Inside the kommando camp that turns boys' doubts to hate
Thick clouds of diesel smoke fill the air outside a run-down guest farm outside the town of Carolina in Mpumalanga. As the stench dissipates, a group of boys, aged between 13 and 19, spill from the bed of a rusty truck. The trip from the city to the country was long and hypnotic in the old jalopy.
It is after midnight when the boys heft bags full of military clothing. "There are old blood stains on my uniform," one of them says, as he trades his sneakers for army boots.
Shouted orders ring out. The harsh intimidation begins immediately. Groaning, the boys raise 4m tent poles among the cowpats dotting the grassland. The large army tent will be their home for the next nine days.
Thirteen-year-old Jano, the youngest at the camp, spreads his sleeping bag on the bumpy floor. He is at the camp because he wants to prove to his father that he isn't a sissy but a real man, he says with a shy smile.
At 18, Riaan is already a little more self-assured. His lily-white skin is recovering from acne. "I want to learn how to camouflage myself in the veld." He, too, seems excited to be camping out and playing soldier, as if he's living an adventure out of a boyhood novel.
But soon they will realise this survival camp is different to others held in the veld.
The boys run from the tent to the mess hall. Before them, under the glare of fluorescent lighting, stands 57-year-old Franz Jooste. Old army decorations gleam on his apartheid-era uniform. The uniforms of the boys also come from that era.
"We're going to make men of you all," he tells them in Afrikaans.
