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    Segomotso and the Dressmaker
    Segomotso and the Dressmaker
    Segomotso and the Dressmaker
    Ebook528 pages8 hours

    Segomotso and the Dressmaker

    By Vincent Gray

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    While meeting Segomotso changed Joab's life forever that strange magical meeting was only part of Joab's story. The story of the 'Dress Maker' is also a story of his deconstructive reading of John Calvin. Joab's reading of Calvin's work takes the texts apart along the structural 'fault lines' created by the ambiguities inherent in the central concepts of Calvin's theology.
    While the plot of the story reaches its climax with the unfolding of the relationship between Segomotso and Joab the dressmaker, there are other parallel plots in the narrative of their story. The deconstruction of John Calvin's theology is woven into the story as a background tapestry with its own plot, making this narrative a typically South African story. The other subplot involves the systematic deconstruction of gender. Joab discovers that 'queer sex' is actually the norm in Nature. Both the fluidity of gender and the predominance of 'queer sex' in Nature means that being 'queer' is actually quite normal.
    Joab who is an unusual character also finds himself because of military conscription entangled in the border war in Namibia and in the SADF invasion of Angola. His experiences of the wars leaves an indelible imprint on his psyche.
    Joab Badenhorst also lands up being a theological and philosophical student at the University of Potchefstroom. As a high school pupil and also as an undergraduate student he starts his journey as a cross-dressing transvestite. His cross-dressing escapades reaches a catastrophic climax in Hillbrow on a Saturday night in the Spring of 1977.
    But back to Segomotso.
    He first meets Segomotso who is a devout Catholic during Lent in 1977, which turned out to be another horrendous year in South Africa. It was the year in which Steve Biko was murdered by the South African security police. It was the year after the 1976 Soweto students uprising. It was two years after the 1975 South African invasion of Angola. 1977 was also the year of the macabre political murder of the Smits. In a real sense the story of Segomotso the domestic maid and Joab the dressmaker is a remarkable journey of mental and physical metamorphosis. They both underwent a special kind of metamorphosis as a result of the way in which their relationship evolved. Metamorphosis as a kind of second birth also opens the doors to a second chance in life. In some cosmological sense a second chance in life often turns out to be a kind of personal redemption or salvation. Redemption as a multi-dimensional experience of liberating personal transformation is not necessarily the same as a religious phenomenon of personal salvation or something as narrowly parochial as the idea of being born again. In the end Segomotso’s and Joab’s process of metamorphosis was triggered by a string of dramatic events which were uniquely South African.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherVincent Gray
    Release dateNov 1, 2015
    ISBN9780620673785
    Segomotso and the Dressmaker
    Author

    Vincent Gray

    As a son of a miner, I was born in Johannesburg, South Africa. I grew up in the East Rand mining town of Boksburg. I matriculated from Boksburg High School. After high school, I was conscripted into the South African Defence Force for compulsory national military service when I was 17 years old. After my military service, I went to the University of the Witwatersrand. After graduating with a BSc honours degree I worked for a short period for the Department of Agriculture in Potchefstroom as an agronomist. As an obligatory member of the South African Citizen Miltary Force, I was called up to do 3-month camps on the 'Border' which was the theatre of the so-called counter-insurgency 'Bush War'. In between postgraduate university studies I also worked as a wage clerk on the South African Railways and as a travelling chemical sales rep. In my career as an academic, I was a molecular biologist at the University of the Witwatersrand, where I lectured courses in microbiology, molecular biology, biotechnology and evolutionary biology. On the research side, I was involved in genomics, and plant and microbial biotechnology. I also conducted research into the genomics of strange and weird animals known as entomopathogenic nematodes. I retired in 2019, however, I am currently an honorary professor at the University of the Witwaterand and I also work as a research writing consultant for the University of Johannesburg.

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      Segomotso and the Dressmaker - Vincent Gray

      CHAPTER 1

      In the year 1977 everything came to a head in Joab Badenhorst’s life. It was the year in which Joab’s life changed forever in ways that he would never have dreamt possible.

      The year 1977 was the third year in a string of unusually bad years starting with the 1975 SADF invasion of Angola in which Joab was called up for 3 months of military duty as a citizen force soldier. The debacle of the Angolan invasion which ended in an ignominious retreat was followed by the Soweto student uprising of June 1976 which opened up an internal front of youthful black resistance to Apartheid in just about every native location within South Africa, and then of course there was 1977.

      In 1977 the black consciousness activist Steve Biko died apparently as a result of being severely assaulted while in the custody of the security police. Also in November 1977 Robert Smit, a prominent National Party politician, and his wife Jean-Cora were murdered in their home in Springs. To this day the murder, a murder so macabre, so bizarre, has never been solved. It remains a gruesome enigma, a chilling riddle, defying all attempts that have been made to solve its mystery.

      There were rumours implicating the Nationalist Party in the murder, but at the end of November of 1977, the Nationalist Party won the white general election with the best results the party had ever achieved, putting to rest the Government’s worries that the electorate had lost faith in the Nationalist Party. Any sane person would have concluded that the events of 1975, 1976, and 1977 would have made the white electorate more introspective about the political future of South Africa. But things remained the same and business in South Africa remained unusual as it had usually been the case for a very long time, which was three hundred years or so.

      At the end of 1977, despite everything, the fortunes of the Nationalist Party could not have looked brighter; they had received a huge vote of confidence from the white electorate. There was no mistaking that they had received a massive endorsement to remain on course with their political agenda for South Africa and southern Africa. In fact, the electorate had given the Nationalist Party a blank cheque to embark on any military adventure or any kind of repressive actions that would preserve the status quo and guarantee that the ‘South African way of white life’ would continue as before.

      The whites had made their cross on the ballot paper, but Joab did not bother to vote. Joab lived out on the fringes in a no man’s land beyond the barricades of the Afrikaner laager.

      The year 1977 was also the year in which Herman Dooyeweerd passed away. Of course, Joab was saddened by the news when a friend informed him on the evening of February 12, 1977, that the great Calvinist philosopher had died.

      Finally, the year 1977 was also the year in which Joab’s mother passed away after her business and all her assets were sequestrated when she defaulted on the payments for a massive bank loan.

      At the time of his mother’s untimely death in January 1977, Joab was doing his Master’s degree (MA) in philosophy at Potchefstroom University for Christian Higher Education where he had also completed his undergraduate degree majoring in philosophy and theology. He had also completed sub-majors in Greek and Hebrew and managed to pick up credits in Biology, Psychology, and Sociology.

      Even though he was the most unlikely of possible candidates for the ministry, it had been his original intention to study towards becoming a dominee (minister) in the Gereformeerde Kerk (Reformed Church). Being highly individualistic, unusually eccentric for a white male Afrikaner, and also gifted with a creative and innovative mind, especially when it came to dress making, it did not take long before he began to explore his own subversive and critical readings of the writings of John Calvin.

      Joab’s readings of John Calvin in the opinion of his academic mentors seemed to be extremely dangerous and had transgressed into a theological minefield, which also represented a kind of theological no man’s land for the South African theological establishment, and therefore represented a kind of forbidden intellectual territory into which no one dared follow him.

      Of course, when his interpretations of the logical and philosophical implications of the works of Calvin’s broke with the orthodoxy of his professors, he realized that as a theological maverick he would not be acceptable as a dominee in the conservative ecclesiastical establishment of the Gereformeerde Kerk.

      He found himself wondering alone as a perplexed pilgrim in a theological wilderness filled with paradoxes, riddles, contradictions, enigmas, and conundrums that defied any simplistic solution. The simple truth was that no one could comprehend the mind of God nor fully grasp the ultimate meaning of His revelation as disclosed in the Bible. For Joab, all doctrinally motivated readings of the Old Testament and New Testament were contested readings fraught with all kinds of disagreements and controversies. Any authentic reading of the Bible had to be dialectical. While he accepted that God’s ultimate revelation in the form of infallible theological truths was embedded in the various books that formed the Judeo-Christian Biblical canon, those truths could only be accessed dialectically.

      In his opinion, no single individual reader could claim a privileged monopoly of interpretation. The existence of the Jewish Talmud was proof of this. In addition, there was no single individual reader who could claim to have attained a full comprehension of the ultimate message of revelation that had been woven by God like a golden thread through the textual fabric of the multiple polyvalent patchwork of individual texts that made up the library of the Bible.

      The search for infallible theological truths was the reason for the never ending commentary on the Bible. Calvin, and also Luther, had spent their lives engaged in endless commentary on the books of the Bible. The Bible has proven to be an inexhaustible quarry for every conceivable doctrine. For the many individual narratives that were embedded in the Biblical canon, there was no getting to the final and definitive meaning of each story. Each story had its multi-threaded entanglements; entanglements which bound the written narrative to the unsaid and the unwritten; entanglements which bound the written ostensible narrative with its hidden unreadable and unwritten and unsaid subtexts, subtexts which subverted its story line and plots with all kinds of unresolvable ambiguities. Even the final meaning of a single verse in the Bible has proved to be inexhaustible.

      Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated.

      Did God really hate Esau?

      Why would God hate Esau? He never gave any reasons why He should hate Esau. How was it possible for God to hate? Hate is such a human emotion; it is a very human passion.

      In His omnipotence and sovereignty, was God deliberately and providentially involved in every finite contingent event that had ever occurred in the history of the Universe?

      Does God in His providential rule arbitrary decide according to His inscrutable and sovereign will the outcome of everything, even the amount of milk in a mother’s breast, as Calvin wrote in his Institutes, ‘…that some mothers have full and abundant breasts, but others are almost dry, as God wills to fill one more liberally, but another more meagrely’.

      Why is it that the exercise of God’s will has been made to appear to be so arbitrary? Could it be true that God actually rules the Universe by arbitrary decree? Was God’s legislative activity and governance of everything in the Universe based on nothing but whim alone? Or was there more to God’s will than arbitrary whim? Calvin’s explanation for the apparent arbitrariness of God’s will was that the councils of God were secretive, hidden, and inscrutable, therefore beyond man’s feeble powers of reasoning and comprehension.

      Does anything happen independently of God’s decree? Or did God prearrange the occurrence of all future events by arbitrary decree even before the foundations of the Universe were laid?

      Was it by God’s arbitrary decree that Biko was to be murdered on the 12th of September 1977? Was it by God’s arbitrary decree that the Smits were to be murdered on the 22nd of November 1977? Was it by God’s arbitrary decree that Vorster’s Nationalist Party would win the general election in 1977?

      These were the kinds of questions that Joab found himself wrestling with at the end of 1977. How was one to conceive the relationship between God and the Universe, and between God and the World, and between God and time? If God’s nature turned out to be completely and utterly unknowable, then of course there was no logical, rational, or empirical way of conceptualizing any meaningful relationship between God and the Universe or between God and man.

      Was there any kind of connection or relationship between Reason (with a big R) and God’s decrees and God’s providence?

      If God created and ruled the Universe by arbitrary decree then it is quite clear from a purely logical point of view that God cannot be known in any meaningful way. This much was clear to Joab, and it was especially true if you happened to be a logically consistent Calvinist, which would be a very rare feat.

      While maintaining a deep intellectual interest in the works of John Calvin, he gradually drifted away from a strict adherence to the Reformed Faith and began to plough furrows in different intellectual fields of theological endeavour, including the Catholic writers. He also discovered the writings of theological thinkers like Karl Barth, Rudolf Bultmann, Paul Tillich and more modern theologians like Jurgen Moltmann and Wolfhart Pannenberg.

      Joab Badenhorst's independence of mind was possibly due to the fact that he did not have a typical, or even what would normally be considered to be a proper Afrikaner upbringing. He was the only child of a mother who came from a working class background, but who had managed to escape sliding down the slippery slope into complete proletarianization as a poor white; she was born and grew up in Malvern, Johannesburg. His mother married late in life. Through her marriage, she was finally able to transcend her previous life of poverty as a lowly and poorly paid seamstress. His grandmother had also been a seamstress, and his grandfather, who was an incurable autodidact, had also worked his entire life as a carpenter and bricklayer. His grandmother and grandfather had been staunch and loyal supporters of the Labour Party. As admirers of Solly Sachs, they were not typical Afrikaners. Seeking a better life, his grandparents moved from Malvern in Johannesburg to Potchefstroom in1949.

      In contrast to his working class grandparents and mother, Joab’s father, Mr Hein Badenhorst, was a successful businessman in Potchefstroom, who had also married very late in life. He owned a female garment manufacturing company and Joab’s mother and grandmother started working in his factory as seamstresses. Joab’s mother managed to become the shop floor manager in the factory and then at the age of 38 she married Hein Badenhorst who was at that time 63 years old. He had been a bachelor all his life. Mr Badenhorst senior died very suddenly and unexpectantly from a heart attack when Joab was barely 2 years old.

      Mrs Badenhorst who inherited her husband’s estate took over the running of the factory and made a great success of it until for reasons beyond her control she went bankrupt. All her big bulk buying customers abandoned her for cheaper and lower-quality suppliers. She was left in the lurch holding a huge inventory of fabric that she had bought on overdraft. Unable to repay the bank overdraft she lost the business and was left with nothing, not even her home escaped the predations of the bank. After giving birth to Joab her long struggle with her weight and high cholesterol problems had begun. The financial catastrophe was too great for her to cope with and she died of a stroke on the 5th of January 1977 leaving Joab who had become a perpetual student with no financial support.

      Even though her husband, Hein Badenhorst, had been a church-going man all his life, she had her suspicions about him. He was a good-looking man, so why did he only marry when he was over 60 years old? Being a single parent after her husband’s death and having the responsibility of running the garment business, she had no option but to bring Joab with her to the factory every day. He grew up surrounded by women working in the female garment-making industry. As a child he played with bits of fabric offcuts, pretending to make dresses. Even while Joab was still a young boy his mother Mrs Badenhorst began to worry that he was going to be like his deceased father. There were all kinds of disturbing signs that caused her no end of distress and worry.

      The young boy insisted on playing with dolls and then he only wanted to wear dresses. He was incredibly stubborn about wanting to wear dresses as a young child. He had uncontrollable tantrums when she refused to let him wear a dress. Burdened with all the stresses and worries of running the garment factory, she did not have the emotional strength to fight with her indomitable son. So from the age of two, every morning she would dress him up as a little girl with lace socks, a frilly dress, and frilly panties, tying bows and ribbons to his long black hair which he refused to let her cut, and that’s the way he would walk around the whole day in the factory much to the gaiety, laughter, and delight of the black women, who were always greatly entertained by this very strange little white boy who was always busy collecting fabric offcuts from the factory floor and then retiring to a corner to play a game of dress making with his collection of dolls. His mother began to blame herself for the way her boy was turning out. With her long hours at the factory, it was impossible for her to give him the attention she felt he deserved.

      Whenever she confided in her parents about her boy’s strange preoccupations, her parents always reprimanded her with the words:

      "Los die kind uit. Hy sal van self reg kom."

      (Leave the child alone, he will come right by himself.)

      They tried to reassure her with the constant refrain that the boy will eventually come right, but for the time being, just leave him be.

      Joab’s mother reminded them that Joab’s behaviour was against the injunctions of the Bible regarding the dress codes for men and women.

      "Die Bybel sê in Deuteronomium ‘n vrou mag geen mansklere dra nie, en ‘n man mag geen vrouensklere aantrek nie; want almal wat dit doen, is vir die HERE jou God ‘n gruwel."

      (In the Bible in Deuteronomy, it is said that it is forbidden for a woman to wear men’s clothes, and it is forbidden for a man to wear women’s clothes. It is an abomination to the Lord our God.)

      But the grandparents always came to Joab’s defence.

      "Jy kan nie alles wat die Bybel sê glo nie."

      (You cannot believe everything that is written in the Bible.)

      This only made her feel more exasperated.

      "Julle gaan almal reguit hel toe."

      (You will all go straight to hell.)

      His grandparents always managed to come to their grandson’s defence with an alternative Biblical proof text which they interpreted as it suited them for the occasion.

      "Die Bybel se ook dat die HERE God het vir die mens en sy vrou rokke van vel gemaak en hulle dit aangetrek. So as ek my Bybel reg verstaan dan het die HERE rokke vir die man en vrou gemaak."

      (The Bible also says that the Lord God made ‘dresses’ (rokke) out of animal skins for Adam and his wife, and they put on the dresses. If I understand my Bible correctly then God made dresses for both the man and the woman.)

      The two old grandparents genuinely loved their grandson and doted over him. They indulged him and even seemed to encourage his every whim. They never discouraged his interest in make-up, dresses, and dolls, and consequently, as a small boy, they did nothing to stop him from clogging around the house in his mother’s or grandmother’s high heels with a bra draped like some absurd oversized grotesque necklace around his neck onto to his chest.

      Not a single day or night went by without Mrs Badenhorst praying on her knees, pleading with the Father Almighty, that Joab would not grow up to be a transvestite. Initially, she was too ashamed to let him go to Sunday school on Sundays and always left him in the care of the domestic servant who would have to play dressmaking with him and his dolls in the backyard.

      She confessed in her fervent prayers that she would be happy if he rather turned out to be a homosexual like his father, rather than a cross-dressing transvestite, whose gender pretensions and sexual ambiguity would be explored to the very extremes of the erotically aroused imagination.

      The latter was her greatest fear. It was unimaginable that her son would grow up to be a dress-wearing transvestite and chase after men like some bitch on heat.

      To her great relief, once he started school he began wearing the required school clothes for boys. But to get him to wear the school uniform for boys proved to be a nightmare. It was only after an emotionally exhausting struggle that almost resulted in her having a nervous breakdown that she finally managed to persuade him to give up the idea of wearing a girl’s gymslip to school.

      But then to her horror, in grade one he wanted to become a ballerina and be dressed up in a white ballet tutu and white pantyhose like some of the girls in his class who had started ballet lessons. After his endless whining and nagging about wanting to do ballet, she eventually relented and for the sake of peace, she enrolled him in an afternoon class for ballet lessons. To her dismay, he took to ballet like a fish to water.

      The ballet teacher expressed delight in his aptitude and ability as a ballet dancer and so with her encouragement he continued with ballet dancing until he finished high school. His ballet teacher even told Mr Badenhorst on many occasions that Joab had the talent, creative imagination, and ability as a male ballet dancer to be the next Rudolf Nureyev.

      Apart from his fantasies of being a ballerina as a young school boy, she had to contend with his fantasy cross-dressing role-playing which not only disturbed her but also frightened her so much that she was afraid to take him to see any Saturday matinee at the movies. Inevitably, after seeing shows like Snow White or Sleeping Beauty he would for days on end become obsessed with pretending to be Snow White or Sleeping Beauty. He showed no interest in playing Billy the Kid, Zorro, or Davy Crockett the king of the wild frontier.

      In all this time, throughout his primary and high school years, he never lost his interest in sewing and making dresses. As an adolescent boy, he spent all his free time in the factory designing dresses, cutting patterns, and sewing. A lot of the fashion lines that left the factory floors were his creations. He went around perpetually with a measuring tape hanging around his neck, even when at home.

      She viewed his sudden interest in girls when he became a teenager as a miracle straight from heaven, an answer to a mother’s persistent prayers. As a teenager, he developed into a very handsome lad with attractive well-defined features, thick black hair, and dark brown eyes, that were alert, intelligent and kind. He had inherited the darker than average skin tone of his maternal grandfather. He was just a bit below average height with a slim but strong sinuously built frame. From years of ballet, there was a natural suppleness and grace to his movements.

      His grandmother often joked that Joab had inherited bushman blood from his grandfather’s side of the family. His grandfather who spent most of his life working as an artisan under the blazing African sun had never suffered from sunburn in his entire life. He was one of those Afrikaners whose skin had a darker hue than the average white skin tone. So there must have been some truth in the belief that Joab’s grandfather had bushman blood and that Joab had inherited bushman genes.

      All in all, he was a beautiful child. Despite his indomitable character which he must have inherited from his grandmother, he grew up to have a pleasant and likable friendly manner. Yet there was always that indomitable side to his nature and he could become very stubborn. While he easily made friends with both boys and girls from within in his age group, he always remained slightly aloof, and never shared with anyone any intimate opinions or feelings. So in a sense, he remained a bit of a mystery to his peers, both male and female. It worried his mother that while he did show an interest in girls, he could never keep a girlfriend for very long because of his inordinate interest in women’s clothing and womanly things, which obviously frightened the girls off.

      What she did not know was that as a teenager at high school, he had become infatuated with members of both sexes. But she knew that as a teenager he would dress up almost every afternoon in teenage girl dresses while she was away at work. In the presence of his grandparents and the domestic servant, he would wander shamelessly around the house in high heels and miniskirts, dressed up like a real teenage slut. To her embarrassment, she knew that his bedroom cupboard was full of dresses, blouses, and skirts that he had made. She decided that the less she knew about what he was doing while alone at the home in afternoons, the better.

      He had taken over his grandmother’s old treadle Singer sewing machine. He moved the sewing machine to his bedroom. The machine which was mounted on a small polished wooden table was supported by an ornate wrought iron stand. An inlaid ruler was fixed into the table top and beneath the table on both sides were beautifully curved drawers in which he kept reels of cotton, zips, needles, and buttons. The machine itself was adorned with gold decals. For hours on end, he kept himself busy with the vintage Singer.

      The machine purred like a contented lioness as his feet deftly peddled the treadle while his long thin but elegant fingers worked with great dexterity while moving the fabric under the needle.

      He first made sketches of his dress designs, and then he drew up the patterns. From his carefully designed drawings, he would cut out the dress patterns. He was in all seriousness an artistic genius and exceptionally capable ‘seamstress’ when it came to dress design and dressmaking. He knew how to fashion the flow and fall of the fabric so that it emphasized and accentuated the sensual and erotic form of a female body especially when he wore the finished garment.

      From early childhood, wearing dresses had always been pretty much a normal every day, preoccupation for Joab. Most of the time he simply enjoyed wearing girl’s clothes while pretending to be a young girl. In fact, his non-judgemental and easy-going grandparents who were living with them had readily adapted to the pattern and custom of treating him as if he were their granddaughter.

      However, with the onset of puberty wearing dresses was no longer merely an endearing girlish pastime that he had previously enjoyed with the unadulterated sensibility of pure innocence that was typical of his prepubescent childhood.

      Once he became a teenager, wearing dresses started to become intensely exciting and addictively pleasurable in a very sexualized and erotic fashion. He began to experience the pleasing sensations of tumescence when wearing high heels, stockings, female lingerie, and dresses. The erotic fragrances of feminine perfumes, the sensual textures of female fabrics against his skin, the sensation of taunt nylon stockings, and the silky feel of female undergarments put him in a state of pleasant arousal that he had not experienced before.

      As a thirteen-year-old teenager in standard six at the Potchefstroom Gimnasium Hoerskool, his career as a cross-dresser had begun in all earnest. After school while at home in the afternoons, his cross-dressing escapades took on a whole new dimension. He started succumbing to all kinds of sexual fantasies and erotic daydreams about engaging in heterosexual sex with males and homosexual or lesbian sex with females. He experienced the desire to fondle the genitalia of males and he also fantasized about male anal penetration.

      His mind began to be invaded by all kinds of intrusive thoughts including those in which he imagined himself being mounted from behind while being fully dressed up as a female. He struggled in vain to smother or drive out these thoughts from his mind. But to no avail, they overwhelmed him like a raging torrent, taking possession of his imagination. No matter how hard he tried, he could not block out or not stop the erotic preoccupations which seemed to have taken on a life of their own inside his head.

      Mrs Badenhorst, the grandparents, and the bemused domestic servant could only perceive the external primary and secondary properties of the cross-dressing phenomenon that was on public display in the Badenhorst home. What was going on inside his head remained an impenetrable mystery to them. Every day after school he changed into a different outfit; always selecting one that corresponded exactly to his mood. He spent an inordinate amount of time in his room getting dressed up for the afternoon. What was astonishing was the atmosphere of apparent utter normality and clockwork routine that seemed to prevail in the Badenhorst home.

      This atmosphere of normality in the home was going to be a huge determinative factor in Joab’s eventual self-acceptance of what he had become. It was the ideal environment or incubator for nurturing the development of a budding transvestite.

      Joab’s grandfather, the inveterate autodidact, was a self-educated man, who had read somewhere about something on almost every possible subject matter, plus he had a remarkable memory, and on top of that, he was also gifted with a creative and imaginative talent for embellishing on any topic, with some of his own innovative ideas, theories, and hypotheses.

      As an autodidact, he had learnt to be an open-minded man, but once he was convinced of the correctness of the facts he would defend his theory or hypotheses with confidence, conviction, and humour. And in the case of Joab’s cross-dressing, he strongly believed that there were similarities in what Joab was doing with what had become accepted as a ‘natural’ cultural and social institution in many other cultures of various aboriginal natives which included some tribes of America Indians.

      The old man discovered in his readings that cross-dressing or transvestism was an ancient social and cultural institution. Cross-dressing or transvestism had existed from the dawn of time as a common and recurring occurrence in all ethnic groups and cultures throughout the world. He argued with great persuasion that transvestism as an anthropological phenomenon had been accommodated and integrated as an acceptable social institution into the structure and functioning of many societies that were anthropologically speaking, quite diverse.

      And thus, he felt strongly that there was no compelling reason why Joab’s predilection for cross-dressing should not be accepted and accommodated as something quite natural.

      There would always be some men who want to dress up as women and act like women, and he believed it had been that way ever since man evolved from the apes. And he was sure that a rational reason could be found for this state of affairs. Why else would there always be, generation after generation, some men who wanted to be transvestites, wear skirts, and chase after men?

      The grandmother agreed with this sentiment. She agreed that transvestites are people who were ‘driven’ by an animal-like instinct to dress up in the apparel of the opposite sex. They were thus naturally compelled by their innate instincts and innate drives to behave in a manner that was typical of the opposite sex. She had seen this kind of phenomenon for herself with Joab. Joab had not learnt the cross-dressing behaviour. Nor did he start wearing dresses because of any kind of social conditioning. And on top of all this, no amount of social and psychological conditioning could stop him from wanting to wear dresses.

      You cannot stop Nature, nor should one interfere with Nature, was all she could say about the matter. His wanting to wear dresses was something innate, and that was that, end of the story.

      While she and the grandfather believed this to be the case, for reasons of tact, and for wanting to maintain peace in the home, they refrained from openly defending this theory. They just tactfully commiserated with Mrs Badenhorst while at the same time undermining her authority over Joab behind her back.

      Because transvestism was natural, something which Nature determined, they both agreed that there was nothing intrinsically wrong or bad with being a transvestite, and when it came to Joab’s upbringing, it was best not to interfere with the course of Nature. Nature in her wisdom knew what was best for Joab. And it was not advisable to interfere with the superior wisdom of Nature.

      In spite of their good intentions to be as tactful as possible, there were times while Joab was sleeping peacefully, that his grandfather and grandmother argued with Joab’s mom, in hushed tones, late into the night, they tried to convince her that transvestism was a natural anthropological phenomenon in humans. As a firm believer in Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, Joab’s grandfather’s speculated endlessly on the biological functional and social adaptive significance of transvestism.

      He told Joab’s mother that it was a well-founded scientific fact that up to 3% of all males in any society were born transvestites, who instinctively wanted to be dressed up as girls from as early as the age of two, just as was the case with Joab. She was also informed that in Samoan society people accepted the existence of a third gender called ‘fa’afafine’ which meant ‘the way of women’. The fa’afafines were transvestites. In Samoan society, the fa’afafine were not thought of as being homosexual in the Western way of thinking. While most fa’afafines did choose to have sexual relations exclusively with men, a small constant minority of fa’afafines did engage in sex with women, and so it was possible that there also existed bisexual fa’afafines.

      "So Joab gaan nie regkom nie, hy gaan ‘n fa’afafine word?" His mother sighed.

      (So Joab will never actually become normal, he is going to become a fa’afafine?)

      "Wat is die verskil tussen ‘n homoseksueel en ‘n transvestite?" She wanted to know.

      (What is the difference between a homosexual and a transvestite?)

      "Dit lyk asof daar verskillende soorte transvestites bestaan, hulle kan homoseksueel, of heteroseksueel, of biseksueel wees," he answered.

      (Well it seems that there are indeed different kinds of transvestites, they can be homosexual or heterosexual or even bisexual.)

      "Wel dan is daar nog hoop. Miskien is hy ’n heteroseksuele transvestite," (Well then there is still hope. Maybe he is a heterosexual transvestite) she mused hopefully, praying that it was just a passing phase, something that would wear off with time.

      At least, if he were a heterosexual transvestite he could still be slightly normal in that he would be attracted to women and not to men, she thought to herself. She herself could not imagine having a relationship with a man all dolled up as a woman. She shuddered inwardly at the ghastly thought.

      Mrs Badenhorst had great difficulty in resigning herself to the facts about Joab’s condition, even after hearing all the details about the stories of the Samoan transvestites and other kinds of exotic transvestites that populated the various tropical islands, jungles, forests, and vast prairie plains of the world. If the world was so full of transvestites, then why were there so few among the Afrikaners, she wanted to know.

      Every day Joab would cycle the five kilometres home from school arriving home at precisely 14.20 on the dot. After getting back from school he would eat the lunch that had been prepared for him at the kitchen table, and then he would dress up. After getting dressed he would start his homework at 15.30, usually at the dining room table that adjoined the lounge in an open plan arrangement. He would sit at the dining room table while his grandparents sat in the lounge, and after doing his homework he would join them in the lounge and they would spend the remainder of the afternoon talking about mundane things and various topics relating to current affairs.

      In the afternoon after doing his homework, he also spent a considerable amount of time paging through fashion magazines and women’s magazines.

      When it came to school sport, he avoided the obligatory requirement that boys were expected to attend all afternoon rugby practices. Ballet classes always conveniently clashed with rugby and cricket. But it proved impossible to abscond from athletics, both inter-house and inter-school athletic meetings. It was inadvertently discovered that he had a natural inborn physical ability for middle-distance running. It turned out to everyone’s surprise and amazement that he was gifted with natural stamina and physical strength when it came to running the 800 and 1 500 meter events. Everyone who saw him run ended up believing that he did indeed have Bushman blood running in his veins, it would also definitely explain his darker than average skin tone. He received his colour blazer for athletics and was made a school prefect at the end of standard nine.

      So all in all, Joab turned out to be a model Potchefstroom Afrikaans school boy, excelling both academically in the classroom and on the sports field.

      On his aanneeming en voorstelling (confirmation) in the Gereformeerde Kerk, his grandfather gave him a second-hand copy of Eric G Jay’s book The Existence of God which he had found in some second-hand bookstore. It was a commentary on St Thomas Aquinas’s five ways of demonstrating the existence of God.

      Like most of his male high school peers, after matriculating, he decided to complete his twelve months of national military service before going to university.

      CHAPTER 2

      For the past four weeks, the six platoons of A (Alpha) and B (Bravo) Companies had been drilled relentlessly from 8.00 until 12.00 by permanent force (PF) non-commissioned officers (NCOs) of the South African Defence Force (SADF).

      Clouds of fine dust kicked up by the stumping of many boots hung suspended like a haze of red fog in the warm late summer morning air that was constantly punctuated by the unremitting reverberations of guttural bellowing and the baying of drill commands, always in Afrikaans.

      Afdeling, afdeling….AAAN….DOOG!

      (Squad…. Attention!)

      Afdeling, afdeling…regs op die linker flank….VOOOOR….WAAARTS!

      (Squad….forward march!)

      LIKS, YAK, LIKS, YAK, LIKS, YAK, LOINKS…

      (Left, right, left, right, left!)

      For the past 12 weeks, Joab had gone through all the necessary and obligatory motions of his basic training in a state of bliss that made him totally oblivious to the merciless impositions of all kinds of strenuous rigours that were designed to break them down and re-mould them from scratch into obedient fighting automatons.

      At the end of basics, he had survived, fully intact, and impervious to anything that the full might of the SADF was capable of throwing at him. In the end, his indomitable spirit, characterized by fierce independence of mind and opinion had prevailed in the purgatory-like underworld of gladiatorial obscenity that characterized infantry training in the South African Defence Force.

      Fortunately for Joab, the destination of his military call-up was in his own hometown at the military base of the 3rd SA Infantry Battalion in Potchefstroom, otherwise known as 3 SAI. On the day that he had to klaar in (compulsory conscription into the army) for his national military service, his mother had conveniently, on her way to work dropped him off with his suitcase at the main gate of the Potchefstroom military base. After walking through the main gates of the military base he was directed to the assembly point where the new January conscription intake had to wait for further orders.

      At 8.00 am he and a few other new conscripts from Potchefstroom congregated outside the Regimental Sergeant Major’s (RSM) office. They ended up waiting for most of the day in the sun on the lawn outside the RSM’s office at the Company HQ for the arrival of the rest of the national servicemen intake that had been drafted to 3 SA Infantry Battalion (3 SAI Battalion). Just after three o clock in the afternoon, a long column of bewildered-looking conscripts marching in ranks of three, carrying suitcases or bags, and dressed in civilian clothing, passed through the main gates.

      Amidst blood-curdling screams, shrill ear-piercing shrieks, unremitting barking and hoarse shouting mingled with a flood of obscenities flowing like a raging torrent from the saliva-spraying mouths of purple-faced permanent force non-commissioned officers (NCOs), the column came to a spluttering shambolic halt in front of the RSM’s office.

      Joab marvelled at the repertoire of barely decipherable primordial sounds that could be trumpeted at a deafening volume from the human male larynx. No animal on earth could match the quality of noise that human males could make. The human larynx had turned out to be an astonishing feat of evolutionary adaptation.

      Joab scanned the bewildered and dejected demeanours of the teenage poesgesigte (cunt faces), which was the designation that NCOs used to describe their sorry faces.

      The frequency with which the word poes (cunt) burst from the male military larynx at full volume was rampant in the extreme. The incessant shock waves of this all-pervasive sexualized expletive defined the culture and character of the South African military ethos.

      Turning to Joab and the other conscripts standing on the lawn in front of the RSM’s office an NCO bellowed at them:

      "TREE AAN julle vuil uile, roer julle vuil gatte julle klomp poesgesigte."

      (You bunch of dirty dogs form up with the rest of the company, move your sorry asses you bunch of cunt faces.)

      Immediately Joab and all the other Potchefstroom hometown boys began to tree aan (joining the ranks of the company) by squeezing into the gaps between the newly arrived column of fresh conscripts. They were then marched off to what looked like prefab classrooms with doors marked ingang (entrance) and uitgang (exit). Leaving their suitcases on the road they were ordered by barking and shrieking NCOs to assemble with their call-up papers and ID cards into a long queue outside the entrance door of the first prefab classroom.

      Passing through the door the queue wound slowly through a large room filled with rows of steel foldup tables. At the tables their army registration details were processed and documented.

      When it was Joab’s turn at the first table a national serviceman lieutenant barely a year older than Joab looked up at him with a bored expression:

      "Jou diensplig nommer poesvoël."

      (What is national service number little cunt fucking penis)

      It was the first time in his life that he had been personally addressed by a remark that was intentionally meant to be demeaning, disparaging, and humiliating. He was surprised that it had stung him.

      He was also surprised how the ironic combination of poes and voël (literally means bird but used as slang for penis) as a derogatory designation intended to be a putdown, actually had a ring of truth.

      The feminizing appellation ‘poes’ was meant to belittle and question their masculinity. They were like women, they were stupid, clumsy, weak, frantic, bewildered, frightened, emotional, and sorry-faced, and they were going to be fucked up big time now, this was their collective fate, to be fucked good and solid. And then at the end of being fucked up, they themselves would become transformed into poes fuckers, every one of them.

      Even though he felt annoyed at his over-sensitive reaction to being called a ‘voël’ (penis), he managed to shrug off the offence as he moved along the line.

      After exiting with their new green military ID books, they queued again, this time at the entrance of the second classroom for their medical examination, tetanus injection, and blood typing.

      While staring with a natural curiosity at all the activities going on about him, it was not long before Joab began to notice that he had attracted the attention of another conscript. Standing a few places behind him stood a smiling fresh-faced young man with a thick mop of sandy coloured hair. His first thought was ‘do I know this person, have we met before?’

      He had an attractive face with green eyes, sensuous lips, and freckles. He wore his hair with a boyish fringe over his forehead. He seemed to be 3 or 4 cm below average height and had a shapely lithe and winsome body that promised to be both soft and firm when touched. It was a body that had not been conditioned to endure strenuous physical exertion. In the eyes of Joab, it was a body that was shaped and contoured from head to toes for sensual pleasure. It was the kind of male body that he could envisage as being dressed up in a tight-fitting shining glittering sheath of erotic fabric.

      After having their eyes tested, pulse and blood pressure taken, and their blood samples drawn, they stripped down to their underpants for further medical examination. Joab turned around once more to catch a glimpse of the sandy-haired conscript who was now also standing in his scants. He instantly caught Joab’s approving eye, and was unable to hide his pleasure as he smiled broadly back at Joab. While looking at Joab he shrugged his shapely shoulders, raised his eyebrows and rolled back his eyes as if to say ‘kan jy dit glo!’ (can you actually believe this!)

      Once outside he immediately befriended Joab with the dramatic

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