The Karma of Violence

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Glen Retief

Abstract

When I was twelve years old and skinny as a grasslands cheetah, my parents sent me away to boarding-school. They had no choice in the matter. We lived in a staff village in a game park more than an hour away from the nearest secondary school, so boarding-school was both an unavoidable and unremarkable rite of passage for all of those entering Standard Six (eighth grade). One baking hot, glaring Monday afternoon in January 1983, the day before the start of the school year, they drove me to Nelspruit, a shady farming town on the main road between Johannesburg and Mozambique. Here, they dropped me at a complex of red brick buildings in a newly-built first-floor dormitory still smelling of concrete dust, builders’ tape and paint, and lined with metal lockers and identical blue-and-white-quilted beds.

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