“How do you feel now,” I asked, “a year on from the verdict?”
The Archivist shrugged.
“My biggest concern is obviously Ben, but besides that, my problem is that it’s something that could have been prevented. At the moment there’s a lot of people who don’t seem to want to address that. I’m not involved at all in the school any more, but apparently nothing’s changed – it’s still carrying on. And, for me, that’s just stupid. It doesn’t make any sense at all. That’s what I battle with – the stupidity of it. But the long and the short of it, is that I feel the school is responsible, not just for what Rex did, but for creating an environment where it was possible. And that’s what needs to change. But apparently now it’s just exploding.
“Ben is now in Somalia working on a rig. He went down to Cape Town and did a rope access course and he’s also done water rescue and emergency stuff. He’s done a few courses. He loves it. He’s very physical and it’s hard work and it keeps him busy. He’s finally, only now, doing what he wants to do.”
I thanked the Archivist and his wife.
But before I left he asked, “Do you need documents or recordings? I have pretty much everything. I record everything, phone calls, a lot of what happened in court. The sentencing, even the report summaries.”
He was a gold mine. He still is.
Chapter 3
The Boy Who Blew The Whistle
*Ben
I had read a lot about Ben before I actually met him. Ben, The Archivist’s son, who had exposed Collan Rex by getting the hostel director and his wife to look at the CCTV footage. I wondered whether his action had been deliberate or, as one of the other boys would go on to tell me, just lucky. Ben stood out from all the others boys because he had been the one to stop it. Of the 144 sexual charges to which Collan Rex pleaded guilty, his name was listed on 57 of them, the most by almost double. He was the one who had encouraged other boys to testify, and the one who had to face Rex in court.
Ben had also been a guest on a podcast with his dad and he had used his real name. He was very open about what had happened, what had been done to him and what he had done about it. He was happy enough to do the same for this book, but I wanted to give him the option.
“If you use your own name, this will be with you forever. If you use another name, if you decide in 10 years’ time that you want nothing to do with this, that you’ve moved on, no one needs to know. And if you want only certain people to know, you can show them the book and say, see this? I am Ben.”
After chatting to the Archivist, Ben agreed with me. They are very close, Ben telling me on more than one occasion that he wanted to be just like his dad.
I went to see them both at home. The Archivist had said that his son was a physical person and I picked up on that immediately. Ben moved around a lot during the conversation. He was good-looking, with that added benefit of youth and vitality. He reminded me of a coiled spring. He was also extremely sure of himself, quite different to other boys I spoke to, some of them having blocked stuff out, some still wrestling with the guilt and the shame. Ben had done a lot of hard work processing that already, and, he said, it had helped that he had talked about it so much.
“When did you decide you were going to expose Collan Rex?” I asked.
“After the last waterpolo tour down to Durban,” he said. “Something happened that just made me say, ‘enough is enough’.”
“Why? What happened in Durban?” I asked.
The Archivist shook his head.
“First you need to understand what happened leading up to it.”
Ben laughed. He knew what was coming.
“Start at the beginning, bud,” said his father.
And, of course, the beginning was the Grade 8 camp.
“Well, the big thing was that if you wanted to go to the school you had to become a man. So that’s basically what the camp was about. At 13, you don’t know anything, and no one wants to tell you anything about it. They just say, ‘Wait until you get there,’ so you know it’s going to be a rat hole, you know it’s going to be hard, but whatever, you prepare yourself. And I was willing to do it, if it was the only thing that would get me to be accepted, I guess. So then when we got there … actually it started one day before that, in the hostel. If you were a boarder, you had to get to hostel a day earlier and you had to do a whole initiation thing. All the Grade 8s had to stand on a chair, and they asked you questions, just to try to make you feel uncomfortable. Anyway, on the first day of camp we did push-ups until whatever time at night and then someone broke a bed and so we had to get up again and it just carried on with push-ups, and running around. Then there weren’t enough beds, so me and my friend didn’t get a bed for the first night. The second night, I think we found a mattress or something, so that was fine.
“And on another day, one of the counsellors at the farm where we were, went down to the river and did some activities and made rafts, and one of the oke’s shoes fell out of a bag into the water, but we didn’t see it, so we just carried on, going on the raft. Eventually we came back for lunch. The oke started shouting, ‘Someone threw my shoe in the water!’ He got all irritated, and said, ‘You better own up.’ And then the matrics decided that we had to find the shoe or everyone was going to be punished. So I just said, ‘Stuff it,’ and I stood up and I said, ‘Sorry, sir, it was me who chucked the shoe in the water.’ I did this because then only one person was going to do punishment. It stopped everyone else from getting punished.”
That was quite something, I thought. Noble and stupid but also possibly dangerous. I’d heard enough in my other interviews by now, to know what those matrics were capable of. But I had to remind myself that, at that time, Ben had no idea who he was dealing with.
“I was taken aside and had to run against a quad bike, and basically drop down, do push-ups, carry on running, drop down, do push-ups, carry on running … Ja, and that just carried on for a long time. I don’t know why they did it; trying to teach me to grow up, I guess, I don’t know.
“That night we had to sleep on the grass and one of the matrics came and started whacking everyone awake with a stick. Then we had to run down a hill and do a whole fitness thing every morning. The main thing they tried to teach us was that if one person doesn’t do something right, everybody pays for it. So if someone wasn’t doing a sit-up properly … they would just make us keep on going until everyone did it properly. And I think that’s when everyone started to learn what was going on, that if anyone does something wrong, everyone pays for it, and if it’s you, then everyone hates you. In their opinion, that’s how you got everyone in shape. So you try not to do anything wrong, otherwise everyone hates you. And ‘snitches get stitches’. They said, ‘You tell on us, and everyone’s going to hate you.’”
“And do they?” I asked.
“Yes. Yes, they do.”
Chapter 4
The Boy with the Marks on his Back
*James
Mariolette Bossert held a special place in her heart for *James. James was sweet and soft and he had been badly abused, not just by Collan, but by the matrics too. He was just one of the boys who contemplated suicide.
“He is so special, Sam,” said Mariolette. “I just want to protect him so much.”
And when I met him, I understood what she meant. He was quiet and thoughtful and very vulnerable. He sat with a small dog on his lap, and throughout the entire conversation, it kept looking up at him with concern. Dogs really are the only animals that can have your back without making a sound.
“He said to me that if his