Published on the Facebook page of the South African Psychoanalytic Confederation (SAPC) in February 2020.

The tragic death of 13-year-old Enock Mpianzi at the Nyati Bush and Riverbreak Lodge (in Afrikaans Nyati Bos en Rivier Wegbreek; Nyati Bush and River Breakaway if translated literally) near Brits on 15 January 2020 highlights the need for a drastic overhaul of what South African schools call “orientation” and what at times seems to be a form of an almost primordial initiation or rather forceful “breaking in” of young adolescents into new school roles (in this instance on entering high school).

Ironically, Enock got into trouble at a time when a psychologist who was present at the camp was conducting a session with learner leaders in which he was explaining the damaging effects of using hazing in orientation (Daily Maverick, 27 January 2020). Hazing or initiation takes many forms, from more subtle to violent, and is aimed at teaching newbies their place in a school or university hierarchy. Often it takes the form of put downs, humiliation and tests of emotional and physical strength.

Not enough is known about what Parktown Boys High School’s teacher-body at the camp was doing at the time. We just know that two of them were reported to have been playing a game. News media reported that seven camp facilitators were part of building a stretcher-raft exercise which exposed the almost 200 Parktown Boys learners to a rapidly-flowing, swollen Crocodile River. No life jackets were made available to those who partook in a risky, staged rescue mission with their makeshift stretcher-rafts.

The website of the lodge refers to the founder of the camp, former primary school principal Anton Knoetze, and state that he is also known as Oom Buffel (Uncle Buffalo; Nyati, according to the lodge information, means buffalo; and, according to information Googled it is a Swahili word for water buffalo). In Afrikaans a human being who is a “buffel” is a very rude person who cannot take anybody else into account. Paradoxically, harsh sounding nicknames such as this one are often softened into an endearment. At the time of Enock’s death, the “riverbreak” camp was in the hands of Oom Buffel’s son who carries the same names. Anton Knoetze Jr described the death as an accident and then stopped talking to the news media. The camp now communicates through a lawyer.

“After 23 years a flood in 2000 and a major veld fire in 2015 Nyati is still going strong,” a no-commas-used sentence in Nyati’s About Us website section reads. The list of reported adversities the camp had to face in its time omits mention of the other four children who lost their lives in water activities at the camp since 2009 (News24, 27 January 2020), children “broken” by the river or swimming pool at what should have been a well-supervised retreat.

As I’m writing this, there’s a book next to me which bears the title, From Social Silence To Social Science. It outlines how HIV/Aids, same sex sexuality and gender came into public awareness through the efforts of public health experts. Is it not time that practices of initiation – which lead to death at times – get the same attention?

Secrecy and silence dominated at the camp and at Parktown Boys after Enock’s unfortunate death. Thankfully, Radio 702 presenter Eusebius McKaiser assisted a learner who looked on while Enock struggled in the water to anonymously bring to light his eyewitness account to the families involved and the public.

The learner spoke of how his attempts to alert facilitators and educators to Enock’s plight fell on deaf ears, as if they were “hazing” him by ignoring him, perhaps not taking him seriously to put him down or humiliate him as part of the “hazing” experience.

Writing in the Mail and Guardian dated 24 to 30 January 2020 McKaiser comments on what it was like to be in a predominantly white high school while he was growing up. He pleads for the abandoning of traditions that no longer serve a purpose and are “dead wood”:

We did cadets every week. That was a chance for some overzealous older students to do drills with us on the school field, shouting at us as if we were in the army … We did not respect these older students. We feared them. The difference is all too often lost on us, including by adults who have “fond memories” of how such activities taught them “resilience”… these activities – and many of the excursions we went on – were simply part of a long tradition of preparing white kids to be conscripted into the army, and to slot into the world as militant, assertive, masculine “leaders”. The hidden curriculum was one infused with toxic patriarchal values and regressive politics that connected with the old apartheid state’s inherent addiction to various kinds of violence (p. 19).

Secrecy and silence also dominated in the 788 deaths of initiates undergoing circumcision in the Eastern Cape since 2006, City Press editor Mondli Makhanya wrote on 30 January 2020. (At the same time 317 boys had their private parts amputated as a result of botched circumcisions.)

These deaths which also have the whiff of a serial killing or mass murdering of our youth about them requires the same close scrutiny the HIV/Aids pandemic had and continues to have. Public and private health experts alike need to get to the bottom of why the old and clearly outdated patriarchies in South Africa – in all of our cultures – are going awry without challenge, without the dead wood thrown out.

Dispensing with the lives of initiates in the pursuit of culture and traditions is such a complex issue. The traditions withstand scrutiny and the deaths take place without justice. How do we talk about all of this without colluding or colonising? Without disrespecting ancient traditions and practices?

Writing in Baba, Men and Fatherhood in South Africa (2006), progressive faith leader and now independent consultant Desmond Lesejane says (p. 179):

The current problem is that ‘African patriarchy’ has become distorted and new patriarchy without obligations or reciprocity has emerged. It gives men power but imposes few duties. The constraints on men, as well as the support and censure system, have disappeared.

In her book, For your own good (1983), the psychoanalyst Alice Miller describes what she terms “toxic pedagogy”: meting out cruelty to and hurting children in all kinds of ways and claiming it is for their own good as if this is the way to build character.

Adolescence is a time of such vulnerability and flux for most young people. Too often in society their feared potential wildness provokes attempts to keep them in their place, to hold them down. In the different patriarchal systems in South Africa death seems an outcome much too often.

In a Daily Maverick article on Friday, 24 January 2020, mention is made of how Parktown Boys had stopped their Grade 8 camp after a former water polo coach was convicted and jailed for 23 years for sexually and physically assaulting boys at the school. Apparently a subsequent investigation by a law firm also found predatory sexual approaches by older learners to new school entrants during orientation/initiation.

It makes one wonder whether the school’s overly macho stance at the camp – executed by Nyati’s facilitators – was a manic attempt to snuff out any potential homosexual activity or tendencies (as raised in the above mentioned report).

As mental health professionals we have the responsibility to speak out against all forms of violence against groups in our society and this includes practices that violate boys and may cause them to identify with the aggressor and continue the senseless violence meted out against others when they become adults.

How come five children die at a camp over a period of 11 years, a camp that is supposed to initiate youth in the right of passage to adulthood? How come young men keep getting killed and mutilated in initiation ceremonies in the Eastern Cape and elsewhere? When do South African people, including women and men, come together to address the perversion of cultural practices that continue unabated to mutilate and murder the young in all communities but, more especially, as in this case, vulnerable, young black boys and girls.

* Thanks to Siobhan Carter-Brown, Carin-Lee Masters and Jonathan Percale for your generous inputs.

Blaming and punishing instead of guiding and helping sexually active adolescents is an ages old victimising custom which lets parents, other caregivers, family and broader society off the hook. This custom contributes to the continuing denial of infantile and childhood sexuality which needs to be nurtured and protected rather than acted on and awakened too early by adult carers.

Toddlers and young children need appropriate information at all ages about sexual matters in order to develop into adolescents who start experimenting with relationships, so that they can become adults who lead healthy lives which are also sexually fulfilling. From young, children need careful and mindful assistance as they get to know their own bodies. Children also need to learn touching themselves in a sexual way is fine but needs to happen in private.

Apart from loving and thoughtful care by family, parents and other adult carers, children may view all forms of inappropriate touching or play by adults or other children with a healthy suspicion. All children need to be enabled to say no to such emotional or bodily intrusion from the moment that they can indicate their non-consent. Adult carers need to become much more attuned to babies’ healthy ability to say no when being passed on to hands that feel unsafe. Instead of extinguishing this response, they need to affirm it so it becomes entrenched.

Once children feel in control of their sexuality they can grow into adolescents who are informed about their experimentation and sexual choices. Informed and protected adolescents will in most instances be able to protect themselves against inappropriate advances from others or going too far against their will with a peer.

The father of modern day psychology, Sigmund Freud, evoked strong reactions in the 1900s when he revealed that children are sexual and need their adult carers to protect rather than prematurely awaken their sexuality. Despite many advances in the field of reproductive health since then and especially in the last 50 years, society’s denial of children’s sexuality is still broadly in place. Today parents still do not discuss sexual issues with their children. Nor do they give them information about puberty and adolescence and the tumultuous changes that will occur in their minds and bodies as they mature. Inappropriate sexual handling of babies and children, which can result in premature sexual activity in adolescents, still remains rife today because it is hidden.

Children’s open interest in sexuality changes and retreats into privacy when they enter primary school. At this stage, older children begin to prefer to stick to friendships with children of their own gender. At puberty boys and girls (who generally mature before boys of the same age) become curious about touching, feeling and kissing a girl or boy they are attracted to. Sometimes these encounters result in having sex, especially when children are not consciously aware of their growing sexual interest or when a culture of mutual consent is not inculcated. Very often young adolescents who become sexually active have been sexualised before when they were not ready to be sexually active. They battle to fight their very strong sexual urges to be sexually active partly because of the intensity of their physical impulse, also because they confuse physical attentions with love and care.

Instead of trying to understand why adolescents become sexually active prematurely society behaves punitively towards them, as if young people should have known better, as if their bodies do not belong to themselves and they therefore do not deserve to be informed about them, as if they should not repeat patterns laid down unconsciously by their parents and grandparents and the other generations that preceded them.

Many an adult woman can today still remember how the arrival of her first period was greeted with great suspicion, how it was equated with sexual activity. Yesterday’s adolescents at times also share how they were humiliated requesting contraception. It’s public knowledge that many adolescents die and are damaged in risky traditional initiation ceremonies. All of which point to the existence of punitive, even unconsciously murderous, practices that persist and hurt adolescents.

Instead of rigidifying the victimisation of adolescents into law society needs broad educational programmes for all adult carers of children and adolescents that can help them guide and protect their charges. These programmes also need to focus on individual psychology because we will not achieve the needed change if there is no examination of how individuals’ sexuality is shaped both consciously and unconsciously.

A focus on the psychology of the individual will also help foster a broad understanding of how sexual coercion and violence come about – that those who coerce and abuse also experienced coercion and abuse at some, often early, point in their lives and that they are perpetuating patterns that will be transmitted from one generation to the next. These patterns can only be changed if both victims and offenders are helped to understand how their behaviours came about.

We should all contribute to bring about a broad, multidisciplinary approach aimed at guiding, protecting and cherishing adolescent sexuality which ensures the survival of humankind.

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*First published on the Psychoanalytic Voice, the official public mouthpiece for the South African Psychoanalytic Confederation (SAPC).