SOUTH AFRICA’S By Gary Baines

Published in History

FORGOTTEN WAR Today Volume: 59

Issue: 4 2009

White South Africans who fought in the long 'Border War' to maintain
apartheid now find themselves in a country run by their former enemies.
Gary Baines examines their continuing struggle to come to terms with the
conflict and their efforts to have their voices heard.
 South Africa's Forgotten War

White South Africans who fought in the long 'Border War' to maintain
apartheid now find themselves in a country run by their former enemies.
Gary Baines examines their continuing struggle to come to terms with the
conflict and their efforts to have their voices heard.

At the base of a hill near Pretoria stands a triangular memorial

commemorating those who died in South Africa's 'Border War'. It has been
erected, unofficially, by veterans of a conflict fought to preserve
apartheid. It stands, defiantly, on the approach road to another memorial,
recently erected by the post­apartheid government, naming those who
died 'in the struggle for the nation's liberation', but pointedly omitting the
veterans' names. The two memorials represent two versions of South
African history and highlight one big unresolved issue - how should a war
be remembered when the majority of a nation chooses to forget?

Almost all white, male South Africans now between the ages of around 35
and 60 donned the nutria brown uniform of the South African Defence
Force (SADF). Between 1967 and 1994, approximately 600,000 young
men were conscripted to perform national service, or diensplig. Failure to
do so meant harsh penalties. The alternatives were to object on
conscientious (actually religious) grounds and face a six-year jail
sentence, or to flee the country.

After national service, conscripts were assigned to Citizen Force or

commando units that were liable for periodical call-ups for camps that
might have included deployment in the 'operational areas' from 1974, or
tours of duty in the black townships from 1984. Most served willingly,
some with patriotic fervor. Many white South Africans welcomed national
service as a rite of passage from boyhood to manhood.

However, conscription caused considerable political 'fallout' as the

number of SADF casualties grew. The number of those killed while on
active duty in defence of the Republic of South Africa remains unclear, but
it is thought to be at least 2,000. Nonetheless, from the mid-1980s the
Border War was still regarded by the majority of conscripts (and their
families) as a necessary commitment to ensure the continuation of white
power and privilege. Occasionally, conscripts defied the system and
joined oppositional organizations such as the End Conscription Campaign
(ECC) and in rare instances national servicemen went into exile to join the
ranks of the armed wings of the African National Congress (ANC) or Pan-
Africanist Congress (PAC).

If one person's 'terrorist' is another's 'freedom fighter', then the white

minority's Border War was the black majority's 'liberation struggle'. The
term Border War, or Grensoortog, was usually assigned to the war waged
in Angola/ Namibia but this conflict was actually part of a civil war within
South Africa and the wider region. The term was ubiquitous in white
South African public discourse during the 1970s and 1980s. It encoded
the views of most whites who believed the apartheid regime's rhetoric
that the SADF was shielding its citizens from the rooilswart gevaar
(literally 'red/black danger'): the dual threat of Communism and African
nationalism.

Nearly 20 years have passed since the SADF withdrew from Angola and
the African liberation movements suspended the armed struggle against
apartheid. When the military conflict ended and national service was
phased out, many former soldiers could not understand why they had
been asked to sacrifice so much, only to surrender power to those they
had previously seen as 'the enemy'. Some were convinced that their
erstwhile leaders had betrayed them. Most SADF veterans remained silent,
either out of a sense of loyalty to the old regime, or for fear of being held
accountable by the new regime for gross human rights violations.

So how have these veterans chosen to remember their experiences of the

Border War in view of the altered political landscape? Whereas they earlier
embraced the concept of their own 'victimhood' - they were victims of an
oppressive regime which made them fight for apartheid - it now seems
that many are prepared to eschew political correctness and the process of
South African reconciliation. Some veterans have insisted that they won
the war, rehearsing the arguments of retired generals who claim that, by
fighting the Cubans, Russians and the black liberation movements, the
SADF held the line until Communism collapsed and thus made a political
transition under more favourable circumstances possible. The veterans
say their contribution to building the 'new' South Africa has not been
recognized.

Few veterans deigned to testify before the Truth and Reconciliation

Commission (TRC), set up to examine the crimes perpetrated under
apartheid, because most believed it to be biased against the SADF. The
South African journalist Karen Whitty explains their reluctance: 'Bound by
a sense of honour to their fellow troops and the patriarchy still espoused
by white South Africa, few men have come forward and spoken about
their experiences, however barbaric and mundane, in South Africa's
border wars.

If veterans were suspicious of the TRC, they were equally wary of public
reaction to the airing of human rights abuses committed during the war.
A submission to the TRC by a group of retired SADF generals refused to
acknowledge the SADF's role in perpetrating human rights abuses both in
and outside South Africa. Some veterans reported that the lack of public
knowledge about the war created suspicion of their stories, while others
who took part in the TRC's hearings were dismissed as sympathy-seekers
or outright liars by the former SADF generals and their apologists. If
trauma involves a betrayal of trust and the abuse of power relations, then
it is not surprising that many veterans embraced silence and victimhood.
TRC amnesty applications were primarily from the ranks of the black
South African liberation armies or non-statutory forces. The TRC's official
report states: 'Of the 256 members of the apartheid-era security forces
who applied for amnesty ... only 31 had served in the SADF. In contrast,
there were close to 1,000 applications for amnesty from members of the
various armed structures aligned to the ANC.'

These statistics do not imply that former conscripts were able to deal with
their own sense of guilt and trauma. Indeed, in autobiographical books by
ex-SADF soldiers, it is clear that they want to apologize for their role in
the war. Mark Behr's novel Die Reuk van Appels (1993) - translated as
The Smell of Apples (1995) - tells of a young white Afrikaans-speaking
boy being groomed to follow in his father's footsteps as a soldier in
apartheid South Africa. It frames the Border War within 'a brutal patriarchy
that victimizes mothers and sons'. The timing of the author's revelation -
to coincide with the publication of his book - that he served as a spy for
the security forces while a student at the University of Stellenbosch
underlined the cathartic purpose of Behr's writing. But such 'confessional
fiction' is invariably ambivalent and frequently accommodates rather than
confronts the culpability of the author.

Tony Eprile's novel, The Persistence of Memory (2005), addresses the

manner in which the memories of 'ordinary' soldiers come back to haunt
them. Eprile has his narrator­ protagonist, an inept soldier and a sort of
anti-hero called Paul Sweetbread, testify before the TRC as a rebuttal
witness to former SADF Captain (now Major) Lyddie, who claims amnesty
for atrocities committed after a ceasefire had terminated South Africa's
occupation of Namibia. Lyddie implicates Sweetbread in a massacre of
Peoples' Liberation Army of Namibia combatants, who were ambushed
while returning home after the ceasefire. Lyddie's self-defence eschews
responsibility for his actions. He says: 'War is war. It is not a picnic. When
elephants fight, the grass and trees suffer.' The story illustrates the
dilemma faced by conscripts if they pointed the finger at their superiors
for war crimes in which they themselves were implicated. They are not
about to admit culpability for the very acts for which their superior
officers repudiated any responsibility, particularly if the new government
pursues recrimination rather than restitution.

Since South Africa's political transition, a number of books by former

conscripts have appeared. These texts of (sometimes) reluctant soldiers
seldom admit complicity in upholding the apartheid system and, if they
do, it is not because of ideological convictions or patriotism but rather
because they believed that they were duty-bound to do so. The stories
often show a political naivety, with the writers suggesting that the SADF
was an impartial force facilitating a peaceful transfer of power.
Citizen Force members increasingly sought to evade call-ups especially
after 1984 when they were pressed into backing the South African Police
efforts at crushing resistance in the townships. But military service was
still regarded by the majority as a necessary price to pay for white rule.
The moral ambiguity conferred on the war by white South Africans comes
after the event; many conscripts who once supported the war now do not
think it was worth fighting.

Not all SADF veterans have managed to get into print. Some have
ventured into cyberspace to tell stories that might be deemed politically
incorrect in the new South Africa; the internet has replaced veterans'
reunions and their chats in the pub. Veterans have established a network
of sites to exchange memories and, in some cases, provide platforms for
advice on matters such as post-traumatic stress disorder. In their post­
apartheid country, do the veterans see themselves as contesting their
invisibility, brought on by the nation's desire to forget the Border War and
what Sasha Gear, a researcher at the Centre for the Study of Violence and
Reconciliation in Johannesburg, calls the 'silence of stigmatised
knowledge'?

They find themselves unable to challenge the consensus, or prevailing

silence established and maintained by South Africa's cultural and political
brokers and they have, arguably, created a (cyber) space to have their
voices heard.

The earnestness of the veterans' quest for reaffirmation of their

contribution to the new South Africa is highlighted by the recent
controversy over the Freedom Park memorial wall on the crest of Salvokop
Hill near Pretoria. Rather than adopt an official SADF memorial, erected in
1979 at Fort Klapperkop (not far from Freedom Park), which lists the
names of some 2,000 killed in defending the Republic of South Africa,
veterans have ignored its existence. When the Freedom Park Trust
announced the erection of another wall of names to honour those who
had fought for freedom and humanity, a pressure group led by
conservative Afrikaners sought to have the names of veterans killed in the
Border War included in that roll of honour. The group also objected to the
fact that the memorial wall was to include the names of Cuban soldiers
who died in Angola fighting the SADF. Their request for 'fair treatment'
was dismissed by Wally Serote, CEO of the Freedom Park Trust, on the
grounds that SADF soldiers had fought to preserve apartheid and defeat
the struggle for liberation. The veterans' group responded by erecting its
own memorial at the access road to Salvokop in January 2007. The plaque
mounted on the veterans' memorial bears the following inscription:

For All Those Who Fell heeding the Call of Their Country ... including
those whose names are not on the Freedom Park wall. So We May never
Forget the Dearly Fought Freedom of all Ideologies, Credos, and Cultures
and their Respective Contributions to our rich South African Heritage.

The group recognised that those relegated to the margins of society and
whose histories become peripheral to that of the nation are likely to
become powerless. The question of whose version of history becomes
institutionalized is a political one. However, the group showed no
recognition that the sharing of a common history is itself a form of
manipulating the past to serve a political purpose. This is evident from
the plaque's explanation of the symbolism of the alternative memorial:

This triangular monument's various sides symbolize the fact that history
is not one-sided. It is erected to ensure that those who, as a result of
Freedom Park's one-sided usage of history, are not being honored, will
get the recognition they deserve. Even though this monument does not
cost the 16 million Rand that Freedom Park cost, it is a sincere effort to
pay homage to those who died in conflicts.

The unnamed conflicts refer to the war in Angola/ Namibia. The plaque
also pointedly quotes a statement attributed to Serote: 'Because at the
depth of the heart of every man beats the love for freedom.' The citation
suggests, perhaps, Serote's hypocrisy in not including SADF members on
the wall of names at Freedom Park.
The meaning of the Border War is not fixed; it has had to be constantly
renegotiated during the country's transition. Ex-SADF national servicemen
believe that they have not been acknowledged for their duties and
sacrifices on behalf of their country and that the time is right for a re-
evaluation of their roles in the conflict. Some wish to rid themselves of
the shame of being regarded as vanquished soldiers. Others have
embraced victimhood to disassociate themselves from being seen as
complicit in an oppressive system. Whatever we make of the wish of
veterans to reaffirm their contribution to creating the new South Africa,
there can be little doubt that neither silence nor ignorance is conducive to
coming to terms with the Border War.

Gary Baines is Associate Professor at Rhodes University and co-editor of Beyond the
Border War: New Perspectives on Southern Africa's Late Cold War Conflicts (Unisa
Press, 2008).