TRC Final Report

Volume 5

Chapter 4

Subsection 1

■ PSYCHOLOGICAL CONSEQUENCES OF GROSS VIOLATIONS OF HUMAN RIGHTS

10 South Africa’s history of repression and exploitation severely affected the mental well-being of the majority of its citizens. South Africans have had to deal with a psychological stress which has arisen as a result of deprivation and dire socioeconomic conditions, coupled with the cumulative trauma arising from violent state repression and intra-community conflicts.

11 Trauma has both a medical and psychological meaning. Medically it refers to bodily injury, wounds or shock. In psychological terms, it refers to “a painful emotional experience or shock, often producing lasting psychic effect.”2

12 Exposure to extreme trauma can lead to a condition known as post-traumatic stress disorder. This may be caused by:

a direct personal experience of an event involving actual or threatened death, serious injury or other threat to physical integrity;

b witnessing an event that involves death, injury or threat to the physical integrity of another person;

c learning about unexpected or violent death, serious harm or threat of death or injury experienced by a family member or close associate.³

13 Perpetrators of human rights violations used numerous tactics of repression, with both physical and psychological consequences. These found their expression in the killing, abduction, severe ill treatment and torture of activists, families and communities. Psychological damage caused by detention was not merely a by-product of torture by state agents. It was deliberate and aimed at discouraging further active opposition to apartheid. Jacklyn Cock says:

Torture is not only considered as a means of obtaining information on clandestine networks at any price, but also a means of destroying every individual who is captured, as well as his or her sense of solidarity with an organisation or community.⁴

14 Mr Mike Basopu, an activist during the 1980s, was arrested in 1986. At the Mdantsane hearing, he told the Commission that activists were aware of the possibility that they might be tortured:

As the freedom fighters, we were struggling; we knew the consequences. What I am trying to say is that, when we were fighting against the whites - when we were fighting against the Boers - we knew that we were going to be harassed.

15 This awareness did not, however, protect Mr Basopu from the physical strains he experienced when he was detained in Fort Glamorgan Prison. He recognised that the role of torture and ill treatment was to inflict permanent damage on activists and limit their future activities. “These prison warders were trying to treat us [so] badly that if we were released from prison we would not be able to continue with our struggle.”

16 Psychological abuse in torture can be divided into four types:

a communication techniques such as verbal abuse;

b attempts to weaken mentally through, for example, solitary confinement or drugs;

c psychological terror tactics, including threats against families or witnessing the torture of other detainees;

d humiliation, such as being kept naked or undergoing vaginal examinations.⁵

17 The South African security forces and third force agents used a combination of these techniques.

18 The intention of torture was not to kill victims but to render them incapable of further activities on their release. Mr Mapela became aware of this during his detention and goaded the police to kill him. In 1964, after being arrested by police who wanted information about a colleague, he was severely tortured and hung on the bars of the cell with handcuffs. He told the Commission about his continued resistance in prison:

There would be Boers coming in and out with a gun. They would put it against my neck. I would ask them to pull the trigger. They refused. Some of them would come and hold a knife against my neck. I would ask them to cut my head off. They would refuse.

19 In 1981, Brigadier Rodney Goba Keswa was arrested and detained by the Security Police in the Transkei and was subjected to mental torture. At the Lusikisiki hearing, he described his first view of his cell the morning after his first bitterly cold night in detention:

When dawn eventually broke, I had the first opportunity of looking around my cell. What I saw still haunts me to this day. The wall on the one side of my cell was smeared with faeces. The spot where the night soil bucket stood was a pool of urine ... The blankets were old, threadbare, smelly, dusty, coarse, with tell tale signs of perverse sexual acts. I tried walking towards the door, but I staggered about sick to the bottom of my gut ... I remembered stories about tactics of killing someone without laying a finger on them.