The Assembly Line of Souls

We moved again. Silverton High School was not a place of learning; it was a place of stratification. If primary school was about learning obedience, high school was about learning hierarchy.

On the first day, we were herded into the assembly hall. The architecture itself enforced the social order: the “Seniors” (Matrics) loomed on the terrace above us like gods, while we, the “Freshmen,” stood at the bottom. We were told we would undergo “Initiation”, a ritual designed to break the individual will so it could be rebuilt in the image of the institution. The school existed to replicate the world outside: a factory line where the seniors were the overseers and we were the raw material.

The school square became a theater of humiliation. During breaks, we were forced to gather there, subject to the whims of the seniors. One afternoon, a senior boy singled me out. He pointed to a heavy medicine ball. “Push it,” he commanded. “With your head.”

I got down on the hot concrete. My hands and knees burned. I pushed the heavy ball across the square using only my forehead, straining my neck, degrading myself to amuse the hierarchy. But physical exertion was manageable; it was the psychological violence that broke me.

A senior girl called me over. She handed me a piece of string. “Measure my legs,” she commanded. “Start at the toe.”

I knelt before her. To the other boys, this might have been a game or a thrill. To me, it was a trap. I moved the string up her calf, my hands shaking with a mixture of fear and confusion. I was being forced to perform a desire I didn’t feel, to enact a male gaze that felt alien to my hands.

As I moved higher, I hesitated.

Smack.

Her hand struck my cheek, stinging like fire. “Too high!” she screamed. “Do the other leg.”

I moved to the other leg. I stopped lower this time, trying to anticipate the invisible boundary of her permission.

Smack.

“Don’t stop!”

It was a no-win scenario designed to enforce submission. She was the sovereign; I was the subject. I stood up, my face burning red. Something inside the “good boy” snapped. I walked away. A senior screamed at me to come back. I kept walking. I walked right out of the school gate.

Fuck them all, I thought. I hate them all. I wish they were all dead.

My rebellion was short-lived. My father, the Colonel, did not tolerate truancy. I was forced back into the system. But I had learned that in this environment, softness was a liability. I retreated into the one place they couldn’t reach: the silence of my own room.

The Noose (Age 16)

For the next three years, the pressure of the double life became a physical weight. The testosterone poisoning my body, the hair growing on my face, the relentless drilling of the cadets; it was too much. The “Survival Wing” I had built with teddy bears and imaginary friends had collapsed under the gravity of adolescence.

One afternoon in 1995, I decided to silence the voice in my head.

I didn’t choose a knife this time. I chose the symbol of the institution that was suffocating me: my school tie.

I tied the end of the striped fabric to a hook on the wall. I fetched a kitchen chair to stand on. I wrote a suicide note, blaming everyone for hating me, apologizing for being born, admitting that I was a mistake.

I climbed onto the chair. I put the tie around my neck. The tears kept coming, but my mind was cold. I kicked the chair away.

For a few seconds, I couldn’t breathe. The pressure was immense. It felt as if my eyes were going to pop out of their sockets. I waited for the darkness. I waited for the silence.

And then, I fell.

The hook gave way, or the knot slipped; I don’t know. I hit the floor, gasping for air, my throat burning, my body shaking. I lay there on the ground, screaming, not in pain, but in frustration. I had failed at living, and now I had failed at dying.

I got up. I cleaned up the mess. I burned the note. I realized that the universe was cruel enough to keep me alive, but not kind enough to tell me why.

The Bargain with God

It was the failure of the suicide attempt that drove me to the school hall a few weeks later.

If the military and the school were the arms of the state, the Church was its soul. In Apartheid South Africa, the Dutch Reformed Church provided the spiritual scaffolding for the entire system. It taught us that hierarchy was divine, and that everything outside the norm was a sin against creation.

When the Afrikaanse Christen-Studentevereniging (ACSV), the Afrikaans Christian Student Association, came to our school, playing modern music and talking about a God who fixes broken things, I didn’t go because I was pious. I went because I was out of options.

It was a cold Wednesday night. The school hall was dark, filled with the sounds of a band. It wasn’t the dour organ music of Sunday service; it was emotional, rhythmic, and seductive. The team leader spoke of broken lives made whole. He spoke of a God who could fix anything.

I stood in the dark corner, shaking. I had tried to cut the “girl” out with scissors; I had tried to hang the “boy” with a tie. Nothing had worked. When the altar call came, I walked forward.

I made a bargain with God that night. I gave Him my heart, but the fine print was specific: Please fix me. Make me normal.

I wasn’t seeking salvation; I was seeking a cure for my identity. I went home and threw away my stash of female clothes, the stolen pantyhose, the makeup, the fabric of my survival. I purged Juanita from my room, hoping God would purge her from my soul.

But the “fix” didn’t come. The Bible, filtered through conservative Calvinism, didn’t offer comfort. It offered judgment. I learned that people like me were an abomination. My prayers changed from “Love me” to “Fix me.” And when the desire to be Juanita didn’t vanish, the guilt morphed into a crushing depression.

The Suicide Bomber

By the time I reached Standard 10 (Matric) in 1997, the depression had hardened into something far more dangerous: Rage.

I had spent my entire school career as a target. I was the moffie, the “fatty.” But as I donned the white shirt of a senior, I decided I was done with fear. The voice in my head that constantly whispered I wish I were dead began to change its tone. It stopped sounding like a plea and started sounding like a threat.

We had a group of bullies at school known as the “Criminal Element.” They were the enforcers of the playground. Ruan was their ringleader.

The collision began in a Maths class. The bell had rung, and I was packing my bag. Ruan screamed from the back, “Remove your fat ass from the front of the class! I still have to write down our homework.”

In the past, I would have moved. I would have apologized for taking up space. But that day, the “girl” inside me, the one who had been sliced with scissors and suffocated with prayer, refused to move.

I turned around. I didn’t look down. I smiled at him. “Make me,” I said.

The shock on his face was immediate. The hierarchy relies on the victim’s compliance. By refusing to comply, I had broken the contract. He promised violence: “I will fuck you up, you fat bastard! You will regret this!”

I replied with a calm that terrified even me: “I’m looking forward to it.”

The showdown happened the next day. It was a setup, an ambush in the bathroom next to the gym class, a classic site of school violence where the teachers’ gaze couldn’t reach. Ruan pushed me inside. His pack was waiting, about seven boys, the air thick with cigarette smoke and adrenaline. They surrounded me, pushing and shoving. They were trying to trigger the flight response. They wanted to see the moffie run.

Ruan stepped forward. He threw a punch. I blocked it with my left arm.

And then, the volcano erupted.

Decades of suppressed rage, at my father for the beatings, at the doctors who cut me open, at the God who wouldn’t fix me, and at my own traitorous body, channeled through my right arm. I didn’t aim for his face. I aimed for the architecture that held us.

I slammed my fist into the brick wall next to his head. The sound was like a gunshot.

The room went silent. Ruan stuttered backward, hitting his head against the wall, his eyes wide. He looked at me and saw something he didn’t understand. He expected fear. Instead, he saw the abyss.

“I suggest you and your buddies leave me alone,” I screamed, my voice echoing off the tiled walls. “If you don’t, the next contact will be your face.”

I stepped closer to him, invading his space. The bully relies on the victim’s fear of death to maintain control. But I had already accepted death. I courted it. By declaring my willingness to die, I stripped him of his power.

“Are you afraid to die?” I asked him, breathless with rage. “Because I promise you, I am not afraid of death. I want to die! I will take as many of you out as I can. I don’t fucking care!”

I was a suicide bomber of one. I had weaponized my own suicidal ideation. For years, my desire to die had been a source of shame; now, it was my armor. If I didn’t care about my own survival, what could they possibly take from me?

Ruan looked at the dent in the wall, then back at me. He saw the deadness in my eyes. He backed down. “This isn’t over,” he mumbled, retreating with his friends.

But it was over. I gave him the finger as he left. They never touched me again.

Epistemic Disobedience

To balance this darkness, I sought refuge in rebellion. I found an ally in Johan van Zyl, another outcast who shared my surname. It felt like a cosmic joke or a spiritual intervention; he bore the same name as my dead brother. It was as if the ghost had returned to help me survive the final stretch.

Together, we waged a guerrilla war of pranks against the seriousness of the system.

In Biology class, we stole cow eyes from a dissection. We hid them in our lunch bags, waiting for Science class. When our teacher, Miss Prinsloo, turned her back, we propped the eyes up on her desk, staring back at her through her own glasses. When she screamed, the class laughed. For a moment, the rigid order of the school was disrupted by the grotesque.

In Chemistry, I locked the door from the outside during a hydrogen sulfide experiment, trapping the popular kids, the darlings of the hierarchy, in a cloud of rotten-egg gas. These weren’t just jokes; they were small acts of sabotage against an institution that demanded total compliance. We laughed while the system coughed.

The Final Break

But pranks and rage were temporary fixes. The pressure of the final exams, the Matric finals, loomed over me. In a white South African household, failure was a social death sentence. One evening, trying to study Biology, the text swam before my eyes. The anxiety was a physical weight, a pressure behind my eyes that wouldn’t release.

I decided to die. Again.

My plan was crude and brutal. I stood in the kitchen, looking down the hallway at a heavy wooden chair in the living room. I didn’t want to cut my wrists; I wanted to smash the thinking part of me that wouldn’t be quiet. I wanted to destroy the brain that refused to be normal.

I ran. I dove headfirst into the chair.

I woke up on my bed with dried blood in my hair. My father was standing over me, scolding me for “running in the house.” He didn’t know I hadn’t been playing; I had been trying to escape. He saw a clumsy child; I felt like a failed ghost.

I passed my exams. I got the university exemption. My father handed me a bank book with savings for my studies, a practical gesture of love from a man who couldn’t speak the language of emotion.

As I drove out of the school gates for the last time in 1997, I told myself that Dawie had survived the war. But deep down, I knew Dawie was just a shell held together by rage and scar tissue. The girl inside, the one who had been prayed away, beaten down, and hidden, was still there, waiting for the moment the guard looked away.

The university was waiting. I was leaving the prison of the school and the prison of the house. I was entering a new territory. And in my mind, I was already planning my insurgency. I would find out who I was, even if I had to burn down the rest of my life to do it.