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Click to view large map Coordinates: | Part of what is now the Mapungubwe National Park used to be a South African Defence Force camp, Greefswald, located on the border with Zimbabwe and Botswana. Most of the military installations were demolished or destroyed when the National Parks department took possession. One of the only structures left, possibly as a reminder, is this bunker built with corrugated iron sheeting and sand-cement mix filled hessian bags, covered with soil and planted with endemic foliage as camouflage. An unfortunate aspect of the Greefswald camp was that it was a place where non-conforming military conscripts were sent and where experiments were conducted on them, mainly under the auspices and guidance of Dr Aubrey Levin as Chief Medical Officer. Greefswald was the name of a military detention camp in South Africa during the turbulent apartheid years—a place where young conscripts were sent if they were judged to be “deviant.” You got that label if you were gay, smoked marijuana, or were a conscientious objector. Gordon Torr called it an "experimental gulag" meant to turn "psychos, sub-normals and deviants" into fighting men. The presiding psychiatrist was Dr. Aubrey Levin, who flew in several times a year by helicopter from Pretoria to see how the therapy was going. |
