Special Report Transcript Episode 80, Section 5, Time 31:05

I was born in Boksburg, but have no memory of it, we moved to Pretoria when I was eighteen months old. My father is a Presbyterian minister, so I was brought up in a religious, spiritual household and although I am not a practicing Christian now I have a very strong sense of right and wrong and justice and injustice and was brought up with that. So I grew up in Pretoria, went to primary school there, matriculated at Pretoria High school for girls and then went to UCT to study medicine. I did my house job in Port Elizabeth and then because I’d had a government bursary I had to work for the state to either pay them back or work it back and the job they gave me was as a medical officer in the District Surgeon’s office in Port Elizabeth. And my bosses there were Doctors Ivor Lang and Benjamin Tucker of Steve Biko infamy. Port Elizabeth, 1985 was a nightmare. It was the year of the Langa massacre, of the death of the Cradock Four, of the disappearance of the Pebco three, of the declaration of the State of Emergency. I used to go through an army roadblock every day to get to work in New Brighton. So it really was one of the darkest years of my life and I started examining State of Emergency detainees at the beginning of August in 1985 because there were too many of them to be kept in police lock ups. And from day one I would say 60 to 70 percent of the people I was seeing complained of some sort of injury. And when I said to them what happened, they said the police beat me or assaulted me or tortured me or whipped me and the vast majority of them had injuries consistent with these allegations.

Notes: Wendy Orr interviewed; Photos: Wendy Orr as child and student; PE in the eighties