How Parktown Boys' high paedophile Collan Rex was schooled in abuse

He was shorter than I thought he would be, just a little taller than me. He had grown his hair longer since the trial, and it was pulled back into a hair band. He had a full beard, neatly trimmed, and was wearing green prison garb.

He looked healthy and well, his eyes bright. He gave Jolene a big hug. If I was sure of nothing else, I was sure of how much they loved each other. There was an intimacy between them I’ve only rarely seen. They sat, held hands and talked about people they knew and things that had been happening, moving from English to Afrikaans and back again.

I sat quietly until they realised that I was watching them.

“Well, thank you for making the time to talk to me,” I said. “Thank you for coming to see me,” he said. Jolene laughed. “Come, ask your questions!” she said.

Jolene - Collan Rex’s  girlfriend. The couple met while he was on trial

Seth - One of the boys molested by Rex

Ben - The whistleblower.  On a water polo tour,  Rex squeezed his neck so tightly that he passed out

The Archivist - Ben’s father, who kept meticulous records of the scandal

—  cast of characters

And so, for two hours, I did. Collan was very easy to talk to. In fact, his very openness made me feel uncertain. I had to keep reminding myself he was not just Jolene’s fiancé; he was serving time for charges of sexual assault — of minors, at that. And yet he seemed a child himself. Was he worried about what I was going to ask? He didn’t seem to be.

“Has Jolene told you what I’m doing, about the book I’m writing?” I asked cautiously. He nodded and looked grave.

“She said you’re writing a book about what happened at Parktown Boys’. About me and about the sexual assault stuff.”

“And did she tell you that I thought I would be writing about the survivors of a monster, but in the end realised I was just writing about victims. Including you?”

“She told me that.” I wanted to be clear. I owed him that. “I can’t condone what you did,” I said.

“And I won’t in the book, either. But I do believe that as much as you were the perpetrator, you were also a victim, because it happened to you when you were there.”

“Ja, it did,” he nodded.

“And if that’s true, then it means that, more than just the perpetrator, you are the evidence of a system gone wrong.” He shrugged and looked regretful.

“Did you always want to go to Parktown?” I asked.

“Or did someone choose the school for you?” He shook his head.

“I chose it. When I was applying to high schools I was still living in Ferndale with my mom; we looked at a few schools there but I didn’t want to go to Ferndale High because I heard it was very rough.”

His mom has said the same thing since.

“As soon as I was there, I fell in love with what it was and didn’t apply for anywhere else and I was accepted.”

“What did you love about it?”

I think I already knew the answer — the same one I’ve heard from almost all the boys and the parents I have spoken to. Its tradition, its history, the very certainty of what is good and strong and true there. I’m reminded of my conversation with Ben, when he walked me to my car after our first conversation.

Despite everything that happened to him, he still loved what the school stood for.

The school was good. It was a place you could feel proud to wear your blazer, and a place of belonging. I loved it there.”

But the matric/grade 8 thing, that’s tradition. You’ll never stamp that out. It’s part of the rite of passage.

So many of them did.

I told Collan about the school he loved. I told him what the boys I had interviewed said about being in grade 8. He nodded.

“Was it as bad for you when you were there? Better? Worse?” He shrugged.

“Look, it was hard, but you get through it, you know.”

A few weeks later we spoke on the phone and I asked him the same question. He had more to say that time.

“That’s the thing, I spoke to my mom the other day about this, and apparently my gran said I was quite traumatised by it — I don’t remember, but my gran said I was. I just remember it as being normal.

“To go from grade 7, where you’re top of the school, to grade 8, where you’re doing push-ups and being made to stand outside in the cold, to being beaten, that’s a big shock. But then everyone else is doing those things and experiencing the same stuff so it must be fine.

“We even thought that when some of the matrics [from 2009] got suspended for beating kids and initiation and stuff. The others still made us run, they made us do PT until we dropped, those push-ups, holding push-up position for ages, we still had to do it.”

I don’t understand this at all. I simply couldn’t fathom it. I talked it over with a friend who had been to an all-boys school, and he was as appalled as I was about the amount of violence and how everything veered towards being sexual. This, he said, had never happened at his school.

“But the matric/grade 8 thing, that’s tradition. You’ll never stamp that out. It’s part of the rite of passage.”

“It’s a rite of passage for a child to be forced onto his knees by a matric who wants a hand job? And then be forced to eat polish if he won’t?”

I inquired hotly.

“No, of course not, but it’s tradition to warm toilet seats for the sixth form and do push-ups and sleep outside on camp and stuff. It bonds them.”

THE HOSTEL TEST

Fear makes the best followers — that echoed in my ears from my conversation with Seth.

The hostel test came up with every boy. On the face of it, it seemed simple. The grade 8s had to know everything there was to know about Druce Hall and its history, everything about the matrics, including all their accomplishments, their full names and all they’d ever achieved on the sports field.

Passing the hostel test relied largely on how the old pots felt about the new pots at the time. On a genial day, the questions might be as easy as naming the prefects in the boarding house. On a tough day, boys would be expected to know every important date in the school’s history and the CV of every prefect. And even if you got it all right, there was no guarantee of a pass.

That was given at the discretion of the matrics in the room at the time of the test. Several boys who got all the answers right were failed because of their “attitude”, especially true of one in particular who was regularly accused of thinking he was better than he was because he didn’t participate enough in hostel sports. A fail meant punishment, and the severity of that was decided by the matrics.

Collan himself had not escaped pain for failing the hostel test. He remembered it well.

“The one time when I failed my hostel test, the matrics made us do push-ups on the bottom field and the one said I wasn’t doing the push-ups correctly so he kicked me in my ribs and hit me and knocked my head on the ground. My nose was bleeding, but he made us run again and again. It didn’t matter.”

HOW YOU BECOME A MAN 

“Did you at any point think to yourself, this is really screwed up? Did you talk it over with the other grade 8s?” He shook his head.

“Now I realise it was like brainwashing by the culture and system. They want you to be part of it and not try to change it. It’s the whole ‘If you cry, you die’ thing. Taking everything they throw at you is how you become a man. You’re a boy when you enter Parktown; grade 8 is the year you start becoming a man.”

“Do you think the teachers knew what was going on?” I asked. He laughed.

“Those Old Boys, they knew about the initiations and the goings-on. They knew. Look, there was stuff they might not have known … I mean, when I was living there, I didn’t know what the matrics were doing to the grade 8s in terms of the sexual stuff, making the kids give blow jobs and that. I was living there and I didn’t know, so maybe they didn’t know that stuff, but in terms of the beatings and the initiations, they knew.”

MAN OR MOUSE 

This was what Collan revealed to me on the phone some time later, but back at the time of my visit to the prison I asked him about the sexual initiations he had been through. I trod carefully, but he was very open about it.

“Throughout high school, kids used to hit each other in the balls and stuff. All the older boys were very physical with us. Even the teachers used to hit us with various objects, like hockey sticks; one teacher made us do knuckle push-ups on pencils while our feet were up on top of the heater.

“Thing is, you thought it was innocent, but actually you never knew what people’s intentions actually were. Sometimes a guy would come up to you and make like he was going to fight you and then he would tap your genitals — that’s the kind of thing that was going on.”

“And was that in grade 8 or did it continue?” I asked.

“It never stopped throughout school, the sexual stuff. Even when you’re in grade 9, there’s a grade 10, or in grade 10, there’s a grade 11. It doesn’t have to be the matrics. Anyone is allowed to have physical dominance over you.

“There were times when I was very uncomfortable with a boy in the grade above me; I mean, I liked him, but he made me uncomfortable. In prep he used to make me sit next to him, and I would try to get away from him.

“He played ‘Man or Mouse’ with me; some of my own peers also played that. The other guy’s hand is near your crotch and if you say ‘Mouse’ he will move his hand down your leg towards your knee and if you say ‘Man’, he will grab and squeeze your genitals and then you know you’re a man. It never stops.”

'WE ALL PASSED OUT DRUNK'

I asked him about water polo. Collan was very athletic at school. Jolene said that if I were to go to his grandfather’s house I would see medals everywhere that Collan had won, for athletics and rugby, but mainly for water polo. His whole face came alive. Water polo was his passion.

“In grade 8, I tried everything. It was my first time playing rugby and I loved that; I was in the B team, so I wasn’t the best at it. Everyone encouraged me to try out for water polo because it’s very physical and really good for fitness, especially if you’re playing rugby. I’m a very physical person, and they said I was very strong.

“So then I tried water polo and made the A team. I played and played and I loved it. I made the Gauteng under-16 A team. The first tournament we played we came second and I got a medal.”

Again, we would talk more about water polo on the phone a few weeks later, because water polo had not been a simple game, even back then. In fact, back then was when all the problems started.

“Even in water polo, they would grab you down there or even outside of the water, they would try to hit you down there. I remember, for our first team water polo fines evening, the whole team got together and for every fine you got, you had to drink. So they got all of us juniors drunk and we all passed out. In the morning, one of my friends told me that one of the matrics had curled up next to him and tried to grab his balls and stuff and touch him.”

“And that wasn’t scary for you?” I asked.

“It was just part of it,” he said.

Just part of it.

“In matric, I had a chance to go to the States. There was a scout from Lindenwood University [in Saint Charles, Missouri]. I just went to recruiting websites and he saw me play in videos,” he said wistfully.

“They offered me a 75% scholarship to go and play there. He spoke to my coach and so did I, but when it came down to the money, my grandparents couldn’t afford it. So I couldn’t go.”

I wondered how things would have been different if he had.

“You know, sport made me happy. I think I was the happiest when I was in school. We were the great water polo team then, we even beat KES [longtime rival King Edward VII School] .”

“And it never occurred to you that what was happening to you was wrong? It never crossed your mind that older boys were molesting you and it wasn’t OK?”

And it never occurred to you that what was happening to you was wrong? It never crossed your mind that older boys were molesting you and it wasn’t OK?

—  Author Sam Cowen

“No,” he said.

“It was just how it was.”

The same question would come up in court later.

PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL

Jolene had waited long enough.

“Ask him. Ask him that question.”

I was thrown. We were still talking generally about Collan’s own schooling, and I wasn’t ready to go in with that question. But Jolene was. Collan looked confused.

“What question?”

“Maybe we can get to it later,” I offered weakly, but Jolene was having none of it.

“Tell him what you told me in the car.”

I looked at Collan. He was curious and alert, his eyes fixed on mine, his hand holding Jolene’s.

“Well, I was telling Jolene in the car about some of the boys, and how they haven’t got over what happened to them. Not just with you, but with the experiences they had with their matrics and the initiations.”

Collan looked upset. “What do you mean they haven’t got over it?”

“I mean a lot of them are still sad, Collan. One wrote matric from a psychiatric hospital. More than one attempted suicide. Their marks are bad. Some are on medication.”

‘I'M JUST GOING TO JUMP’

Ben especially had struggled more than he had let on.

“Most of the time I was happy about what I did,” Ben had said.

“But a lot of the time I was just thinking I wish he never existed and then nothing could have gone wrong. I felt lost. All the time.

“And at one point I got upset and felt like I didn’t want to live any more … My dad and my brother were in the car and I just hopped out and I ran for like apparently an hour long. I came to a bridge over the N1 and I just decided to hang there and I thought, I’m just going to jump. Basically, while I was hanging there, I was hanging by one arm … Ja, I just held with one arm and I felt like I wanted to fall, and at the time I wished I had.

“But the one thing that kept me back was seeing this, which is my family. And I didn’t want to disappoint people. It goes through my mind still. You’re going to live or you’re going to die, so you’re wasting your time here anyway. There’s no point in doing anything because again, it’s got to come to an end. I don’t believe in anything after death because it just makes no sense to me. “Just to think, it’s all gone, nothing’s left. If you die, there’s nothing left. It doesn’t make any difference to anybody else, you are yourself …”

DEVASTATED

I could think of a lot of people to whom it would have made a difference. It was after that incident that the Archivist sent him to a psychiatric hospital.

“I enjoyed Beethoven. Maybe because I got to … mainly because I got to chill. I think the main reason I enjoyed it was simply because I actually got along with people. People had their own problems, and it was cool because as soon as you start to listen to people, you get along very well.

“But physically and mentally I wasn’t feeling great. I kept on telling the doctor that I wasn’t sleeping well … or that I didn’t have enough energy for the day; eventually I was taking 26 tablets a day.

“I wrote all my exams from there. I know I wrote at a school, I remember where, but I don’t remember anything else. I don’t remember getting a lift there, I don’t remember which exam I wrote each day. I told my parents I was studying very hard and … maybe in my head I was, but I know I didn’t actually study a single thing. Besides history because I … liked history, but I don’t know how much I remembered.”

When I related this to Collan he looked devastated. He put his hand up to his mouth.

“I don’t want them to be sad. I’m sorry I hurt them.” He really did look sorry. Jolene pressed on.

“Tell him!”

“One boy said he can still feel you and taste you …”

I hated saying it. I hated thinking it.

'I FELT BAD SOMETIMES'

Jolene turned to face Collan; they had been sitting next to each other, heads together, but now she drew back.

“You need to tell me right now. Why does he say that?”

Collan looked at her.

“I don’t know why he would say that.”

“You need to tell me right now. When you touched those boys’ genitals, was it because you wanted to be dominant over them or was it because you are sexually attracted to boys?”

His eyelids flickered. When my son does that, I know he’s telling a lie. When my husband does that, it’s because he’s stressed. I couldn’t tell here.

“No, I never did that. I never — and I never tried to make anyone else do that. I never.” He looked at me.

“She says she will love you no matter what your answer,” I offered. It was all I had.

“I never did that.”

“What did you do?” I asked.

“Like I said in court, I touched them where I shouldn’t have. Sometimes I wondered why I crossed the line like that. I remember now and then, like when I choked Ben until he passed out, that gave me a real big fright. That was a big scare, and I thought, why am I doing that, why am I crossing that line? Another boy passed out as well.

“When I grabbed their genitals, it was like, I don’t know how to explain, for me to get dominance over them; I felt like I was the stronger one, that I was the one with power. That’s how it got to me always grabbing them.

“And I felt bad sometimes when I knew I had hurt them, when they expressed they were in pain.”