Does It Hurt To Die

By Paul G. Anderson

Christian de Villier's becomes increasingly interested in the circumstances surrounding his father’s death. Using the Internet, he tries to find the reasons why he might have been killed. There is little to satiate his curiosity until one day he discovers a blog site set up by an old anti-apartheid activist. The blog site claims that his father had worked for the Bureau of State Security in the old apartheid government.
Christian returns to Cape Town from Australia, shortly after his eighteenth birthday. Unknown to him his return to South Africa is monitored by the National Intelligence Agency and a white underground Afrikaner supremacist organisation. They both have knowledge of his father’s genetic research on racial profiling, and believe that Christian might lead them to a missing folder containing highly sensitive material on chemical and germ warfare .
Christian discovers the folder buried in the garden of their old house in Cape Town. Included in the folder are evidence of foreign governments involvement in a germ warfare programmes and the development of nuclear arms.Christian finds encrypted genetic research on racial groups under his father's name. Christian recognizes the code as similar to one on the back of a photo of his mother and himself and emails his mother .
His email is intercepted and Christian,along with a beautiful coloured girl he has met,Isabella, are pursued by the secret white supremacist group. Christian and Isabella, are taken hostage by the white supremacist group and held in an underground mine.In return for Christian and Isabella's lives they demand the key to the encrypted genetic research from Christian's mother,who realizes the research will be used to kill many Black and Coloured South Africans.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Paul G. Anderson
• Release date: Apr 27, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301091072

Paul G. Anderson

Paul Anderson lives in Adelaide, South Australia. He is a general surgeon who specialised in upper gastrointestinal and hepatobiliary surgery. He has also been one of the pioneers of laparoscopic bariatric surgery in Australia. He was born in Rotorua, New Zealand and like many Kiwi boys had a love affair with rugby representing his country as a junior All Black. He started his tertiary education at Waikato University in Hamilton before furthering studies in Scotland, California and South Africa. The passion for writing has always been present and is latently manifest thanks to the encouragement and direction of many friends. There is a sequel to ‘Does It Hurt To Die’ being written: ‘Old Lovers Dont Die’. which has just been published by Austin Macauley.A sizzling romance -Love Cuts Deeper than a Sharp Scalpel He is currently Chairman of Specialists without Borders, which is a not-for-profit organisation taking medical education and training into developing countries.

Book preview

Foreword

’So many gods, so many creeds

So many paths that wind and wind

When all this world needs

Is just the art of being kind’

This book began after a terrorist attack in South Africa. Describing what happened was to be a catharsis—a way of dealing with a post traumatic stress syndrome. Writing about the event successfully assuaged its dramatic impact, and then, with the encouragement of my family and friends, the initial writing grew into something that hopefully will make a greater contribution beyond my recovery.

Discrimination based on colour or race still exists in our world. There has been enormous progress over the last fifty years to rid ourselves of the abhorrence that in its active form is segregation. Looking back at the past, albeit in the somewhat fictionalised form utilised in this novel, will hopefully allow the grotesque image of man’s inhumanity to man and woman, that was and is racial segregation, to remain committed to history.

Although this book is purely fictional, it draws on some real political and historical events from the author’s own experience while doing a PhD centred on politics and race in South Africa. If it allows the reader therefore to experience the mephitic feeling of segregation, it will have partly been successful. However, its real intent is to intrigue, beguile, stimulate imaginations and entertain; while commending me to you as a talented storyteller.

Chapter 1

At eighteen years of age, Christian de Villiers had an angulated coltish appearance. Shoulders that were broad but without significant muscle definition and rakishly long legs suggested that testosterone had not yet finished its subtle hormonal sculpturing. He was a head taller than most boys his age. A leptorrhine nose was framed within a shock of wavy sun-bleached hair that reached his shoulders. It was his smile that was most disarming. It assuaged the impact of his physical presence and drew you to the youthful inquisition that resided in his eyes. Nearly everyone remarked on how similar in appearance he was to his father, with one exception—his mother.

Christian had moved to Adelaide from Cape Town in South Africa with his mother, Renata, when he was four year old. The beautiful bluestone villa that they lived in for the next fifteen years was typical of many Adelaide homes. Blocks of bluestone, mined in South Australia at the turn of the century, had then been smoothed with chisels and cemented to form solid walls. The thickness of the walls provided warmth in winter, and protection in summer from the harsh forty degree heat. The bluestone block in their villa was set off with an elegant woodwork edging around the top of a whitewashed veranda, which contrasted starkly the deep blue corrugated roof. He had liked it from the moment they first moved in.

Despite the solid walls and its elegance, Christian had come to understand their villa was not maintenance free. Every few years the wooden parts of the house needed painting and protecting from the termites, which were endemic in South Australia. His mother had insisted from an early age that privilege was earned and not a birthright. Each time the house was due to be painted there was no discussion, just the presentation of sandpaper and paintbrush and a look which demanded compliance. He effectively became a labourer’s navvy for the week that it took to complete the treatment and painting. He hated doing it, but more so the apparent satisfaction it gave his mother to see him doing menial work. What he was meant to learn from this he could neither work out nor get his mother to explain.

Now nearly nineteen years of age, he felt there were other things he could more successfully do with his time, especially as he knew his mother could afford to employ someone. However, he had never been able to change his mother’s mind once it was made up and guessed it would not probably happen now. He knew it was somehow related to her Teutonic background: some kind of genetic inflexibility which demanded perfection, a standard which he found difficult to live up to and deal with at times. He often wondered how his father had dealt with his mother.

Jannie de Villiers, Christian’s father, was murdered in Cape Town just before Christian’s fourth birthday. Christian knew he was a surgeon and that he had been the head of the Cape Town liver transplant unit. He also knew that he had been caught up in a terrorist attack carried out by a radical black group who wanted to destroy the apartheid government. His father had survived that only to be murdered a week or so later. What was particularly strange about his father’s death was that no one, especially not his mother, seemed to want to give him any more information about why or how his father had died. The older that he grew the more it irritated him that no one would talk about his father.

Over the years, Christian had read on the Internet how his father had survived the terrorist attack on a church in Cape Town, in which twenty people were killed and fifty seriously maimed. The act of terrorism had divided the country. It seemed as a result of that attack, black people were considered even more unfit for democracy by the ruling white government. He had read how his father was seriously injured and had been interviewed on television and appeared in newspapers. There was, however, very little on his father’s subsequent killing. The Cape Times newspaper suggested that it was the unfortunate consequence of a robbery gone wrong. However, he could not imagine his father not putting up a fight or there not being a report of his resistance. It all seemed so incomplete—a puzzle that needed all the pieces arranged more neatly, at least in his mind.

Soon after his father’s death, his mother had decided that it was safer to leave the country. Through a job advertisement, Adelaide had been chosen because of the work potential for his mother, who was a medical doctor and pathologist. Like Cape Town, Adelaide had beautiful surrounding vineyards. His mother often used to remark that McLaren Vale and Barossa Valley reminded her of Paarl and Stellenbosch.

Christian could remember little of Cape Town or his father, although at times he would think there was something in his subconscious related to his father’s death that he could not quite access. Try as he might, he could never recall more than an uneasy feeling when thinking of his father. When he first arrived in Australia, he had had nightmares about him. He would awake crying out for his mother certain that he could see his father lying by a pool bleeding. His mother would reassure him until eventually he went back to sleep. With time, the nightmares became less frequent, but there was a disquiet that remained somewhere deep inside. He tried harder to research the murder as he got older, feeling that the disquiet would only settle once he knew what had happened to his father.

There were certain other strange things that he could not account for that he thought contributed to that disquiet. Christian knew his mother was professionally successful and there was not much in life that they had to worry about financially, but he had also been aware that his father had provided an offshore bank account. He had heard his mother discuss it with friends, obviously concerned that in some way this linked her to whatever Jannie de Villiers had been involved with in South Africa, before he was killed. When he asked his mother about it, she would never answer other than it was something that he did not need to concern himself about. That phrase to Christian was one of the most annoying answers he ever received from his mother and compelled him to find out more.

That his father had left them an offshore bank account initially hardly raised too many questions in his mind about where the money had come from. After all, his father was a surgeon who travelled abroad. That was until he heard his mother discuss with an old South African friend whether they should use it at all. Her friend, anaesthetist Charles Viljoen, had argued that it was their inheritance and provision for a future life, to which no past guilt could be associated.

He had not really understood the discussion but knew in some strange way it was related to what had happened to his father. If it had just been a straightforward murder, why should there be an overseas bank account with guilt associated with it. Other small things also piqued his curiosity about his father. After they arrived in Adelaide, there were the strange phone calls, which used to occur monthly. He remembered that they had seemed to frighten his mother. The phone calls continued for quite a few years before mysteriously stopping.

His mother had quickly established herself in the Adelaide medical community and had become a senior partner in a private pathology laboratory. Within a very short time she became a sought-after consultant in genetic counselling, an area of pathology that she had specialised in. As her reputation grew, she became a sought-after expert witness in profiling for DNA paternity suits. She would often talk about some of the cases to him, which intrigued Christian from an early age and helped spur his interest in doing medicine one day.

The other thing that intrigued him about his mother was why she had never re-married. She was of medium height, had natural blond hair which she usually wore pulled back in a bun, was of slim build and always dressed beautifully. He thought, in a biased-son-sort-of way, that she was very attractive. Male colleagues from work would often call in but were never encouraged to go beyond friendship, let alone stay overnight. That no man had featured in her life since his father had died was puzzling. It was something he never really understood. He wondered whether it was because the love that she had had for his father had run so deep that no one else measured up to him. The alternative, he sometimes reasoned, was that his father’s death was so traumatic that she never wanted to be involved in a serious relationship again. It puzzled him, though, that she never seemed to want to discuss anything significant about his father.

Sometimes Christian thought that she had completely forgotten about the life that they had started in Cape Town. The only times she really talked about his father was to acknowledge that he was a great surgeon and had done some wonderful things for the people in South Africa. This so exasperated him that finally, from the age of about twelve or thirteen, he had tried to gather as much information from the Internet about his father that he could. Some of the comments attributed to his father following the terrorist attack were racist, but he considered them to be not too antagonistic since five black terrorists had just shot him. However, racism did not quite fit with what little he knew of his father and seemed at odds with the other parts of his life, particularly the oath that he had taken as a doctor to save people’s lives.

Christian had also read on the Internet his father’s death notice, which followed a week or so after the terrorist attack. Accompanying this were acclamations about the great work that his father had initiated through the liver transplant unit. It mentioned in particular his courageous decision to do a groundbreaking liver transplant on a young South African boy called Sibokwe. To Christian that was all quite impressive and a legacy to be proud of. Why his mother did not want to talk about that he could not comprehend. There were too few answers for someone who desperately wanted to know more about his father.

By the time, he turned fifteen the desire to know more about his father had become overwhelming. The need to at least know what his father stood for persisted right through into his final year at school. He determined that he would do well enough in school to get into medicine, and then take time off to go to South Africa.

During study breaks, he would often Google the terrorist attack on the church in Cape Town, looking and hoping for a new blog site or updated information. Occasionally he caught his mother looking at him from the doorway of the study, unsure whether she was disapproving or was remembering certain things about his father. When he did ask her, she had always just turned her back and walked out of the room.

When he had exhausted gleaning information from the Internet, he resorted to eavesdropping to try to find out a little bit more about his father. When friends of his mother came over for dinner and he heard the conversation turn to his father, he stayed at the dinner table for as long as he could. That also was not very helpful, as they tended to talk mostly about the differences between himself and his father. His mother seemed to be much more delighted that there were differences than similarities. Not that he could stay at the table for long when the subject was his father; it was usually suggested that he should go and study. His mother would constantly remind him that if he wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps and study medicine, he needed to work harder. It seemed no one was really interested in giving him more information. He became convinced there was a conspiracy of silence going on, which made him even more determined to visit Cape Town.

Christian had almost given up but he still kept on checking the Internet in case one day there might be something new. Shortly after his graduation from Year 12, he was searching through all his favourite folders, aware that his mother was again standing at the study door where she could see over his shoulder. This time she did not turn and walk out of the room. He was going through the old YouTube clips of the terrorist attack on the church, partly wondering why his mother had not yet left. Turning to see if she was doing something else, he noticed she was staring intently at his computer screen. On the screen was a picture of his father, one that he had always liked, showing his strong jaw, high cheekbones and eyes not unlike his. He could see his father’s wavy hair, similar to his own. It was obviously the picture that caught his mother’s attention, but then he noticed that underneath it was a new blog site.

Looking more carefully, he noted that it announced that new documents had been revealed about the church massacre. The blog had been set up by an old anti-apartheid activist, Kurt Davies, who had suggested that the attack had been orchestrated by the apartheid government security services as a way of showing the world that blacks were not capable of governing South Africa. Then at the bottom, there was a footnote about Jannie de Villiers, his father, alleging his involvement with the security forces and the apartheid regime.

Christian was so shocked he did not notice that his mother had moved up close behind him. He read the footnote again uncertain as to whether he should believe what had been written, ’that the very well known transplant surgeon Professor Jannie de Villiers had been complicit in terrorism through his links with the Bureau of State Security.’ Christian sat looking at the screen stunned. Surely, that was not his father, he thought. It could not possibly suggest his father was involved in a terrorist attack. He turned slowly to face his mother.

‘Mum, that’s not true, is it? Tell me that’s not true.’

‘Christian,’ Renata said quietly, putting her hand on his shoulder, ’it’s time we had a talk.’

Christian never liked sitting when he was talking to his mother, as she always seemed to stretch herself up to her full height to gain greater authority, something he assumed again came from her Flemish background. Although she was a tall woman, her aquiline features and rigid posture seemed to make her appear even taller. With her harsh hairstyle, she was the essence of efficiency and control, and when in a mood he knew from past experience was not to be messed with. Christian also had learnt that there were ways of dealing with her controlling inclinations—sitting down to address his mother gave her too much advantage, so he always stood up. He stood and looked at her, trying to contain his anger that she had kept this from him for so long.

‘Mum, did you know about all of this?’

‘I’m not sure that I’ve ever fully understood what your father was involved with outside of his surgery. I’m not certain whether the blog that you’ve just read is true, but neither can I be certain it’s not true. I never said anything to you, as I made a conscious decision that I wanted you to remember him for all the good things.’

‘But I always sensed that, and it’s been so frustrating that you wouldn’t tell me anything.’

‘I know, but I thought it was for your own good. I also knew there’d be a time when I’d need to tell you as much as I know.’

‘Mum, that’s what I’ve wanted to talk to you about all these years. I’ve decided I’m going to take a year off now and go back to Cape Town to see where Dad worked and find out more about him. I don’t think he would support terrorism, and someone needs to clear his name, our name!’

‘Think about this. You’ve worked so hard and done so well in your Year 12 exams. I’m sure you’ll be accepted into medicine. Don’t you think you should go with the momentum? Maybe once you’re qualified you can go back and find out what happened to him or even work there? I think that’s what your father would have wanted.’ She paused slightly to ensure she had his full attention before continuing. ’And besides which, all that work that you’ve done in biometrics and iris recognition software development during your school holidays may be lost. I believe they were going to involve you with the new upgraded addition and even provide you with a salary increase these holidays.’

‘Foul, Mum. That’s an attempt at distraction.’

Renata stopped talking and looked at her son. He had Jannie’s skin, with its propensity to tan in the summer, and reluctantly admitted they looked very similar. She had always known that he had the essence of Jannie within him and that she might, as in this instance, have to confront the spirit of his father—the resilience, determination, the sense of challenge, the I-want-to-show-you-I-can-overcome attitude. Christian had inherited many of his father’s traits and these, she suspected, had partly caused him to be the achieving teenager that he now was. Perhaps it was true, she thought, that you can take the Afrikaner out of Africa but you cannot take the Afrikaner gene out of their progeny. She realised there was no sense in denying it; she needed to handle it as best she could.

She looked at him again and laughed in a way that Christian had not seen for a while.

‘What, Mum?’

‘It’s just that you, at times, are so unbelievably like your father. Here’s the deal, then—I’ll tell you all I know about him, and then you can decide if you need to go.’

‘OK. And thanks, Mum. This is the first time I’ve heard you say that I’m so much like my father—that means a lot to me.’

Christian saw tears in her eyes and felt a little embarrassed, but his mother quickly closed the gap between them and hugged him.

‘Hey, Mum, this tactic won’t work either; you know I’ve got to go.’

Renata laughed again dabbing at her eyes.

‘Can we start now?’

‘Yes, we can. In a way, it’s the fulfilment of a time that I knew would come, a time when the Afrikaner in you could no longer be denied. In order for you to progress to adulthood you need all the pieces in place that you can find, but they may not be the pieces that you were hoping to find.’

‘So, how about starting with the terrorist attack? Tell me what happened, and then fill in whatever else you know. The news only gives a basic outline and I need to know what it was really like for Dad.’

‘Come through to the kitchen. I have some books and letters to show you, and I’ll do my best to remember everything that happened that evening and the events afterwards. However, I warn you, it may not be what you want to hear. After that, we need to have a serious talk. Perhaps I should tell you a bit about your father before we get to the killings in the church..

Chapter 2

‘Your father was very tall, with broad shoulders and slim hips. He was quite handsome in a rugged kind of way, as you’ve seen from the photographs,’ Renata said. ’He was raised on a farm in the Paarl region, about an hour from Cape Town, and was used to hard physical work. His father insisted on him supervising and working alongside the black and coloured workers, and as a result, he was quite muscular. I often thought that without that background of hard physical work that he may have chosen a medical specialty more suited to his awkward height.’

Christian looked at her, taking in all that she said. Although he wanted to ask questions, he decided to let his mother continue in case his interruption derailed the information he had so long waited for.

‘His family were staunch conservative Afrikaners, third-generation Boers, who had always been farmers. Your father was the only son and there were expectations that he would continue the tradition and take over the farm from your grandfather.’

‘So they were against him doing medicine?’

Renata nodded.

‘You have to understand that his parents were passionate supporters of segregation of the racial groups and early and vigorous supporters of apartheid, something which they had constantly instilled into your father from a young age. Afrikaner sons were not expected to question the philosophy of segregation, which was something which troubled your father. I remember when he told me that he first tried to question his father about the basis for racial segregation he received a backhander that left his ears ringing and drew blood. As he grew older, he came to realise that talking about the non-whites as potential human beings was regarded as heresy, to be expunged from patriotic Afrikaner families. Legislated separation of the races was considered the only way a white South African would survive in Africa in the nineteen fifties and Afrikaner sons like your father were expected to unquestionably uphold that belief.’

‘That must have been really hard for Dad if he didn’t believe in that system.’

‘That kind of upbringing was very typical for many of the Afrikaner men of that era. Their families were direct descendants from the early settlers, and as such, they had to be tough to survive. Initially, the early settlers were everything from priest to police officer. Because the blacks that they came into contact with had had no education, they assumed that they were no better than animals and that’s the way they should be treated. They also saw their role in preserving their inheritance as ensuring that their sons and daughters understood, sometimes forcibly, that the only solution for South Africa was segregation of the races.’

‘Doesn’t sound like he had a great childhood, with all that indoctrination and then being beaten by his father when he disagreed with him. How did he get away to study medicine, Mum?’

‘From the time he was about ten years old he decided that tending vines on his father’s farm didn’t satisfy him. It wasn’t all the physical work that was required—he quite enjoyed that aspect of farming—it was the treatment of non-white workers as little better than slaves that he became more and more uncomfortable with. He could see that segregation ensured that the family farm was financially successful, as labour costs were minimal. But he was most concerned with the way his father treated the workers and abused them. He couldn’t stand seeing them kicked or punched. He knew he couldn’t be part of his father’s succession plan; there had to be an alternative. He determined his way out after he’d had several conversations with Dr Wauchop, their local general practitioner, when he came to the farm to do home visits. Although the visits primarily were to check on his mother’s hypertension, the doctor would find time to talk to your father about medicine. Your father soon realised that medicine was challenging and about helping people—an alternative to what he considered a lifetime of servitude on his father’s farm. There also didn’t appear to him to be any abuse in medicine. While Dr Wauchop never treated the black or coloured workers on the farm, your father had noticed that he always greeted them warmly. From that time he was convinced that if he worked hard enough, medicine could be the way out for him.’

‘That sounds like he wanted to get away from racism, not enforcing it through some terrorist act. And it doesn’t sound consistent with what was said on that blog at all.’

‘Honey, that’s just the background I wanted you to have so you could understand where he came from, and the fact that there might have been deep-seated influences for the decisions that he subsequently made. It must have been really difficult for him. Then there was an incident, which I’ll tell you about later, on the night of his twenty-first birthday, when his father told him never to come back. In addition, he never did return to his family or the farm. That was incredibly difficult, as he was his mother’s favourite, but in the Afrikaner family the ultimate allegiance was to the husband, and his father never wanted to see him again.’

‘That must have been awful,’ said Christian, ’and so confusing, going from such a rigid belief system to one where you were allowed to question whatever you wanted.’

‘It was, Honey; there were many days when we all thought he was making a smooth transition, and then suddenly all that Afrikaner past would surface. When he made his announcement to the media after the terrorist attack, none of us really knew which Jannie was going to speak. We all prayed that he would not revert completely to his family values and say that blacks were not fit to govern.’

‘I read that part in the news story.’

‘Yes, it wasn’t as bad as we had feared, but then it wasn’t as good as it could have been either.’

‘I understand all that had a bit better now, Mum. Can we fast forward to the terrorist attack, as that’s where it seems most of the questions about my father started?’

‘That was a night I’ll never forget. I can describe it almost exactly as it happened, but there are lots more bits of information that I need to give you for you to understand him. And I have to warn you that there may be things about me that you may not like either.’

‘I can’t imagine that, Mum,’ said Christian, cheekily, relieved to lighten the discussion.

‘Very cute, young man, but let’s go back to the story. The night of the shooting, your father was waiting for a call to do a liver transplant on a young African boy. The proposed recipient of the donor liver was a young African boy, Sibokwe Tamasala, who had developed hepatic failure. He was particularly concerned, as this young boy was an African high school pupil in one of the remote townships of the Cape Province, which meant he only had a limited window of opportunity to get him to Cape Town and do the transplant. Your father knew Sibokwe wouldn’t survive more than a few days unless he could receive a new liver. But there were also other pressures which made the transplant more stressful than it normally would have been.’

‘What kinds of other pressures?’

‘Sibokwe Tamasala was the son of Thompson Tamasala, who was falsely suspected of being an anti-government activist and was killed by the Bureau of State Security (BOSS)—the apartheid state’s sinister security service. Not only was Sibokwe the son of an innocent black man who had been erroneously killed, but he was an incredibly photogenic young African boy, who, for both reasons, had captured the attention of the nation’s left-wing anti-apartheid groups. Your father knew that the transplant meant more than just saving a boy’s life; it also meant possibly assuaging a little of the white nation’s guilt over the meaningless killing of his father. That in itself created an enormous pressure to succeed. That was the lead-up to the terrible night when your father was shot and is really where his story begins.

Chapter 3

Jannie de Villiers lay stretched out on the king-size bed, his size twelve feet hanging over the end. He tried to remember when he had last made love to Renata, and decided it was at least six months ago. Their relationship, he knew, was deteriorating, and he wondered whether it was partly the difference in their upbringing. Renata came from a liberal English speaking third-generation South African family, while his family were staunchly conservative Afrikaner farmers. Looking up from the bed at the whitewashed walls of the Cape Dutch cottage, his thoughts drifted to the family he had been cut off from. How far, in many ways, he had come from a farm in Paarl; a place which his father had asked him to leave and never come back to, brandishing him a traitor to the Afrikaner because he wanted to go to the liberal English-speaking University of Cape Town. Jannie’s success in becoming the head of the liver transplant unit at Groote Schuur, he knew, was partly to prove to his father that he could succeed without him. The unit had become one of the most successful in southern Africa, and now they were waiting to do the first transplant on a young African boy—not any young African boy, but the son of an anti-apartheid activist who had been tortured and killed by the security police.

The Groote Schuur team had been waiting several days for a donor liver, without any success. He knew that unless they got a liver within the next thirty-six hours, the young African patient, Sibokwe Tamasala, would probably die from fulminant liver failure. Strangely, he thought there would be many among the conservative Afrikaner community who would not be unhappy if that happened. Africans were not seen as equals in any way, especially when it came to sophisticated medical care. They were cheap labour, expendable and replaceable; with his conservative Afrikaner upbringing, he could identify with that feeling. Jannie felt the immense pressure to not only succeed but also to fail. He did wonder to himself what his family would think if he saved this young African boy’s life. Having been ostracised for going to an English-speaking university and marrying an English-speaking woman, he assumed that they would consider he