Academics try to make sense of thorny apartheid-era war
nce the war correspondents have moved on, the historians move in — either to help the combatants or bayonet them.
Erwin Rommel, a German general from World War 2 who was promoted way beyond his level of competence, was extolled by a string of British historians while his nemesis, Bernard Montgomery, hero of El Alamein, was excoriated 19 years after his great victory, especially by Correlli Barnett, a distinguished historian.
Today the American Civil War is being re-examined and one of its revered generals, Robert E Lee, of the defeated South, is no longer viewed as kindly as before; some Confederate statues are even coming down.
Napoleon, 205 years after his defeat at Waterloo, remains a topic of fascination for historians. And the battle of Cannae in 216 BCE is still studied at military academies.
OThere is never an armistice in academia. Four years ago it was the turn of SA historians to give the treatment to what is called the Border War, a title that is only half accurate. That war, between 1966 and 1989, was fought across northern Namibia and southern Angola. At times it involved as many as seven belligerents on two sides: SA together with two Angolan anticolonial armies, Unita and, briefly, FNLA against the MPLA, winner of the Angolan civil war, Cuba, the Soviet Union and the People’s Liberation Army of Namibia, the military wing of Swapo.
During a symposium on August 26 2016, the 50th anniversary of its first battle and also Namibia’s national day, the historians tried to make sense of the war. Dissertations presented by 12 academics are now available in a new book, In Different Times, published by Sun Press.
The editors, Ian van der Waag and Albert Grundlingh, two history professors at
Stellenbosch University, believe that it’s the first attempt to seek a deep understanding of the war. They point out that it took SA about 80 years for a singlevolume history of the Boer War (no doubt, Thomas Pakenham) to be written that mostly satisfied both sides.
It’s been just over 30 years since the end of the Border War, which is still being fought, metaphorically, and fortunately not with the same bitter vehemence as the Boer War, in books (non-fiction and fiction), academic articles (118 at the last count), movies, songs, Facebook posts, serious debates and pub arguments — often on the same level — and even in a musical. Each has a theory, many elliptical. In the end it depends on whom you want to believe. The war is still that close. Even its name is a problem.
“The nomenclature remains problematic,” say the editors. “The emotions stirred, the wounds caused and the problems left unresolved are too heated, too deep and too complex for any historian to produce one objective narrative that might find general acceptance.”
In Different Times won ’ t achieve a Pakenham consensus, but not for want of trying; it reflects a fairly broad perspective. Its breadth is impressive but the quality is varying.
Jean Pierre Scherman’s contribution on SA’s first invasion of Angola — Operation Savannah 1975-1976 — is useful only if the reader has an old map of that country containing the Portuguese place names, which have long since changed.
Gary Baines and Ian Liebenberg, academics who were conscripted to the SA Defence Force (SADF) during the war, are wafflers. Why is it that some historians insist on making a good story boring, and can’t let go of the jargon, throwing in their epistemologies and ethnographies while wallowing in post-modernities.
Nevertheless, anyone willing to plod through their reading route marches will find occasional relief. Liebenberg has some interesting points in his “socialisation” of the conscript.
Other contributions are clear and well written, especially McGill Alexander’s on the first battle of the war in a remote Swapo base camp at Ongulumbashe.
Grundlingh deals with the agonised ambivalence of the liberal opposition and Frederik Van Zyl Slabbert’s brave stand against the militarism of PW Botha, who was always eager to use apartheid’s war machine.
Rodney Warwick not only covers the militarisation of white SA society but shows the insidious manner in which the Afrikaner state co-opted its distrusted and disliked — even, in some cases, loathed — white brethren, the white Englishspeaking South Africans (the Wessas, as he calls them).
But before that could begin, the SADF needed to be Afrikanerised. Some ranks were given, for a time, new titles (lieutenants became veldkornets and lieutenant-colonels commandants, both old Boer republic terms) and NCO chevrons resembled those of the Wehrmacht. Indeed, Rudolph Hiemstra, a commandant general of the SADF, World War 2 resister and a National Party flunkey, had a uniform that closely resembled Hermann Goering’s.
Warwick has unearthed some egregious evidence from the military archives: the commandant of the Ventersburg commando (militia) “complained angrily” in a letter to his MP that replacing the Afrikaans word kommando on the cap badge with unitas undermined the Afrikaner to appease the “English”.
The complaint was apparently not acted on. Realising that it needed every able-bodied white man to protect its obsessive ideology of republicanism and apartheid, the Afrikaner nationalists cynically — and ironically — manipulated the paradigms of patriotism. “Remember the war, boys! Tobruk, Sidi Rezegh,” they reminded old English regiments. The nationalists of course meant World War 2, when almost every English SA family, and not a few Afrikaans ones, fought for empire and Jannie Smuts. These were the same nationalists who had reviled Smuts and at the time opposed, some violently, SA’s participation in World War 2 on the side of the Allies.
Persuading all white citizens to come along to war on the border was a great con job and the Wessas, accustomed to the comforts of white privilege and not a little bigoted themselves, fell for it. Also the Cold War was a convenient bogeyman.
Ancient white fears, especially in an era of uhuru, and new ones of communism (swart en rooi gevaar) were enthusiastically stoked. It was only towards the end of the Border War that the growing white antipathy, framed by the End Conscription Campaign and many young white men opting for exile, along with international sanctions on credit and weaponry, persuaded the apartheid government that the war was no longer worth the candle.
By the time the peace deals were worked out in New York, Cairo and Geneva, the Soviet Union had collapsed, the Cubans were on their way home and the situation had changed dramatically, allowing all sides to claim victory. This book doesn’t deal much with the politics of peace, but perhaps that could be a topic for the next symposium by Stellenbosch’s two history departments, and another volume of their African Military Studies, of which In Different Times is the second.