Читать книгу Brutal School Ties - Sam Cowen - Страница 12

The Matron

Mariolette Bossert

The first time I met Mariolette Bossert was in the dining hall of the hostel. I didn’t recognise her at first. On her Facebook picture she looks happy and energetic and when I met her, she looked so tired, her face pinched. I had heard from a few of the mothers that Mariolette had been a rock for their children when the abuse was first exposed and she continued to be one, even years later.

Mariolette was very nervous; she didn’t want to lose her job and said she had been threatened with that before for her constant speaking out. We agreed that she would talk off the record first, and then decide later what to do in the best interests of her family and the hostel and, of course, ‘her boys’.

“I promised them I would stay until the last of them finished matric,” she said, over coffee and homemade milktart. “And I will, but I don’t know how much longer.”

She loved the boys, and while we talked, there was a constant stream of them coming in and out of the dining hall. This one needed his medication, that one couldn’t find his cricket shirt, someone else had misplaced some sports equipment. She dealt with each one quickly and with care, like a mother. She showed me around the boarding house, the new extension with coffee stations and fruit baskets and some fairly robust lounge furniture. Later she offered to write it all down for me, but reminded me that I would only be allowed to use it if she agreed. Her notes sat in my inbox for a long time.

“I arrived at Parktown Boys’ in 2016, with my husband, Chris, who had been employed as the Director of Boarding. I was not employed by the school at the time. When I first walked into the boarding houses, they were in a shocking state. All the mattresses were smelly and torn. Some boys were sleeping on dirty mattresses without fitted sheets. There was one dirty old couch for 60 boys to sit on. There was no place where they could even make a cup of coffee. If they were thirsty, they had to drink water from the filthy bathroom taps and some taps were missing. I was not surprised when I saw that the boarding house cleaning budget was R1500 for the year. The ladies only bought Sunlight washing liquid to clean everything in the boarding house. There were rats all over the place. Parents were unaware of these conditions as one of the rules – and a so-called ‘tradition’ was that no parent was allowed to enter the boarding facility, especially the mothers. The parents could only drop the boys off at the gate. I found it hard to believe that a mother would just leave her child, without seeing in what conditions her son was living.

“The boys had to endure the most terrible rules. Although they were boarding, they were not allowed in the boarding house after school and were only allowed to enter just before dinner time. According to the masters, they had to pack a bag in the morning and go to sports.

“Another harsh rule they had was that if the boys were late for dinner or had the wrong uniform on, they had to sit on the floor outside the boarding house and only got food if there was food left over, after everyone else had eaten. I was simply shocked with the way the masters were running boarding.

“I began driving my husband crazy, urging him to speak to the committee parents when they had their meetings, specifically about the condition of the mattresses. I could not sleep at night, tossing and turning, thinking about how the boys were sleeping on those filthy things.

“When I questioned the masters who stayed in boarding about the shocking conditions, they would tell me that this was ‘life’ and this made boys ‘men’. I was horrified. I knew I had to do something.

“I urged Chris to ask the committee if they would mind if I taught the ladies to clean the boarding properly. I was not employed by the school and not working at that stage. With permission from the parents’ committee, I bought sugar soap and we scrubbed everything: the showers, the floors, the walls, the filthy couch, but eventually we had to throw that out as it was totally rotten, infested by insects. I have a lot of pictures detailing how the place used to look. On the first day of school, the teachers had a cocktail party in Surgite, the Old Boys’ bar, and my husband invited me to accompany him. The headmaster, Mr Bradley, introduced me to a mom by the name of Michelle Hobkirk; he told me she had done a lot of work for the school and maybe I could assist her in my free time if I was up to it.

“Michelle brought her retired parents to the school. Her mom took measurements and made curtains for all the windows and her dad worked day and night on maintenance, fixing up, painting and gardening, to improve the boarding living conditions.

“Michelle kindly sponsored workers on weekends to do painting, building and help put in cupboards for the boys, as they only had these broken steel trommels, broken and bent, kicked-in steel cupboards for their clothes. The toilet seats were broken and the doors did not have handles. Toilet doors could not close. The showers were totally open and no boy had any privacy. Most of the upgrades were sponsored by the Hobkirk family. One of the parents kindly loaned us R150 000 to buy the boys proper Gold-range mattresses. The day we carried those mattresses into boarding, the boys stood up and clapped so hard and long, it felt like we had just won the World Cup. We gradually paid the money back, after we rented the boarding houses out in the holidays to outside touring groups.

“For nearly a year, I worked full day for boarding with no remuneration. I also looked after the sick boys at night and, in emergency cases, took them to doctors and hospitals. The boys had never had this before. The first night we arrived, we told the boys they could come and see us if they were not feeling well. Soon we had half of the boarding house standing in a row outside our house. We’ve been told that before we came to Parktown, when the boys were not feeling well, or even bleeding, they were told to go away, or to phone their parents or just lie on their beds. Close to the end of that first year, the parent committee saw the work I had done and so they decided to pay me R5000 per month for working in the boarding house. I was very grateful as we were battling financially.

“When Chris took over the boarding house, we found at least 10 boys who were not officially on the books. When we contacted these parents, all the parents had exactly the same explanation: that a Parktown master would come to their houses or shacks and promise to give their sons full boarding and schooling in exchange for playing rugby and cricket for the school.

“When we discovered this, and the parents were contacted, we found that most of these boys were already in matric or Grade 11, playing first-team rugby. All of them came from very poor homes, most of their parents were waiters or cleaners, unable to afford the fees. The master involved was called in and he promised that there were bursaries coming, but nothing was ever paid in. After these boys finished their school rugby careers, the committee decided to expel them from boarding as no bursaries had come to light. My husband and I were very upset by this – how these boys were used for [their] excellence in sports, but once they were no longer needed, they were forced out, while they were writing their record or final exams.

“When we started at Parktown, Surgite – the Old Boys’ bar – was open most week nights. Certain teachers sometimes made the boys buy ice for them at the garage after 9 or 10 pm at night. I only found this out after putting a pass-out system in place, where security would not let the boys out without a written pass from us. One day Chris was at a golf function, so I personally walked up there and told the masters that I would not allow boys to go out as it was dangerous for them to walk by themselves at night and if they wanted ice, they could go buy it themselves. They just laughed at me. From then on they used to send security to buy ice and cigarettes for them. I am sure the parents would not have appreciated it to know their sons had to walk late at night to buy masters ice for their drinks. I also found it shocking that some of the masters had their girlfriends staying overnight with them. Chris immediately stopped this and gave them final warnings. This was when the first real problems started between us and the Old Boy teachers.

“So we cleaned up the bar and only opened it on weekends. It was run professionally and we used the money we raised to sponsor a few boys in boarding, as well as spending R32 000 for the year on the bursary and the sports boys’ toiletries. We appointed student masters in boarding to help us with prep duties. These masters did not get paid, but they had to do two hours of prep per week and help us wake up the boys. For this they got free accommodation, food and internet, and they also had to earn money from coaching at the school.

“Collan Rex was an old boy and we did not appoint him. He was appointed by Parktown Boys’ teachers Remo Murabito and Dave Hansen, and his position was Pastoral Care. From the outset, I had serious doubts about Collan. I didn’t like how he wrestled with the boys and was so familiar with them. We were already interviewing someone else for the assistant master position to replace Rex – having already made up our minds that we were not going to renew Rex’s contract – when he was arrested, as he had been given several warnings for touching the boys inappropriately by wrestling or hitting them, and he also neglected the prep. We found him to be very immature and not a role model for the boys.

“The night Rex was caught on camera, a boy, Ben, came to ask me to look on the cameras for the first-team waterpolo caps that had gone missing over the weekend after the boys returned from their game at Affies in Pretoria. We had installed the cameras two months earlier because of a lot of cell phone theft. Ben wanted us to look at it so we could see who took the waterpolo caps out of the common area. It was very time consuming and boring watching all the footage. We told Ben to carry on watching it while Chris sat next to him marking and I was in the kitchen, baking birthday cakes. I had introduced a system whereby each boarder got a birthday cake on his birthday. The next minute Ben made a loud sound. Chris looked up and saw that Rex was in the middle of doing sexual acts with a few of the boys. Chris immediately stopped the footage and came to tell me what he had just seen.

“I told Ben not to talk about this to anyone as Mr B and I had to investigate this in order to take it further. He said to me, ‘Mam, everyone knows about this – this is Rex’s way.’ I asked him to explain why would they let Rex touch them in this way. Did they like it? Ben said no, they did not. He said, ‘He does it to everyone and he is strong so they cannot fight him off.’ He said that when they went on tour, when they showered, Rex would come into the showers and do sexual acts to them in the shower. I asked him why they had not reported it. He simply repeated that Collan did it to everyone, that it was ‘the Rex way’ and it was ‘the Parktown way’. I asked Ben whether the waterpolo caps were really missing or whether he just wanted us to see the footage, but he insisted, ‘No, mam, I was looking for the caps.’ I was not convinced because the caps were on the table the entire time. We later discovered that Ben’s intention was indeed for us to see the footage and get Collan Rex fired. We decided to act immediately.

“We phoned the headmaster at the time, Mr Bradley, then we called Ben’s mom, as well as Mr Greyling and Michelle Hobkirk from the SGB, the School Governing Body. After they viewed the footage, the police were called. After the police viewed the footage, they said, ‘Let’s arrest this monster.’

“The next day the entire boarding house was called, in their grades, to our house. By then everyone knew Collan had been arrested and they obviously knew what he’d been arrested for, as it seemed like all the boys knew his ways. We told them that if they were one of Collan’s victims, they could speak to anyone in boarding. Of the eight boys who came forward, seven opened up to me and one boy to a teacher, Mr Zulu. We immediately informed all the boarding parents of the incident, but Mr Bradley did not want to let the entire school community know at that stage. He said we should just keep it between us and the boarding parents. I was not happy about it, as a lot of the victims told me that Collan did this to day boys as well … The next day I asked Mr Bradley if the school would help us secure a psychologist to try to help the victim boys.

“The school then got a psychologist, *Janet, the mother of a day boy. Janet started facilitating group sessions with the boys and after the sessions she would come to me and tell me certain details. I was worried about this as I felt she should not be telling me things that the boys had told her in confidence.

“The next day Mr Bradley came to our house with Collan Rex’s girlfriend [also a teacher at the school]. She wanted to see the footage … She had also been Collan Rex’s teacher when he was in Grade 9, so she was a few years older than him. Mr Bradley said she needed to see the footage to have closure because she loved this man and she couldn’t move on. Chris and I had a huge problem with this request because we felt it was not right to show her the footage. So I asked the Foundation administrator to phone their lawyers to get a legal opinion. We agreed to show her the beginning, before the boys got undressed, where Collan was only rubbing the boy’s leg, and trying to kiss the boy. She immediately burst into tears. She shook her head and said, ‘This is what he used to do to me.’ The administrator arrived and told us we are not allowed to show her the footage and we stopped immediately. She told us she was done with Collan and if I would please phone his family to collect his stuff in boarding. She gave me his uncle’s number.

“The next day whilst the boys had a counselling session, they saw this teacher, Collan’s ex, standing in the door listening to them. The boys were very upset and very scared that she would tell Collan who the boys were and what they had said. She landed up doing exactly that. She went to visit Rex and she told him who the boys were. She later admitted this to my husband and I and Mr Bradley. She told us it was really hard for her to just walk away as she was feeling sorry for Rex. I was very upset that she had listened to the boys’ conversations with the psychologist. I reported this to Mr Bradley again. I told him the boys were terrified. Some of them said they did not want to be taught by her any more.

“The next day, Janet, the psychologist was sitting at our house, waiting to get a room to counsel the boys, when Mr Bradley brought Collan’s girlfriend to our house. She was not on a medical aid and Mr Bradley suggested that because the school was paying for the boys’ counselling sessions, they should also pay for her as she was also a victim of Rex. Mr Bradley called Chris and me to one side and told us Janet would also be seeing her. I objected, saying that surely this would be a conflict of interest. We stopped it immediately. But whilst Mr Bradley was talking to us, Collan’s girlfriend asked Janet what the boys had said Rex had done to them. And Janet started telling her. I was furious. I told Mr Bradley, ‘This is not right.’ When the girlfriend left I confronted Janet. She admitted to me that she felt she had been put in a corner. She also said she really needed the work and money from the school.

“Janet subsequently gave the boys her cell number and said they could call her any time if they needed her. The boys then started sending her messages like, ‘Mam, I can’t sleep,’ and they would add little emojis. When Janet received a message with a heart emoji one night, she was at her boyfriend’s house and he did not like it at all. The next day she called me to tell me she needed to speak to me urgently. I saw the boys earlier that morning before I met with her and they told me of the extreme foul language Janet was using in their sessions. I was very concerned. Later that morning Janet told me she thought one of the victim boys was in love with her as he was sending her messages late at night with emojis. I then knew something really big was wrong. I asked one of the moms, who was very high up in the medical field, to check Janet’s qualifications. Just to find out whether she had ever been taken off the psychologists’ roll for unprofessional behaviour, like confidentiality. This was indeed the case.

“Mr Bradley asked myself and Michelle Hobkirk to go with him to the school’s lawyers regarding the case and to get advice going forward. When we sat down with the lawyers, they said that we could make this all go away by the end of the day. Michelle and I were both shocked and asked them to explain. They asked us to leave the room because they wanted to speak to Mr Bradley alone. After the meeting I told Mr Bradley we couldn’t just ‘make this all go away’, as some boys had been raped, abused, and that this was serious.

“Mr Bradley agreed. But then he dropped a bombshell and told us that he had just resigned. We told him we were very concerned as only the boarding parents had been notified about the abuse and not the day parents. He said he wanted to keep it as quiet as possible and we needed to put something together going forward. We were building a R27-million boarding house and he did not want this to come out and give the school a bad name. This really angered me and I decided to get advice from my sister-in-law, who was a magistrate in the children’s court.

“In the meantime, the victim boys who had come forward were very scared, ashamed and sad, because by then everyone knew who they were. They were embarrassed to face the other boys or go to prep. They would sit and do their homework at my house and cried almost every night. They felt like outsiders, crying till the early hours of the morning. They were teased beyond imagination. They were called ‘gay’ and ‘liars’ – not only by their mates and other students, but also by some of the teachers. One of the female teachers told a boy who was sucking his pen, ‘Collan taught you well to do oral sex.’ They were called snitches, they were accused of messing up the school’s name and how they must have liked what Collan did to them, because they did not report it when it happened, how they had asked for it and enjoyed it. These boys were damaged and heartbroken.

“Then an appointment was made for us at the Johannesburg Parent and Child Parenting Centre to meet up with Luke Lamprecht and Rolene Milne, who have done a lot of work with abused children, and for the first time it felt like we could get the boys professional help, which was already late, months after Collan had been arrested. We were told the boys were supposed to have each gotten their own psychologist, right from the start and that it should have been someone who had testified in High Court before. Rolene Milne then started getting the correct psychologist for each boy. Mr Bradley, who had not left the school yet, had a meeting with the parents, where he assured them that the school would pick up the bill for the psychologists and their meds. The boarders would also be taken to their psychologists from boarding. For one and a half years, I drove the victim boys from boarding to and from psychologists, psychiatrists, doctors and hospitals. I had to manage every single boy’s appointments and make sure they attended. It finally became too much for me, as more and more boys started coming forward about the abuse. By this stage, 23 boys had opened up.

“I myself started going on meds; it felt like I was having a breakdown of sorts, but I had to be strong for the boys. After all, they were the real victims. Not just of Rex, but of a whole system of intimidation and brutality that was part of the school’s tradition and culture.

“This whole ordeal really had an impact on my family life. I now understand why initiation had been taking place for so many years because, before we fixed things up, the boys had nothing to do at night to keep them busy. Just sit in the filthy rat-infested boarding house, where the matrics who were boarders had free range to abuse and initiate these young boys in any way they wanted. It was considered to be great fun for matrics to beat up boys who had to run for their lives, whilst being blindfolded as they were hit with socks, filled with golf balls and potatoes. The younger boys were put in a cupboard or locked in the locker, which was carried down to the showers, the taps were opened and when the locker filled up with water, and the boy felt like he was drowning, that ‘made him a man’. Grade 8 boys were sometimes forced to stand naked at prep and then have their private parts compared and made fun of, with boys gathered around, laughing at a boy’s penis size. One of the heads of boarding also facilitated a ‘turn-around day’ – or changeover day – in boarding when the Grade 8s and matric boys swapped for a day: the Grade 8 boys now had all the privileges of a matric and the matrics had to do what the Grade 8s told them to do. [At the end of the day] the head of boarding would then blow a whistle [signalling that changeover day would be over] and the matrics were then allowed to beat the Grade 8 boys. One boy slept in a tree the entire night because he was that scared of getting beaten up by the matrics.

“The Grade 8s sometimes had to stand on their knees while matrics played face tennis by hitting them hard through the face. They had to stand at the stairwell, where matrics would kick them down the stairs. A cupboard door made of solid wood was broken on one of the Grade 8 boy’s head. This same boy was made to lie in a ditch of sewerage for an entire night. The boy was peed on by the matrics, while he was sleeping on the top bunk bed. Some Grade 8 boys had to put their old pots’ underpants on and were told to give their pots blowjobs or hand jobs before going to school.

“These ‘traditions’ just kept on going. Because this was once done to boys who were now seniors, it was now their turn to do it to the new pots or ‘slaves’, which is how the Grade 8 boys were often referred to. The school had an iron-clad code of silence. The boys dared not to speak about it because they would be beaten up. Certain teachers mocked boys who were reporting abuse to us. They were accused of being snitches and were penalised when it came to marking. The worst thing ever is to be a snitch at Parktown Boys’ – that would be the end for a boy.

“The Grade 8 camp came up in January 2017, a few months after Collan’s arrest. I overheard how the teachers were planning what to take along for their evening braais and how they were looking forward to the big party they were going to have. After hearing a lot of initiation stories, I begged Chris to speak to the two boarding masters who knew our policies against initiation and they promised to look after the boys. I personally phoned the woman who was head of first aid and asked her whether I could give her the boys’ Schedule 6 medicine and if she could make sure that they were given it every day. But when the buses left, she told the boys to keep their medicine with them, because they were not staying at the same place as the teachers, who stayed two kilometres away from the boys. The boys would only see them once a day at the dining hall. So on camp, one of the boys gave two of his friends Concerta and, because it makes you stay up the entire night, these boys walked off in the middle of the night to go swim in a dam without any supervision. When the boys returned we had to deal with a number of furious parents. I tried to get answers from two of the teachers who said they had stayed too far from the boys, so they could not distribute the medicine. This was given to us in writing. We reported this to Mr Bradley, who said that the next year they would have to plan better. The boys came back with blisters on their hands from the push-ups they were forced to do; they were hit blue and purple, kicked in their stomachs, and I was told that nearly every boy cried on the camp. There were more than 10 written statements of initiation and abuse. Mr Bradley wanted to take the matrics’ prefectships away, but my husband Chris asked him not to do this. Chris reasoned that we must make sure this never happened again and that the teachers should be doing their work and watching the kids, not leaving it all up to the matrics. Why send eight teachers on camp who don’t even watch the boys? Mr Bradley called the entire group into his office and said they would have to do better the following year.

“Of course, after all of this I was enemy number one, especially among some of the Old Boys. We were sworn at, made fun of and, on one occasion, I was bumped down stairs in front of a group of people at a function at the boarding house. I reported this incident to the police and took photos of my injuries after rolling down the stairs. Some of the Old Boys thought this was extremely funny, seeing a 50-year-old woman falling down stairs after being pushed by them. Then my dogs were mysteriously poisoned.

“After the Collan Rex tragedy, although the traditions of initiation and abuse carried on, the boys got stronger and began to speak more openly, although it was very hard for them to tell their parents, and up to this day, many have not told their parents everything that happened to them. I became their support. For one year, I sat with boys, cried with them and held their hands, and gave them their meds to help them cope at school.

“When the Collan Rex cased started, Advocate [Arveena] Persad called me in and she said all parents of Rex’s rugby teams and waterpolo teams since 2015 needed to be contacted as she wanted to make sure all boys had come forward before the case started. Most of the day parents were unaware of this case, as this meeting happened seven months after the incident, just before Mr Bradley left. It was kept from the day parents for seven months although most of the abuse happened on tours and daily in the swimming pool, where boarders and day boys mixed.

“Luke Lamprecht helped to arrange for Rees Mann to address the school on sexual assault. As the executive director of South African Male Survivors of Sexual Abuse, he was going to talk to the boys to help them understand. One of the prefects suspected that one of the victim boys was talking about him, so he made the boy stand up in front of the whole school. He landed up standing for more than 15 minutes. It was very traumatic for him; he said he felt like the entire school was looking at him. After this incident he began having nightmares relating to the incident. He was subsequently put onto antidepressants. When he had to do his impact statement, he had a total breakdown when this incident came up and we had to stop the interview. Something like this could have a negative impact on this boy for the rest of his life.

“The initiation never stopped and as much as the school tried to blame it on boarding, there was just as much going on at the day school. These traditions were happening in the classrooms, on the school fields and in the prefects’ room. When we caught the head of boarding doing the same to the boys, which Carte Blanche exposed in 2009, he was expelled from boarding. Despite the school claiming that the brutal rites of passage had stopped, Chris caught a group of matrics red-handed. They had taken Grade 11 boys down to the bottom field. They had to all strip naked and then they got Deep Heat rubbed onto their private parts. The matrics would then stand in a row and the Grade 11s had to bend over and get hit with bats, tennis rackets, sticks, belts and then were forced to jump into the pool. They had to do this for a few rounds. It was believed this made you a man at Parktown Boys’. Once it was over, the Grade 11s could go to the matrics’ dorm to have coffee with them – this was called ‘the right of way’. But this was going on all the way through when we got here – the exact practice Carte Blanche reported on in 2009.

“The parents of the victim boys who are planning a civil case against the school have been accused by various parties attached to the school of ‘trying to run the school down’. I believe the school has failed the parents and the boys. There has been no protection for those who have stood up for the truth. Despite me reporting 68 incidents of violence and wrongdoing, no meaningful action was taken on any one of my reports.

“Despite all its problems, I still love the school and l love the boys. But boys have been hurt so badly and something needs to be done. The Collan Rex case was just the beginning. There are at least another five serious criminal cases on the go against certain members at this school. One of them entails an incident at the Grade 8 camp a few years ago, when the boy, who is now in Grade 11, was hurt so badly that he still has scars on his body. There are four other boys who have the same scars on their backs or chests. We’ve had four suicide attempts. One boy had to write his matric finals from a psychiatric ward. We have eight boys on psychiatric medicines. There are 23 boys from the Rex case, scarred for life. There are also files and files of statements from Old Boys recording abuse at this school.

“This has become such an emotional and personal journey for me. But I will not stop until justice is given to these children. I want the adults involved to acknowledge what they have done to these boys. I especially feel strongly about the secondary victimisation, where the victims have been doubted and told that they are liars, breaking these boys even further. I want these boys to be acknowledged for their bravery and for all the perpetrators to apologise to the victims. Four years down the line, no boy has received an apology.”

After Grade 8 learner Enock Mpianzi died tragically in a drowning incident that caught national attention in January 2020, Mariolette called me.

“You can use it. You can use it all,” she was crying. “Those poor boys. Those poor little boys.”

I wasn’t sure whether she was referring to the victim boys then or the Grade 8s now. Either way, the pain was the same.