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Division in the (Inner) Ranks: The Psychosocial Legacies of the Border Wars
Abstract
During the apartheid era, a key component of the Nationalist government's strategy in combating both African nationalism and the perceived threat of communism was the compulsory conscription of young white men into the South African Defence Force (SADF) between 1968 and 1993. Conscription was one relatively small component of a system in which all South Africans’ lives were profoundly affected by the political domain's imposition of racial, class and gender stratifications. This paper is based on ongoing research into the psychosocial legacies of the apartheid wars. It explores how some of the burgeoning publications about this period of South African history reflect the intrapersonal legacies and psychological stresses that were caused by the social and political discourses of this context. A particular focus in this discussion is the way in which the social and political fracturings that characterised South African society during the apartheid era have been mirrored in the psychosocial constructs that significantly shaped some conscripts’ lives, both at the time and in the post-apartheid context, and continue to influence current South African society.
... White work, therefore, needs to include an explicit grappling with the gendered and intergenerational impacts of militarised white masculinity, with the 'lingering unspoken pain of white youth who fought for apartheid' (Edlmann 2012(Edlmann , 2015. The DRC 'white work' process highlighted the fact that demilitarising 'white work' will, however, have to take into account the different, culturally specific journeys of change of white South Africans from liberal, Englishspeaking and those from more conservative, Afrikaner, DRC backgrounds. ...
In this article, we reflect on our lived experience as co-facilitators of a promising intragroup anti-racism process within the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) in South Africa. Firstly, we describe how this emergent process, referred to as ‘white work’, has developed since 2018 to include three focal areas: facilitation and training, research and the development of resources for faith leaders. Secondly, in the interest of localised, embodied diagnostic work, we mention relatively neglected strands of South African whiteness that have arisen through this process of ‘white work’. We argue that this DRC ‘white work’ contributes to a more intersectional approach to dismantling whiteness. Finally, we propose that the dismantling potential of this ‘white work’ rests on three dimensions – raising consciousness, cultivating capacity and forming community – while stressing some of the challenges and limitations we have encountered in our process thus far.
Contribution: This article contributes to both the diagnosis and dismantling of South African whiteness by presenting a narrative reflection on an emergent process among members of the DRC in South Africa.
... Most of the combat took place in Namibia (then known as South West Africa) and Angola. However, some also fought in Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia) and Mozambique, although not on the same scale or for the same length of time (Edlmann, 2012;. ...
This chapter explores the problems faced by male conscripts into the former South African Defence Force. While conscripts came from English-speaking and Afrikaans-speaking communities, this chapter isolates the specific legacy issues of male Afrikaner conscripts. Conscripts exercise little choice in going to war and the forced nature of their military engagement as state veterans provokes unusual legacy issues compared to other state veterans. These legacy issues are thrown into particularly high relief by having fought on the losing side.
... The faces are those of (elderly) political leaders, but their (young) soldier bodies point to those hundreds of thousands of white men who were conscripted during the apartheid era. Given the much greater needs and suffering of those on the receiving end of generations of systemic racial discrimination, it is, of course, understandable that the post-1994 national focus has not been on the 'lingering, unspoken pain of white youth who fought for Apartheid' (Edlmann 2015(Edlmann , 2012. Here, I am only drawing attention to the strong possibility of a family-type loyalty between white conscripts as 'blood brothers', as 'brothers-inarms', especially towards those who 'paid the ultimate price with their lives'. ...
A significant factor undermining real racial reconciliation in post-1994 South Africa is widespread resistance to shared historical responsibility amongst South Africans racialised as white. In response to the need for localised 'white work' (raising self-critical, intragroup historical awareness for the sake of deepened racial reconciliation), this article aims to contribute to the uprooting of white denialism, specifically amongst Afrikaans-speaking Christians from (Dutch) Reformed backgrounds. The point of entry is two underexplored, challenging, contextualised crucifixion paintings, namely, Black Christ and Cross-Roads Jesus. Drawing on critical whiteness studies, extensive local and international experience as a 'participatory' facilitator of conflict transformation and his particular embodiment, the author explores the creative unsettling potential of these two prophetic 'icons'. Through this incarnational, phenomenological, diagnostic engagement with Black Christ, attention is drawn to the dynamics of family betrayal, 'moral injury' and idolisation underlying 'white fragility'. 'White fatigue' is challenged by stressing the Biblical nature of Cross-Roads Jesus' confrontational, 'ugly' portrayal of the systemic violence of apartheid and colonialism. It is also argued that a combination of Louw's shocking portrayal of an enraged, emaciated township Jesus with the explicit depiction of white historical responsibility in Black Christ increases the counter-cultural potential of these icons to disrupt denial amongst white South African Christians. However, the realisation of this potential will require the cultivation of more capacity to work creatively with the intense emotional, moral, spiritual discomfort brought to the surface by this type of religious icon. CONTRIBUTION: The article argues for a contextualised, South African engagement with the crucifixion of Christ, through an embodied interpretation of two anti-apartheid religious paintings. It makes a contribution to critical whiteness studies and practical theology and thus fits into the interdisciplinary, hermeneutical scope of HTS.
It is poignant to note that after the official South African Truth and Reconciliation
hearings discontinued there has not been adequate progress made in terms
of racial and ethnic reconciliation in South Africa. Therefore, the chapter aims
to address the issue with a focus on the contribution that Steve Biko made
from his perspectives on a Black Consciousness ideology and how it can be
used to address the matter. The chapter commences with stating the problem
of racial and ethnic reconciliation in South Africa, that is still a challenge, and
has often been observed in media spats between coloured and African blacks.
The chapter uses this ethnic and racial tension as a case study to explore
how the work of Biko can complement the discontinued work of the South
African TRC’s process in ensuring racial and ethnic reconciliation. The objective is to show that Biko’s black consciousness, can also serve as a ‘Christian’
response to the still racial and ethnic fragmented society
For many young South African adults (often called ‘born frees’), who were born just before or just after the demise of political apartheid, the ongoing realities of poverty and inequality bring to light the question of whether they truly are ‘free’ in contemporary South Africa? Their lived experiences of poverty and inequality seem to be in conflict with theologically laden concepts that remain prominent in social and political life, such as reconciliation, forgiveness, justice and restitution. This leads to a bi‑directional process of contesting, and being contested, by such notions and discourses. Furthermore, in light of the double legacy of both the church and youth as resisting injustice, this publication seeks to explore the many perspectives from which the Christian faith, race and inequality amongst youth can be brought to light.
In 1986, the Supreme Court of South Africa reversed a decision made by the Board for Religious Objection and thereby established that Buddhism was legally recognised as a religion. This seminar will examine the thinking found in the court decision and compare it to our own problems as scholars of religion when we have to decide what is and what is not “religion”.
This essay uses feminist scholarship to engender African military history. It begins by examining the ways in which gender has—or has not—been integrated into African military history over the last ten years. Next, it analyzes some of the most influential feminist scholarship on gender and militarism in Africa today. Although most of this literature has not been produced by historians, it has much to teach us about how gender can be critically interrogated within our own work. The penultimate section considers the importance of cultivating a feminist curiosity and discusses what this type of critical thinking can bring to African military history. And finally, the conclusion reflects upon the future of the field, describing what needs to be done and how we might get there.
Just as stories about the past are constructed in particular ways, so too are silences about historical events. Silences about what happened in the past are catalysed by a range of factors including expedience, fear, perceptions of threat, a need to protect, political amnesia, trauma and moral injury. Historical silences are constructed within social spaces and in people’s own accounts of their personal histories and identities. Silences are thus both personal and relational constructs that do not remain static, but rather shift and evolve, and can be disrupted. This article reflects on work conducted by the Legacies of Apartheid Wars Project between 2012 and 2014 at Rhodes University. The aim of these reflections is to explore the theoretical implications of work that sought to intervene in realms of silence and constrained memory, and invite public dialogical engagements with the past. The aim of these engagements was to acknowledge the complexities of apartheid’s legacies and some of the silences enfolded in those complexities, cognisant of the dynamic relationship between speaking and silence in how work of this nature engages with contested political, social and cultural terrains. The work of the Legacies of Apartheid Wars Project could, therefore, be said to comprise memory activism in the midst of ongoing contestation regarding how to make meaning of both the past and the present in the Southern African context.
External and internal forces threatened the apartheid state in the 1980s. The refusal to perform compulsory military service by individual white men and the increasing number of white South Africans who criticized the role of the military and apartheid governance had the potential to destabilize the gendered binaries on which white social order and Nationalist rule rested. The state constituted itself as a heterosexual, masculine entity in crisis and deployed a number of gendered discourses in an effort to isolate and negate objectors to military service. The state articulated a nationalist discourse that defined the white community in virile, masculine, and heroic terms. Conversely, “feminine” weakness, cowardice, and compromise were scorned. Objectors, as “strangers” in the public realm, were most vulnerable to homophobic stigmatization from the state and its supporters.
Every war is fought twice: militarily and then discursively. The war of words or discursive struggle tends to be particularly acrimonious following civil wars. This is true of South Africa’s Border War/Liberation Struggle, during which the white minority’s ‘terrorist’ became the black majority’s ‘freedom fighter’. Notwithstanding the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the legacy of this conflict remains divisive. Contestations over the meaning and memory of the war have manifested themselves in a number of ways. These include tensions during the integration of the South African Defence Force (SADF) and the armed wings of the liberation movements. A commemorative crisis has also followed the erection of new memorials, such as Freedom Park, to honour heroes and heroines of the Liberation Struggle. A fracas followed the decision of the Park’s trustees to omit the names of deceased SADF soldiers from the Wall of Names. This paper examines how Freedom Park became the site of struggle between self‐styled representatives of SADF veterans and cultural elites of the post‐apartheid order. It suggests that this controversy exemplifies the functioning of memory politics in transitional societies.
On the basis of examining life stories narrated by 63 Israeli male veterans of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, this article delves into the social construction of personal memory. Focusing on the remembering subject will allow us to study this process by highlighting the agent who creates his or her world, but at the same time it will disclose how society frames and channels the agent's choices.
My contention is that personal memory (traumatic or normalizing, conforming or critical) is embedded within, designed by, and derives its meaning from, a memory field that offers different interpretations of war. Yet this memory field is not an open space, and the remembering subject is not free to choose any interpretation he wishes. Cultural criteria "distribute" accessibility to different collective memories according to social entitlement. These "distributive criteria" dictate who is entitled to remember and what is to be remembered, thereby controlling the extent of trauma and criticism of personal memory.
This paper aims to provide an overview of a narrative psychological approach towards the study of self and identity. The narrative psychological approach can be classified as broadly social constructionist insofar as it attempts to examine the cultural structuration of individual experience. However, building on recent criticism of certain social constructionist approaches (such as discourse analysis), it is argued that these approaches tend to lose touch with the phenomenological and experiential realities of everyday, practical life. Accordingly, they overplay the disorderly, chaotic, variable and flux-like nature of self-experience. Drawing on recent research on traumatizing experiences such as living with serious illness, this paper argues that the disruption and fragmentation manifest in such experiences serves as a useful means of highlighting the sense of unity, meaning and coherence (the `narrative configuration') more commonly experienced on an everyday level. Moreover, when disorder and incoherence prevail, as in the case of trauma, narratives are used to rebuild the individual's shattered sense of identity and meaning.
A National Serviceman's Border War (Johannesburg: Galago, 2008); C. Blake, Troepie: From Call-Up to Camps
- S Webb
- Ops Medic
- G Korff
Examples include: T. Ramsden, Border-Line Insanity: A National Serviceman's Story (Bloomington, IN:
Trafford, 2007); S. Webb, Ops Medic: A National Serviceman's Border War (Johannesburg: Galago, 2008);
C. Blake, Troepie: From Call-Up to Camps (Cape Town: Zebra Press, 2009); G. Korff, 19 With a Bullet: A
South African Paratrooper in Angola (Johannesburg: 30 Degrees South, 2009); C. Blake, From Soldier to
Civvy: Reflections on National Service (Cape Town: Zebra Press, 2010); A. Feinstein, Battle Scarred:
Hidden Costs of the Border War (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2011).
- A Christopher
- Branch
- Wisdom
Christopher, A Branch of Wisdom: A Quest for Meaning in a Divided World (Kommetjie: Beyond Books,
2002).
New Namibia Books At Thy Call We Did Not Falter: A Frontline Account of the 1988 Angolan War as seen through the Eyes of a Conscripted Soldier
- R Andrews
Examples include: A. Feinstein, In Conflict (Windhoek: New Namibia Books, 1998); R. Andrews, Buried in
the Sky (London and Sandton: Penguin, 2001); B. Fowler, ed., Pro Patria (Durban: Just Done Productions,
2006); C. Holt, At Thy Call We Did Not Falter: A Frontline Account of the 1988 Angolan War as seen
through the Eyes of a Conscripted Soldier (Cape Town: Zebra Press, 2005).