The School of Enforced Norms

The lesson I learned in the hospital, that my body was public property, was perfected in the classroom.

In 1985, attending a white primary school in South Africa was not about education in the liberatory sense; it was an induction into the factory. The school, much like the prison service my father commanded, existed to replicate the hierarchies of the society it served. It smelled of chalk dust, floor polish, and fear. The ringing of the bell was not a suggestion; it was a command that moved hundreds of small bodies in synchronization.

I didn’t cry on the first day like the other children. I was used to being alone. I was used to navigating rigid structures. But I wasn’t prepared for the specific cruelty of my Grade 1 teacher.

She was a woman of sharp angles and terrifying authority. In her class, I was labeled “slow.” I struggled to color within the lines, a metaphorical failure that she treated as a moral one. In a regimen that valued uniformity above all else, my inability to conform was an offense.

One day, biological necessity clashed with institutional authority. I raised my hand, terrified.

“Ma’am, I need to use the toilet.”

She glared at me over her glasses. The class giggled, the sound of the collective enforcing the norm.

“You just had a break,” she snapped. “You can hold it.”

This was politics enacted on a child’s bladder. By denying me the right to urinate, the teacher was claiming sovereignty over my body. She was asserting that the school’s schedule superseded my biological reality.

I went back to my coloring, squeezing my legs together. The pressure built until it became physical pain. It was a repetition of the hospital trauma: the adults deciding when and how my body was allowed to function.

I raised my hand again. “Ma’am, please. I need to go now.”

“No. Finish your assignment.”

The logic was absolute: production before humanity. The assignment, coloring in a picture, was valued more than my physical distress. I stood in line at her desk, my unfinished paper in hand, my body trembling.

She stood up, a tower of rage, screaming at me for being a terrible student.

And then, the warm rush.

I couldn’t stop it. Urine ran down my legs, soaking my grey school socks, pooling on the floor.

The shame was absolute. I stood there, a six-year-old boy broken by the authority figure, crying while the class laughed. It was a public execution of my dignity. I learned then that the adults in charge were not there to protect us; they were there to break us until we fit their schedule.

While the teacher yelled for me to get out, a cleaner arrived with a mop. She was an older Black woman, invisible in the hierarchy of the school. As she wiped up the puddle, she looked at me. She didn’t laugh. She didn’t scold. She just gave me a quick, soft look of sorrow, a fleeting acknowledgment that I was a child in pain, not a problem to be erased.

It was a tiny kindness, but it made the teacher’s cruelty feel even sharper.

The Portal

But amidst this trauma, there was a flicker of something else, a moment of accidental freedom found in the Survival Wing.

The school put on a play: Rapunzel. While the other boys groaned about being forced into costumes, I felt a secret thrill. I was cast as a bunny in the woods. The costume involved yellow tights.

For the boys in my class, the tights were a source of humiliation. They were reacting to the cultural mandate that men must reject the feminine to be valid. For them, the tights were a downgrade.

For me, they were a portal.

I couldn’t wait to put them on. The moment the fabric touched my skin, the anxiety that constantly hummed beneath my surface went quiet. I loved the transformation. I loved the makeup. For a few hours during rehearsals, I wasn’t Dawie the slow kid, or the Colonel’s disappointed son. I was a creature of the woods.

I didn’t have the language for it then, but I felt a profound sense of alignment. My external presentation finally matched the softness I felt inside. For the first time, I possessed visual sovereignty. I controlled the image I presented to the world. I wasn’t the boy who wet his pants; I was something beautiful.

I begged to keep the costume after the play ended. The teachers, baffled by a boy who wanted tights, let me take them.

That afternoon, alone in my room, I put on the yellow tights. I didn’t play “war” or “rugby.” I played at being soft.

One afternoon, disaster struck. I snagged the tights while playing, tearing a massive hole in the fabric. I ran to my room, curled into a ball, and wept. It wasn’t just a piece of clothing; it was my second skin.

My mother found me. She saw the torn yellow fabric and the devastation on my face. In a moment of quiet grace, a crack in the patriarchal wall; she didn’t scold me. She took my hand, led me to her bedroom, opened her drawer, and handed me a pair of her own pantyhose.

“Here,” she said.

She didn’t ask why. She just filled the need. It was a silent conspiracy, a small act of mutual aid in a house ruled by law.

The reprieve didn’t last. The classroom remained a site of violence. Because I struggled academically, the teacher used the ruler not just as a measuring tool, but as a weapon. She would hit me across the knuckles when I failed.

One day, she struck me with such force that the ruler shattered on impact.

I went home with red, swollen hands. My mother saw them. For the first time, the two systems of authority in my life, the School and the Father, clashed.

My father went to the school the next day. He was a man who believed in discipline, yes, but he was also the Colonel. He understood hierarchy. And in his mind, the teacher had damaged his property.

He didn’t intervene because he was against violence; he used violence on me himself. He intervened because he claimed the exclusive right to discipline his son.

My safety in that moment was purchased by privilege. Because my father was a white man of high rank in the Apartheid security forces, he could walk into that school and demand that the violence stop. If I had been a Black child in a township school during the 1980s, where state violence against children was standard policy, no Colonel would have come to save me.

My father’s protection was not justice; it was a function of his power in an unjust system.

Whatever he said to her, it worked. She never hit me again. She treated me with a cold, terrified distance. I had been saved by the very toxicity I feared.

Arundel Street

For my first year of school, we lived on Arundel Street. It was a commander’s house, because my father was now in charge of the prison at the top of the rise: Pretoria Maximum.

Every morning he drove past the old red-brick prison, turned right, and went up the rise to his office. I knew that road the way other children know the road to their grandmother’s house. I did not know what was at the top of it.

At the top of that building was a room with a single long beam and seven nooses. On the trapdoor beneath it were seven pairs of painted footprints, so that the condemned would stand exactly where the drop required. Beside it was a holding section the warders called the Pot, where men spent their last seven days and were weighed and measured for the rope.

In 1985, the year I learned to read, the year a teacher broke a ruler across my knuckles, 137 people were hanged in that building. The overwhelming majority of the people sent to those gallows were Black. Very few of their names ever reached the newspapers. One that did was the poet Benjamin Moloise, hanged on 18 October 1985, after the United Nations Security Council had appealed for his life.

We used to walk up to the generals’ houses on the ridge, and I played in their gardens. That is how the architecture works. It is built so that a child can grow up within walking distance of the gallows and never once hear the trapdoor.

By the end of that year, my father was transferred. In the Prison Service, you go where you are told. We were moving to Baviaanspoort, a farm prison outside the city.

I didn’t know it yet, but Baviaanspoort would be the place where the binary would try to crush me completely. It was a “farm prison”, a place where nature and incarceration met. It was fitting. I was a child of nature, trapped in a prison of gender, moving from one cell to another.