The Sovereign and the Powder

The first memory is not a story; it is a study in contrasts.

It is the smell of lavender and face powder fighting against the sharp, metallic scent of brass polish and starch. It is the soft silence of a bedroom colliding with the heavy thud of military boots in the hallway.

It is the beginning of the war between who I was and who I was commanded to be.

I was three years old, clutching a teddy bear by the arm, running down the hallway toward my parents’ bedroom. It was a Saturday evening in the early 1980s. Outside our walls, South Africa was at war with its own people; in the townships, Black children my age were growing up in the shadow of police raids and armored vehicles.

But inside our white, suburban home, the air was still. It was an unnatural quiet, a safety purchased by the violence of the state my father served, the unearned peace guaranteed to us simply because of the color of our skin.

I ran because I knew what was waiting for me at the end of that hallway. I found a patch of carpet near the vanity and sat cross-legged, mesmerized.

My mother sat before the mirror, wearing her dressing gown. To a child whom the world saw as a boy, this wasn’t just a grooming ritual; it was an act of alchemy. I watched every brushstroke of powder, every application of color to her lips. I watched as she transformed, softening the edges of her face.

In that pool of warm light, my gender felt fluid, like something you could paint onto yourself to reveal the truth underneath.

But the room was shared, split down the middle like the world outside.

Behind me, looming tall and terrifying in the mirror’s reflection, my father stood buttoning his official military evening tuxedo. He was an officer in the Prison Service. He spent his days training young men to enforce the will of Apartheid. He was the towering avatar of Patriarchy; in our house, his word was not just a rule, it was law.

If my mother were the cosmetics, he was the Colonel. In apartheid South Africa, titles mattered. They moved through doors that stayed closed to others. At home, the title did something else: it replaced tenderness with hierarchy. For most of my life, I knew him as the Colonel, not because I was confused about rank, but because that’s how he lived in our house.

While she applied softness, he applied armor. I watched him fasten the buttons of his tunic, trapping himself inside the uniform of the state. He didn’t look in the mirror to find himself; he looked to inspect himself. He was checking for flaws, for weakness, for anything that didn’t align with the regulation.

He was also a man of deep Calvinism, a faith of order, discipline, and the absolute authority of the father. To him, I was just another recruit who needed to be inspected.

He interrupted my dream. “Dawie, have you packed your toys? We are dropping you off at Grandma’s in a few minutes. Go grab your things.”

The sadness hit me instantly. I didn’t want to leave the soft world of the mirror, the only place where I felt real. I hesitated. I looked at my mother, hoping she would intervene. But in the hierarchy of our home, the Colonel outranked the Mother. She continued applying her mascara. Her silence was not just consent; it was survival. She, too, lived under his regime.

My hesitation was a mistake. In the military logic of my father’s mind, hesitation was insubordination.

His voice rose, sharp as a whip crack. “Son, I’m only going to ask you once.”

He was enforcing the only law he knew: the law of the body. He looked at me, saw a boy, and commanded the soul to match. There was no room for error. Any deviation was a threat to the order he protected.

I stood up, clutching my teddy bear tighter. In that moment, standing between the woman I wanted to be and the man I was terrified of, I learned the first rule of the binary: feelings are a weakness, and compliance is survival.

I walked out of the room, my head down. I had been given an order, and like a good soldier, I obeyed.

To understand the silence that defined my childhood, you must understand the intersection of powers I was born into. Growing up in the 1980s, the family was a factory for producing compliant citizens. My father demanded loyalty, obedience, and silence.

I was a quiet child. I learned early that in a world dominated by men who demanded “respect” through the threat of violence, a child’s duty was to be invisible. I had no friends. My only social circle consisted of my cousins. The gender segregation was immediate and brutal. The girls would try to “play doll” with me because I was the youngest, a game I secretly loved but publicly resisted to avoid scrutiny.

The boys, however, were enforcers of the hard, masculine ideal. Every visit ended in a wrestling match or a chokehold. I would end up crying, physically overpowered, only to hear my father’s mantra: “Man up. Grow up.”

He wasn’t just telling me to stop crying. He was enforcing a colonial standard of masculinity. Just as the state used violence to “civilize” indigenous populations, my father used fear to beat the “feminine” weakness out of his son. He was trying to construct a man out of a girl.

I was not entirely alone. I had my teddy bears, twelve of them stacked around my bed like a soft barricade. And I had a ghost.

I was four or five when I learned about my brother. He had died of blood cancer at six years old, seven years before I was born. In those days, doctors viewed grief as a defect to be fixed, telling my parents the only way to recover was to repair the family unit by having another child.

I was a “replacement child.” I was born with a job description. My purpose was to heal my mother’s grief, to fill the silence left by the dead. This knowledge sat heavily on me. I felt I had to be perfect to justify my existence. I had to be the son they lost. But I wasn’t him. I was me, and “me” felt wrong.

Since I didn’t feel safe talking to the living, who demanded I be a rugged boy; I began talking to the dead. My “imaginary” brother became my confessor. I remember lying under blankets in the backseat of our car, whispering to him. It was the first time I whispered the truth: I feel different.

Talking to him was my first act of resistance. In a system that demanded total surveillance and compliance, creating a secret inner world was an act of reclaiming my soul.

The Enforcement of the Binary

The shift from the soft world of the mirror to the hard reality of my father’s authority was usually signaled by a voice. But this time, it was signaled by a violation of a border I didn’t know existed.

I don’t remember the specific infraction. In authoritarian structures, the specific rule broken is less important than the assertion of power. But looking back, through the lens of the adult I am now, I know what I did. I had likely lingered too long in the softness. I had likely moved my hands with a grace that belonged to my mother, or pitched my voice too high, or perhaps I had simply been caught gazing at the forbidden world of femininity with too much longing.

I had acted too femininely. To the Colonel in the Prison Service, this was not a childhood phase. It was a defect in the recruit. It was a threat to the standard.

His face was bright red with anger. He screamed at me to go to my room. I walked down the hallway, my legs heavy with dread. I knew the ritual of discipline in our house. Usually, he used the “strap”, a thick piece of leather, 300mm long and 80mm wide, attached to a wooden handle. It was a tool of the trade, designed by the state to inflict maximum pain without breaking bones. It was the instrument of the prison.

But that day, the transgression was too personal for the strap. That day, he used his hands.

He entered my room, sucking the air out of the space. He told me to bend over the bed. I was four years old. My heart hammered against my ribs like a trapped bird.

The first blow landed, and the pain was absolute. It wasn’t just physical; it was a violation of the sanctuary I tried to build in my room. My crying turned into screaming. I begged him to stop.

“You know what you did! I will stop once you stop crying. Take your punishment like a man!”

Take it like a man.

It was a command to disconnect the self from the body. It taught me that to be male is to be unfeeling, to treat one’s own pain as an enemy to be conquered. With every stroke, I wished for death. His hand pushed me into the mattress, suffocating my screams.

This was not discipline. It was a border war fought on the geography of my back. Just as the colonial state used violence to “civilize” indigenous populations and erase their cultures, my father used violence to beat the “feminine” weakness out of his son. He was enforcing the borders of gender with the same fervor he expected his recruits to protect the country’s borders. He was terrified that the moffie, the traitor to masculinity, was taking root in his house, and he was trying to kill it.

The pain was too much for a child’s nervous system to process. My brain did the only thing it could to survive: it shut down. It was an involuntary act of resistance. If he demanded I “take it like a man,” my body refused to take it at all.

I retreated into the dark where he could not follow. I passed out.

When I woke, the house was quiet. After that day, he never hit me with his hands again. I think he realized he had gone too far, that he had nearly broken the vessel he was trying to mold.

But the lesson was learned. The system, the patriarchy, the binary, the state, was stronger than I was. I realized then that if I wanted to survive, I would have to hide Juanita deep inside a fortress of silence. I became a master of the double life. I learned to mimic the movements of boys, to roughen my voice, to suppress the urge to be soft. I entered a state of internal exile.

This was the true beginning of my metamorphosis, not a beautiful unfolding, but a hardening. A protective shell built layer by layer to keep the soft creature inside alive until it was safe to emerge.