South Africa's 'Border War': Contested Narratives and Conflicting Memories

284 Pages·2015·3.448 MB·English

by  Gary Baines

Preface
For the sake of full disclosure, it should be noted that I am a former South
African Defence Force (SADF) conscript and hence a veteran. I make no claim
to speak on their behalf though. In fact, many of my opinions are at odds with
those of large segments of this ‘community of remembrance’. Nor did I set out
to write myself into this (hi)story. But it would be disingenuous or dishonest to
deny that I have something personal invested in this project. It is easy to suspend
critical judgment in a public culture which has a heightened sensitivity towards
the personal experience of war-related (and other) trauma. There is the danger
of the expression of personal emotion displacing historical analysis. So while I
have some sympathy for SADF veterans, it is not my intention to ‘whitewash’
their defence of a fundamentally unjust political system. I have no wish to
become an unwitting accomplice in the articulation of racist right-wing views.
But neither would I want to deny their existence. So I believe that SADF veterans
are accorded a voice and a fair but critical treatment throughout this book.
Grahamstown
August 2013
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Acknowledgements
This book has been a long time in the making. During this time I have incurred
numerous debts to those who have provided information and given of their time.
In certain instances assistance was solicited and in others volunteered. Whatever
the case, it was given willingly.
This venture started out as the South African War Veterans Project that
was funded by SANPAD (South African Netherlands Research Programme
on Alternatives in Development). My Dutch-based partners, Graeme
Goldsworthy and Joop de Jong, helped to get the project off the ground. The
team was immeasurably strengthened by the sagacity of my colleague from
the Rhodes University Psychology Department, Lindy Wilbraham. Theresa
Edlmann, who joined the project as a PhD student, became its pivot. She
obtained additional funding from Atlantic Philanthropies that enabled the
project to morph into a new phase known as The Legacies of Apartheid
Wars (LAWs) Project. Situated in the Rhodes History Department under
my nominal leadership, LAWs has been directed by Theresa with purpose
and aplomb. Although my own work has happened in tandem with the
SANPAD and LAWs projects, it has benefitted enormously from contact and
engagement with many persons who have shared their life stories with me and
the group. It has been an enriching (and occasionally emotionally exhausting)
experience.
I wish to express my thanks to the following people who have provided me
with photographs and permitted me to include them in this publication: Dudley
Baines, John Liebenberg and Mike McWilliams. I have also received assistance
from the archivists at the Documentation Centre of the Department of Defence,
especially from Steve de Agrela. My research has taken me further afield to the
SWAPO archives at the Basler Afrika Bibliographien, a visit facilitated by Dag
Henrichsen. Another Namibian, Jan-Bart Gewald, hosted me at the African
Studies Centre in Leiden in the Netherlands, where I spent three months writing
up material that appears in this book.
During the course of my researching and writing, I was provided with useful
information and insights by colleagues working in related fields of research or
interested in my project. Collegial exchanges with Anthony Akerman, Steve
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viii Acknowledgements
Davis, Luise White, Rob McNamara, Sue Onslow, Richard Dale, Janet Cherry,
Christopher Saunders, Pieter Wolfaardt and John Daniel proved invaluable to
me.
I also owe a debt of gratitude to fellow SADF veterans Cameron Blake, Clive
Holt, Robert Wilson, Graham Danney, Paul Morris and Lew Gerber, as well
as retired professional soldiers Jan Breytenbach and McGill Alexander. They
answered questions, agreed to interviews and provided me with materials from
their personal collections.
I am also grateful to Mary Corrigall, the Books Editor at the Sunday
Independent, who has supplied me with a steady stream of review copies of books
related to the ‘Border War’. This has recently become a minor ‘industry’ amongst
publishers and Mary has enabled me to keep track of developments in the field.
None of the above-mentioned individuals should be held responsible for any
errors and omissions in this text.
I also wish to acknowledge permission from the publishers of the following
journals for allowing me to reproduce material from articles that I published
therein: South African Historical Journal, Social Dynamics, Safundi: The Journal
of South African and American Studies and Scientia Militaria: South African
Journal of Military Studies. Earlier versions of two chapters in this book were
also published by Berghahn Books and the University of Cape Town Press, who
have allowed me to reproduce them. Full details of these articles and chapters are
to be found in the bibliography.
I wish to dedicate this book to my wife and partner, Angela, who has had
to put up with bouts of writing in which I became virtually incommunicado.
Thanks, Ang, for understanding why I had to see it through.
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Figures
Figure 3.1 P OW Robert Wilson paraded before the media, Luanda,
16 December 1975 55
Figure 3.2 F amily reunion, Waterkloof Air Base, 2 September 1978
(Jan Hamman) 67
Figure 5.1 Mass grave, Cassinga (Gaetano Pagano) 97
Figure 5.2 Massacre at Kassinga (Pagano/Asberg) 98
Figure 6.1 S ADF convoy entering Namibia, 30 August 1988
(John Liebenberg) 108
Figure 7.1 Mass grave near Oshakati (John Liebenberg) 123
Figure 7.2 E enhana Shrine showing female PLAN combatant
(John Liebenberg) 126
Figure 8.1 S .A.’s Vietnam (ECC Archives,
University of the Witwatersrand) 137
Figure 9.1 F ort Klapperkop Statue of Uniformed Soldier
(Dudley Baines) 157
Figure 9.2 Fort Klapperkop Memorial Wall (Dudley Baines) 158
Figure 9.3 The Wall of Names, Freedom Park (Gary Baines) 161
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Glossary of Abbreviations,
Acronyms and Terms
AK-47 Russian-designed and manufactured assault rifle
ANC African National Congress
APLA Azanian People’s Liberation Army, the PAC’s armed wing
BWS Breaking the Wall of Silence, a Namibian movement that
publicizes the detention of SWAPO members in camps
Casevac Casualty evacuation
Casspir An acronym of SAP (South African Police) and CSIR (Council
for Scientific and Industrial Research) who collaborated to
develop an armoured personnel carrier that is able to withstand
mine blasts
CCB Civil Co-operation Bureau
CCC Cultural Code of Captivity
CEO Chief executive officer
COIN Counterinsurgency
COSAWR Committee of South African War Resisters, an exile organization
that opposed military conscription
CPR Certified Personnel Register
Cuca A small shop found in Namibian homesteads named after a
Portuguese-Angolan beer
Cutline A cleared strip or DMZ (see below) that served as a boundary
between Namibia and Angola
DA Democratic Alliance
DDR Democratization, demobilization and reintegration
DSM Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the US
medical fraternity’s bible
DTA Democratic Turnhalle Alliance
DMZ Demilitarized zone where all people are treated as the enemy
ECC End Conscription Campaign
FAPLA Popular Armed Forces for the Liberation of Angola – armed
forces of the MPLA (see below) government in Angola
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Glossary of Abbreviations, Acronyms and Terms xi
G5/G6 Artillery cannon manufactured by Denel to combat the Russian-
built Stalin organ
HNP Herstigde Nasionale Party (Reformed National Party)
HTML Hypertext markup language
ICRC International Committee of the Red Cross
ICT Information and Communication Technology
IFP Inkatha Freedom Party, the Zulu nationalist group led by Gatsha
Buthelezi
JMMC Joint Military Monitoring Committee
Koevoet Afrikaans for crowbar. Official name for the unit was South West
African Police Counter-Insurgency (SWAPOLCOIN)
LAARSA Legion of the Associated Airborne R.S.A., an organisation of ex-
SADF paratroopers
MFA Minister of Foreign Affairs
MIAs Missing in actions
MiG Russian-built Mikojam and Gurevich fighter-interceptor aircraft
MK Umkhonto we Sizwe (‘Spear of the Nation’), the ANC’s armed
wing
MOD Minster of Defence
MOTH The Memorable Order of the Tin Hats, an ex-servicemen’s
association
MPLA Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola
NGK Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk (Dutch Reformed Church)
NIS National Intelligence Service
NP National Party, the ruling political party in South Africa,
1948–1994
NSG National Service Generation
NSMS National Security Management System, the network that
exercised executive control of South Africa during the
presidency of P. W. Botha
NCO Non-Commissioned Officer
NGO Non-governmental organization
OAU Organisation of African Unity
PAC Pan Africanist Congress
PLAN People’s Liberation Army of Namibia, SWAPO’s armed wing
PMP Parliamentary Millennium Project
POWs Prisoners of war
PTSD Post-traumatic stress disorder
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xii Glossary of Abbreviations, Acronyms and Terms
R1/4 South African 7.62mm calibre rifle modelled on the Belgian FN
Ratel Afrikaans for ‘badger’. A personnel carrier fitted with a 20mm or
90mm weapon
Recces Members of the SADF’s reconnaissance or special forces
RPG Russian-designed shoulder-mounted rocket launcher that fires
armour-piercing 85mm rounds
SAAF South African Air Force
SABC South African Broadcasting Corporation
SADF South African Defence Force
SANDF South African National Defence Force
SAP South African Police
SCF Southern Cross Fund
SWA South West Africa, now called Namibia
SWAPO South West Africa People’s Organisation
SWAPOL South West African Police
SWATF South West African Territorial Force
TRC Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa
UDF United Democratic Front
UK United Kingdom
UN United Nations
UNSC United Nations Security Council
UNITA National Union for the Total Independence of Angola
UNSC United Nations Security Council
UNTAG United Nations Transitional Assistance Group
US(A) United States of America
ZANLA-PF Zimbabwean African National Liberation Army – Patriotic
Front, the military wing of the Zimbabwean African National
Union led by Robert Mugabe
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Introduction
It is axiomatic that wars do not end with the cessation of hostilities; they have
an afterlife. Wars continue to affect veterans and society more generally for a
long time after the shooting is over. If the end of war carries with it an obligation
to remember, and ‘the silence and disinterest of the many empower the few to
shape the memory of the past for all’,1 it begs to ask these questions: who are ‘the
few’ and how do they fashion the memory of a war? And what meaning(s) do
they ascribe to it?
This book addresses such questions with respect to South Africa’s ‘Border
War’. Its thesis is that the meaning of ‘Border War’ is neither fixed nor inscribed
in the event itself but shaped by mnemonic communities after the fact. These
communities are comprised of memory makers or agents who fashion and
memory bearers who accept, reject or reinterpret the dominant meaning
of an event. Collective memory is negotiated at the interface between those
responsible for the imposition of a dominant public narrative and individuals
or members of a minority mnemonic group. As Timothy Ashplant and his
collaborators aver,
In all societies, different social groups have a differential power to
make their meanings and memories central and defining. The weaker
and more marginalized have less access to the agencies of either state
or civil society, and less capacity to influence prevailing narratives or to
project their own into wider arenas.2
These arenas are characterized by an unstable and dynamic power relationship
that ‘approximates to a site of contestation which is constantly subject to
changing individual and social forces’.3
The nomenclature of the Border War
The contestation over the meaning of the ‘Border War’ begins with the name
itself. Naming (and more so, renaming) is a political act. As Natasha Norman
has it, ‘[t]he very naming of this war denotes the conflict of ideologies inherent
in its opposing forces’.4 The term ‘Border War’ entered the discourse of white
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2 South Africa’s ‘Border War’
South Africans in the late 1970s and is well established in the public domain,
as well as the literature. Its common usage is exactly why the term must be
problematized. My insertion of the term ‘Border War’ in scare quotes invites
readers to do just that.
Conventional military histories of the ‘Border War’ focus primarily on
the war waged by the South African Defence Force (SADF) in Namibia and
Angola.5 The standard narrative commences with the combined security
forces’ attack on the South West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO) base
at Omgulumbashe in 1966. It tracks the ‘hot pursuit’ operations and invasions
of Angola launched by the SADF against SWAPO, which occasionally brought
it into direct conflict with the armed forces of Angola, as well as those of its
ally, Cuba. But this narrative pays rather less attention to the fact that the SADF
occupied large swathes of southern Angola for extended periods in support of
its Angolan surrogate force, UNITA (the Movement for the Total Independence
of Angola) between 1975 and 1988. Most of these accounts also fail to mention
that SADF bases in Namibia were situated in an illegally occupied territory, or
that cross-border operations and large-scale incursions violated the integrity of
neighbouring states, especially Angola. What they do stress is that the SADF
was shielding South African citizens from the twin threats of communism and
black nationalism, known in the Afrikaans language as the rooi/swart gevaar
(red/black danger), respectively. Thus the term ‘Border War’ was used by the
apartheid state to perpetuate the fiction that SADF troops were protecting South
Africa’s border and not actually fighting on foreign soil.6
Certain commentators have employed specific terms such as ‘bush war’,
‘apartheid wars’ or ‘thirty years war’ for the conflict. Each of these terms has a
connotation that is slightly different from others’. Proponents of ‘bush war’ tend
to limit the scope of their inquiry to the fighting by armed formations in the
veld (or bush) rather than asking uncomfortable questions about the political
dimension of the conflict.7 Conversely, those who favour ‘apartheid wars’ suggest
that the root causes of the conflict are the colonialism and white supremacy in
the subcontinent.8 The last of these terms offers more of a periodization than a
description of the conflict, commencing with the armed liberation struggle in
the early 1960s and ending with the demise of white minority rule in the 1990s.9
However, none of these terms quite does justice to the complex nature of the
conflict, as it was a combination of civil, (counter-)insurgency and conventional
warfare; what US military theorist John McCuen has called a ‘hybrid war’.10
A term favoured by the current ruling parties in southern Africa is ‘national
liberation struggle’. So, for instance, SWAPO describes the conflict against the
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