Dr. Shock

[n2doc]

How an apartheid-era psychiatrist went from torturing gay soldiers in South Africa to sexually abusing patients in Alberta

BY RICHARD POPLAK

INSPECTED from above, there is nothing—just the converging serpents of the Limpopo and Shashe Rivers, and a plateau surrounded by endless tracts of veld. In 1970, a military camp was built here, overseen by a psychiatrist who believed firmly in the curative power of pain. In apartheid’s darkest corners, he was known as die Kolonel, his camp was christened Greefswald, and no two terms inspired more dread in the members of the South African Defence Force, themselves experts in the creation and dissemination of terror.

Hundreds of white teenage boys were processed through Greefswald in the 1970s, and its survivors still drift through the country like ghosts. I recently met one, who insisted I refer to him only by his Hebrew name, Itiel. He was born in 1951, he told me, and in his teens succumbed to the Aquarian drug warp. Through a scrim of hallucinogens, he watched the apartheid regime congeal around him. “I was basically psychotic,” he said. “I felt as though I’d come to a strange planet.”

South Africa in the ’60s was the strangest planet. The Sharpeville massacre, in which the regime killed sixty-nine unarmed black protesters, served as the decade’s bloody opening allegro. Black opposition parties were banned, dissenters filled the prisons, and in 1964 Nelson Mandela was sentenced to a life term. Two years later, Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, the so-called architect of apartheid, was stabbed to death by a parliamentary messenger who claimed to take orders from a tapeworm in his stomach. As if serving the same parasite, the government introduced universal conscription in 1967. Almost every white male in his late teens was churned through the SADF’s meat grinder, and if any failed to emerge as “normal,” he was processed again until he did.


Itiel’s conscription papers ordered him to a Pretoria drill hall in January 1971. For a habitual drug user quitting cold turkey, basic training made for a cruel comedown. He committed a near-fatal error: after deciding that he no longer wanted to be in the military, he informed a solicitous officer about his substance abuse. A week or so later, without warning or explanation, he was sent to 1 Military Hospital, or 1 Mil, the SADF’s sprawling medical campus in Pretoria. Within its austere fortifications lurked the psychiatric wards, infamous throughout the army as the loony bin, the nuthouse, the abyss within the abyss. Military psychiatric hospitals were first established to mend minds damaged by war, but only a few of the wards’ inmates had experienced combat. Instead, about half the forty beds were occupied by gays, rock ’n’ rollers, and dope heads—the counterculture’s ragged foot soldiers. “They were most interested in what songs we listened to,” a former patient named Gordon Torr told me. “What they feared most were people who didn’t think the way they did.”

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