The not-so-good old days of ‘melkkos’ and bread with pineapple jam

There is an incredibly interesting collection of Facebook pages dedicated to what its members call “The Good Old Days” in South Africa. Thousands belong to these groups and share posts and pictures of stuff that I haven’t spared a thought about for years. In some cases even forgetting that it existed at all.

But scrolling through these posts, well, other kinds of memories came flooding back of a time when every Friday, for two periods, all the boys were made to don khaki fatigues in white schools, and march from one end of the rugby field to another. Again, and again.

With push-ups in between and a lot of running and PT. It was torture, especially when it was all in aid of your fate as a conscript when kissing matric goodbye, in a system that was the antithesis of everything I believed in.

Veldskool was the same. In Standard Five and Eight we were all carted off to some far flung rural camp. There, you’d be fed slop like melkkos and bread with pineapple jam, which I still hate to this day.

Gippo guts was inevitable in between propaganda driven lectures about National Party policy, decentralisation, why homelands were important and, of course, that everything that PW Botha did was God’s will.

There we some fun times too, like stalking lanterns at night and other, what I realise now, semi-paramilitary activities dressed up as leadership training.

At 16, all the boys were carted off to a military camp. At these camps you’d learn how to shoot with an R1 and R4 machine gun, be taught basic bush survival skills, go through a load of torturous physical fitness regimes and ablute, socially, in a row of long drop toilets.

They’d give us meals in tin cans; without a can opener. We had to use sharp rocks and knives to open the stuff. And, of course, endure hours of lectures about the Angolan border war and why PW’s finger swag was God’s own gospel.

But at least we got to shoot a rifle that looked just like Sylvester Stallone had in the Rambo movies. I remember not being able to go into a shopping mall or a cinema without being screened by a metal detector wand

I remember the bag checks and airport like security at cinemas. And I remember the urban legend that HIV infected needles were placed upright on movie seats to infect as many people as possible.

At school, from primary through to high school, fire drills and different kinds of alarms for bomb scares and the like were practiced at least once a month. Posters were ever-present on walls and in libraries educating everyone about the different kinds of bombs that you might encounter. Limpid mines, grenades, what illegal firearms look like, even landmine identification was hammered into children from age six and up.

It was not a fun time. But scarily, we all thought it was normal. It was the nightmare not only of the oppressed majority but caused the militarisation and radicalisation of thousands of young minds. I went to school with many of them.