Children Want to Wage War, Not Play : S. Africa: Violence, Hate Warp the Young

At age 3, little Fikile can recognize the sound of a police armored car rumbling down her street fast enough to hide under a table before it passes.

At 3 1/2, Thato can give step-by-step directions for making a gasoline-filled firebomb.

And at 4, Mapu says unhesitatingly that when he sees a white man, he wants to kill him, and that, as soon as he is a year or two older, he will.

“What this unrest is doing to our children is horrible, absolutely terrifying,” said Mapitso Malepa, director of the Entokozwen Early Learning Center here. “We have a generation of children who do not want to go out to play, but to wage war, real war.

“At an age when a child should be innocence itself, he is caught up in some of the worst violence imaginable and it deforms him so cruelly. At an age when he is totally impressionable, he sees anger, bitterness and hatred all around him, and it warps him in the most frightening way.”

Concern is growing among teachers, physicians, social workers, clergymen, psychologists--and, most of all, among black parents--about the impact that 15 months of sustained civil unrest has had upon children in Soweto, the black satellite city of nearly 2 million people outside Johannesburg, and in South Africa’s other ghetto townships, particularly those under emergency rule near Cape Town, Port Elizabeth and in eastern Cape province.

“The traumas these children are going through, the traumas really of a civil war, mean a generation of violence,” an American-trained child psychologist here said. “They only see violence, they only know violence and they can only respond with violence. I am afraid that this generation will never really be at peace.”

Those most caught up in the unremitting violence--now an element of everyday life here for South African blacks and Coloreds (people of mixed-race)--are young. Most are adolescents in their teens, some are young adults in their early 20s, but others are children, some not even yet in school.

Since January, at least 68 black and mixed-race youths under 18 years old have been killed by police, according to the Detainees’ Parents Support Committee, a human rights group. Some of them have been as young as 4 and 5.

Black and mixed-race youths account for about a quarter of all arrests and detentions without charge, according to the committee, and many of those coming out of lengthy stays in jail, sometimes after torture, show signs of severe psychological trauma.

Children as young as 7 have been picked up and held by the hundreds in prisons here on charges of not being in class during school hours. At present, only the youngest children go to school here; the rest boycott classes for political reasons.

And the deaths and detentions of older brothers and sisters, cousins and neighbors and particularly of parents has, in the words of a white psychiatrist here, “sown salt and crushed glass in this jagged, bleeding wound . . . that could easily kill a whole generation with anger and bitterness.”

“Our children are the true victims of the current repression,” Zac Yacoob, a leading civil rights lawyer, said here recently. “When the police tear-gas a neighborhood, as happens every day in (black) townships, it is the children who suffocate from the fumes.

“When the police fire their shotguns, half of the pellets seem to wind up in the backs and the arms and the legs of the littlest ones. And when the father or the mother or the elder brother is killed, again it is the children who suffer, who starve, who see their people, their own families, crushed by the might of the apartheid oppressors.”

The Rev. Paul Verryn, a Methodist minister with the South African Council of Churches, who counsels youths who have been released from detention, sees even deeper damage done in police detention of school-age children under the partial state of emergency proclaimed by the government in July.

Most Are Teen-Agers

Although police at times have detained as many as 800 primary and junior high school students at one time, most black youths detained are teen-agers. The period of detention has varied from as little as two days to more than three months.

Verryn quickly catalogued the psychological injuries of children who have been arrested, interrogated and held under the security laws.

“If the child has been tortured or if the separation from the family has been particularly traumatic, the patient often weeps at the mention of words that create any aspect of the experience. There is often a fear of going to bed at night, as that would signify a time of nightmares and be reminiscent of the moment of being taken by the authorities. Many smaller children, at the sight of (police or military armored cars), wildly take flight for fear of losing their lives or being shot with birdshot. . . . They fear for their lives, and they are sure they will be detained again and often express doubts of survival if this were to happen.”

Particularly among the younger children he is counseling, there is also a strong feeling of guilt, Verryn said.

“They feel they have caused untold heartache and worry for the family and deserve to be punished,” he said.

Finally, there is depression, often quite deep.

“This is marked by a deep sense of loneliness,” Verryn said. “The isolation that was experienced in detention comes home to roost, and the released child expresses this hopeless desolation in words that show a longing to die.”

Some of those the minister now counsels were first detained after the 1976-77 Soweto uprising, when black youths rebelled against the government education system at the time.

“They describe their experiences with the same intensity they would if they had been released from detention only yesterday,” Verryn said. “When you consider how many hundreds--thousands even--of black youngsters have and are being detained now, we are facing a grave social crisis.”

The police response is that “the arrests of youths, especially in the unrest situation, are unavoidable” because “a petrol (gasoline) bomb or stone in the hand of a child is as potentially devastating as in the hands of a grown person.”

Police Statement

National police headquarters released a statement saying: “The dilemma facing the police in the present situation is that a large number of mobs responsible for all kinds of violence and other unrest-related lawless acts consist of children. The police, faced with these mobs, are often forced to take drastic action and are then made the scapegoat for having injured or arrested youths.”

However, to the Rev. Peter Dhlamini, an Assembly of God minister who works with youth in the black townships east of Johannesburg, the result is an alarming “buildup of tremendous anger and hostility among our children.”

He warns, “If you think the country is on fire now, wait until these kids, the ones who are 5 and 10, grow up . . . because they are already planning what they will do.”

Black parents, teachers and community leaders are frightened for their children but feel helpless in their inability to give them a calmer, safer environment in which to grow up.

“My 10-year-old says there is no time for play,” said Zodwa Mabaso, the mother of four and a former political detainee here. “The games she acts out are what to do when the police come. She says, ‘Is this cupboard big enough for me to hide in? No. I will rather hide in the laundry basket. I must remember to take some clothes out of the basket before I go to sleep so there is space for me.’ ”

It is not just Mabaso’s street-wise 10-year-old who has been politicized--so has her 4-year-old daughter, who was detained in the middle of the night along with her activist parents last year.

“She has pointed out the policemen who detained us that night, and she knows all the cars the police drive,” her mother said. “I don’t know what will happen to our children. . . . Their experiences have made them bitter.”

The bitterness emerged almost immediately last week in conversations with Fikile, Thato and Mapu and other black children in Soweto. But with them, unlike with their older brothers and sister, there is a kind of an innocent openness about their anger, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

Malepa, the veteran social worker at the early learning center, said black children are growing up now with much the same feelings that white children from Dutch-descended Afrikaners have long had--but in reverse.

How Can We Live Together?

“From infancy, an Afrikaner child has heard, ‘You must sit on the kaffirs (the blacks),’ and what we have in apartheid is the result,” she said. “In these days, our children, from their own experiences, are getting the same idea, that whites must be stepped upon. How do (white) people think we are going to able to live together in peace if this oppression continues?”

With anguish, she recounted the reactions of some of the center’s children after police fired tear-gas grenades into its classrooms in August.

“When the older children told their parents what had happened and the parents asked what they had done, the kids said, ‘Unfortunately, we didn’t have our petrol bombs with us, but the next time we will be ready.’

“When the children told me this, I asked what they knew of petrol bombs. Imagine my horror when they told me, ingredient by ingredient, step by step, how to make them, how to light them and how to throw them so they explode on impact.

“Then I asked what they do when they see a white man, and they said, ‘We kill him.’ When I said, ‘No, no,’ they said, ‘Well, first we greet him, and if he greets us back then we won’t kill him.’ Even at this level, that of 3- and 4-year-olds, children see the police, the army, the state and, simply, whites as their enemy.”

In much of this, small children are merely imitating their older brothers and sisters, the “comrades” fighting South Africa’s system of racial separation and minority white rule.

However, the American-trained child psychologist in Soweto sees the “comrades” replacing their parents and other adults to become the main role models for black children in a way that will turn more and more schoolchildren into highly politicized militants.

“Obviously, all of black society is undergoing tremendous changes right now,” he said, asking not to be quoted by name because of his position as a government employee. “But, to my mind, none will be so far-reaching as those affecting our children.

“We may not welcome some of these changes, but we are finding there is little that we as parents can do about them. The revolution that is coming will not only be against this apartheid regime, but it may also encompass black society.”

Already, black parents and teachers are noting a new rebelliousness among their children. At one Soweto nursery school, the children decided one morning that they no longer wanted cornmeal porridge and demanded oatmeal instead. En masse, they overturned their plates and shouted, “ Siyanova, siyanova! (We will destroy!” just as older youths increasingly do during their attacks.

Thoughts of Killing

After one of the pupils was bitten by a dog while walking to another kindergarten here, classmates gathered stones, went to the home of the dog’s owner and told her, “We have come to kill you and your dog!”

Youths who have been jailed or detained, often without charge, may suffer from even more severe traumas, according to psychologists, clergymen and others who counsel them. Given the thousands of teen-agers who have been arrested and held by the police, these traumas may have communitywide impact.

“We are finding that released detainees and prisoners, particularly those who have been tortured badly or held for long periods in solitary confinement, tend quite often to be anti-social, undisciplined and aggressive when they return home,” said psychiatrist Kevin Solomons.

He compared the psychological impact of detention on children to that “post-traumatic stress disorder” found among former war prisoners and American veterans of the Vietnam War.

“They also tend to communicate these feelings to those around them, amplifying the effects of their detention through the community.

“When people realize their own lives can end, perhaps in the next minute or two, and that they have no control over this, it is psychologically shattering and, when those involved are children and adolescents, this is even truer.

“Later, there is a need to repeat the trauma over and over to gain control. A person is haunted while he is asleep and awake, and all the fear of an imminent loss of life comes back. Anything, just the sight of a policeman, perhaps, can trigger it. This is what leads to the uncontrolled, unruly, aggressive behavior.”

One of Solomons’ patients, a high school student, was arrested by the police and held in a small town in northern Transvaal. The boy was badly beaten, Solomons said, losing several teeth. He said the boy had been subjected to electric shocks and suffocation and that his testicles were squeezed with a monkey wrench during interrogation. He also said he overheard his interrogators discussing whether to kill him before he was finally released.

Now, severely depressed and with little energy, he “only shows animation when he talks of killing the person he believes betrayed him,” Solomons said. “In planning this revenge, he is able to repair his psychological damage. He smiles when he thinks of murder, and that is the only time he smiles. . . . “

Although this is a dramatic example of the psychological impact of police torture and detention, it should be multiplied by the scores of reported torture cases and by the thousands of youths who have been detained, Solomons said, to gauge the overall impact on society.

“Individual cases are tragedies, for the damage is severe, long-lasting and sometimes disabling,” Verryn added. “But when hundreds and now thousands of young people have been psychologically damaged in these ways, we are talking about a social tragedy of national proportions.”