a different universe than our mock hangings in 
school bathrooms, where once my friend Andre involuntarily stained the wood of 
an improvised gallows with his urine. (“Disgusting! Phew!” said the seniors when 
he did this, and they, too, were in a sense correct). 

I look at my American students in their polo shirts, wedged between their 
counselors, homeroom advisors, parents, teachers, and administrators, and I think: 
I’m happy you’re so spoiled, even though you don’t have a clue.

But then, after the school day, superciliousness gives way to envy—a blind rage 
at them and their lucky country, accompanying me on the I-95 highway past the 
billboards and the palm trees. This, in turn, later decomposes in its constituent 
elements: a naked pain as I sit in front of the television, and unadulterated 
abandonment plaguing me as I try to do my grading. A hole throbbing in my chest, 
right above my diaphragm. A cold terror in my hands, spreading over my body.

And I ask myself yet again: why was there no one? Why did no teacher take 
the trouble to notice what was happening, all of those years ago, in bathrooms 
with doors left unlocked and open, in dormitories with glass windows open to the 
clouds and birds? Why did no one snap Abu Ghraib-style pictures of our grinning 
and jaunty tormentors—cause a local scandal? At that year’s final honors assembly, 
when John received the award for community service and moral leadership for 
making sandwiches for the neighboring old age home – everyone in the audience 
rising to applaud, John standing in the amber-colored spotlight, smiling his aw-
shucks grin, holding up his trophy for the school photographer—why did no one 
heckle him from the back rows?

A memory: late afternoon, perhaps a week or so after the beating in the shower 
room. The sun is a luminous blood-red, the color of the hostel bricks. I stand at a 
wooden door, the entrance to the apartment of the teacher-on-duty. The teacher 
answers it, a ruddy-faced man with ginger hair and thick, stocky arms full of 
blonde hairs. I try to explain to him that John has been beating me several times 
a day ever since I arrived, for everything from walking past an empty Coke bottle 
left on the landing to not folding the corners of my bed hospital-style. In my 
mouth these jumbled complaints transmute into a mangled story about how I need 
to cover my textbooks and John won’t let me do this during study hall because he 
wants all the Standard Sixes to go to a dance the next evening. Sometime during 
this jeremiad I begin to sob and ask if I can call my parents from his phone. The 
teacher touches me on the arm, firmly but not unkindly.

“You tell John I say he needs to let you cover your textbooks,” he says. “Be 
strong now. You’ll be OK, I promise you.” Why does he never mention this 
incident to me again?

Or here is another one: another late afternoon, just before sunset, the quality 
of light heavy-red and golden. I am in my parents’ car driving back to the game 
reserve, the first weekend I have been permitted to go back home—along with the 
other boarders, I am required to stay in the hostel and cheer at sports events when 
the school is playing one of our neighbors. I have contacted my parents several 

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times since the abuse began, mostly from my aunt’s office in the newsroom of a 
community newspaper across the street: I have been stealing away, unseen, after 
lunch, and spending entire afternoons sitting on piles of phone books and stacks 
of returned tabloids. My father shifts the vehicle into third gear to go up a hill. 
Then he sighs, a sigh deeper than any I have heard him issue before, a moan that 
seems pregnant with a grief that is far beyond my twelve-year-old comprehension.

“The thing is, it’s not true, Glen,” he says. “I know it isn’t. You’re not a sissy or 
a nancy boy, or another of the other things they’re calling you. This is what makes 
this all so unfair.” Perhaps the tremble that starts on his lip also indicates that he is 
angry with them; his shoulders and neck tense up. Is he also annoyed at me? 

He says: “Some of these young guys just act like walking penises.” I don’t 
understand what he means. He says: “This does happen to everyone, you know.” 
He never, to my recollection, articulates the sentiment that in retrospect I so long 
to hear from him, the words that will touch my inner ache: The fact that this is 
happening is a moral abomination, and I will do everything, I mean everything, 
my son, to protect you from it.

Or here, at last, is the most painful memory. It is late one afternoon at school—
I think the afternoon after John made me lie under a pile of blankets. Somehow 
I have made my way to the top of the school, to the fourth storey of the building 
we called the East Wing, with the view over rolling green hills covered with 
citrus orchards and the ribbon of tarred road leading to Johannesburg. I can see 
the little toy houses where my grandparents live, on an orange farm ten minutes’ 
drive away: these are the grandparents whom I have begged my parents to let me 
live with, but they have refused. I lean over the railing, the top half of my body 
precipitously hanging above the hard ground. Death’s release exerts a strong 
attraction. I pray: “Please, if I jump now, Lord Jesus, send your angels and carry 
me over there, to Granny and Grandpa, and make it so that I don’t have to come 
back here.”

But there are no angels, at least none that I believe in enough to risk my fate. I 
do not jump. 

A significant part of my adult life has been spent trying to come to terms with 
these experiences. “I am a survivor of torture,” I have said to myself, by way 
of trying to force myself to take my own victimization seriously. But the words 
survivor and torture stick in the throat like fruit pits; they clang hollow and untrue, 
sound to me like self-pity and dramatization. I long to spit them away from me 
– even though, reading through the incidents listed in reports by Human Rights 
Watch and Amnesty International it is hard to see how the actions of John and his 
friends back in 1983 could not at some level have qualified as war crimes. 

Denial is complex and multi-faceted, universal, pernicious. To confront it 
means not just to challenge the multiple lies and half-truths embedded in the 
self, but also to face loved ones and personal anchors, family and friends, the 
communities that provide structure and identity. 

Until age twenty-four, when I first arrived in New York City as an immigrant 
and expatriate, I truly had no idea there was even anything strange in the story 

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of my early adolescence. All of my life I had simply thought of myself as unlucky 
for having been hit “harder” than the average Standard Six, because of being 
visibly homosexual. Being stripped naked, though, and forced to enter a pillow 
slip lined with menthol muscle relaxant; being punched and clobbered and called 
names; dealing with jokes and high jinks, a little telephone-crank “cock-shock” 
machine here and some humorous armpit hair-burning over there: all of this I took 
for granted as a regular part of growing up. When, after three months of John’s 
depredations, my parents managed to persuade the school authorities to transfer 
him to another passage—an action they took without telling me, for fear I would 
give away the secret and become more of a target—the abuses continued, albeit 
at a reduced intensity, and in fact they persisted throughout high school. My father 
was not wrong in telling me these things happened to “everyone.” A 2001 report 
of the South African Human Rights Commission, authorized by the new democratic 
parliament, found that such abuses were widespread and accepted in schools 
“within an institutional culture of authoritarianism and bullying.”1

It took several years and the utterly anguished, horrified expressions on the 
faces of friends of several different nationalities—American, Swiss, Spanish, 
Brazilian and Chinese—for me to realize that, say, having one’s head shoved in a 
tiny wooden mailbox while being caned with a three-foot hockey stick was not a 
universal coming-of-age ritual. Even then, I was reluctant to acknowledge that my 
childhood wasn’t “normal,” “happy” and “safe.” It is no exaggeration to state that 
it is those moments sitting around in Brooklyn brownstone apartments watching 
faces crumple into utter bewilderment at the descriptions of my childhood and 
adolescence that I felt the first serious stirrings to provide a fiction and nonfiction 
of witness; to share with the wider world my story and its implications. 

In talking to my family over the years, and in sharing my published memoirs 
and personal essays, it has been hard to share this newfound international 
perspective. My parents tend to be sympathetic, yet guarded. “We did the best 
we can,” says my father. “In those days, that’s the way things were done.” It is all 
but impossible to communicate frankly with my former teachers who still live and 
work in the town where I grew up. Recently, when I suggested to one of my old 
Math instructors that school discipline may have been cruel in the old days, she 
proceeded to regale me with a diatribe about how, under democracy, academic 
standards have collapsed and the blacks have brought drugs, laziness, and knife 
fights into previous citadels of order. “Yours was the last generation,” she tells me, 
“to be educated in safety.”

At the political level, the denial of the abuse of young white male 
preadolescents under apartheid is a glaring absence in the national discourse 
about reconciliation, healing, and the building of the so-called “rainbow nation.” 
Existing narratives of the apartheid era rely heavily on notions of white aggression 
and black victimhood. To some extent feminists have succeeded in adding to 
the mix concepts of male belligerence and female injury. Entirely missing from 
this world view is any sense of white males themselves as dual victims and 
perpetrators, stuck in a perverse, topsy-turvy karma of oppression—not being 
subjected to the ills that they inflicted on others, as in the Hindu cosmology, but 

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rather treating others they way they were once treated, and thus perpetuating the 
cycle ad nauseum.

And yet in the universe of apartheid, this is exactly what happened. At 
countless institutions like my boarding school, spread across the African veld like 
red-brick blisters, boys without hair on their bodies became, for a time, honorary 
black South Africans. As the years went by, these boys, with all the verve of 
understudies stepping into stage roles, went on to bully the juniors under them, 
shouting orders to polish shoes or make beds, walloping them in the kidneys 
when they took too long to bring back Coca-cola from the corner store. When 
the time came for these seventeen-year-olds to be conscripted into the South 
African Defence Force, the roles flipped once more. This time, they were made 
to do push-ups over mud puddles until their arms collapsed, or run miles with 
backpacks on their shoulders, or perhaps even have sexual intercourse with 
female prostitutes to prove their masculinity. According to at least one post-
apartheid human rights study, if they showed signs of gentleness or effeminacy 
they were made to endure punishments including electric shock treatment and 
having their genitalia rubbed with shoe polish and inspected by whole platoons.2

In white male South African society, the final step on this ladder of suffering 
and oppression was to become a soldier or officer entrusted with the task of 
maintaining white supremacy. According to the report of Desmond Tutu’s Truth 
and Reconciliation Commission, here there were few limits on the exercise of 
brute power. Herero and Ovambo women on the Namibian border were beaten 
and gang-raped. Captured guerilla fighters got fried alive on the engines of 
armored cars. At the higher levels of military command, white men who looked 
and spoke just like John and his friends gave orders for the engineering of civil 
wars and famines that would claim millions of lives. Like so many mad Kurtzes, 
many white men seemed to lose all sense of themselves in those days, to become 
intoxicated with power and cruelty, and to have no qualms about destroying 
individuals, families, and nations. By time it all came to an end, the damage 
done, both to South Africa and its neighbors—the child soldiers with their legs 
blown up, the families left abandoned and destitute—simply beggared the human 
imagination. 

Perhaps I was either too gentle or too tough a soul to succumb to the karma of 
violence. Perhaps it was simply that as a gay man I was a natural misfit in my 
own society, with no hope, under apartheid, of ever being comfortable in the 
laager, the circle of wagons drawn against indigenous Africans. Perhaps, back in 
those humid summer days when John was standing over my bed, with his smell 
of Clearasil facewash and his ironed black boxer shorts, trying to plant in me the 
spiritual kernel of what he was—perhaps on one of those, another seed managed 
to blow into my soul, much as, even on the hottest afternoons in the dormitory, a 
breath of honeysuckle would come in through the open windows. Grace, divine 
or otherwise, is inevitably mysterious. 

When I myself reached Standard Ten, I never participated in the torture of the 
younger boys. I never punched them full-force in the chest or struck them with 

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canes and athletics spikes; I never seized them, thrust them up into corners, and 
threatened to bash out all the teeth in their mouths. But I cannot claim to be a 
hero. I never reported or spoke out against any abuse or bullying. I never looked 
at the juniors while they were being tormented, never offered them as much 
as a commiserating shake of the head. On one occasion, so as not to appear a 
weakling in front of my peers, I did make a Standard Seven in my passage bend 
over for being disrespectful to me, and I hit him as hard as I could with a cricket 
bat, until he begged me to stop. I remember that when I was done I threw up in 
the passage toilets.

I never joined the South African Defence Force. At age nineteen, a student 
at the University of Cape Town, I joined the End Conscription Campaign and 
declared that I was a conscientious objector, that I would not fight for white 
supremacy. Along with many thousands of white men of my generation, I decided 
simply to ignore the call-up papers, not to show up at one of those train or bus 
stations where we were supposed to shave our heads, heave our duffel bags onto 
our shoulders, and be transformed into killers. The penalties for refusing military 
service were six years’ prison, if they caught you. By that time, though, the laws 
had become virtually unenforceable.

I have said that the karma of violence was repetitious and unchanging, but that 
is not strictly true. By the time I reached matric, the so-called initiation rituals in my 
school were already markedly reduced in intensity, and soon after that, under the 
leadership of a new school principal, they were forbidden. After the transition to 
democracy in 1994, all forms of corporal punishment and bullying were outlawed. 
The rest of the story of the South African transformation is well-known. Today, the 
liveliest wars fought are on the soccer fields, cricket pitches, and rugby stadiums.

As I write these words, summer has once again descended on Miami. Days 
so scalding that when I leave the air conditioning it feels like I have stepped 
into a furnace give way to cool, fresh evenings lit up by thunderstorms. The 
poinciana trees are all in red, fiery bloom; my students are on summer vacation. 
Before leaving, one of my favorite students, who plans to one day become a 
memoirist herself, ran up to me early one morning and told me that she had not 
only managed, with the help of a peer counselor, to defuse a bullying situation 
between an older boy and a younger one, but that she had joined the local 
Amnesty International club, and would be working next year to secure the release 
of political prisoners in Guantanamo, Havana, Mexico, and the Middle East. She 
was so exuberant and happy; her arms wheeled as she talked about going to 
Washington, D.C.; her mouth opened wide as she laughed about the fun she was 
going to have in Chiapas. You, too, I thought, are going to be a witness. And this 
time, instead of provoking jealousy, her open, innocent face, so full of youthful 
happiness, gave me hope.

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NOTES

An earlier version of “The Karma of Violence” appeared in Hotel Amerika.

1. See South African Human Rights Commission 2001. 
2. For examples of such violations within the SADF, see Van Zyl, Mikki,  

et al. 1999.

WORKS CITED

South African Human Rights Commission. 2001. Report into Initiation Practices 
at Educational Institutions and a Preliminary Report on Cultural Initiations. 
Cape Town: SAHRC, October.

Van Zyl, Mikki, et al. 1999. The Aversion Project: Human rights abuses of gays and 
lesbians in the SADF by health workers during the apartheid era. Simply Said 
and Done: Cape Town.

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