Description
Book SynopsisNew oral histories from Black Namibian and Angolan troops who fought in apartheid South Africa's security forces reveal their involvement, and its impact on their lives, to be far more complicated than most historical scholarship has acknowledged.
In anticolonial struggles across the African continent, tens of thousands of African soldiers served in the militaries of colonial and settler states. In southern Africa, they often made up the bulk of these militaries and, in some contexts, far outnumbered those who fought in the liberation movements' armed wings. Despite these soldiers'' significant impact on the region's military and political history, this dimension of southern Africa's anticolonial struggles has been almost entirely ignored in previous scholarship.
Black troops from Namibia and Angola spearheaded apartheid South Africa's military intervention in their countries' respective anticolonial war and postindependence civil war. Drawing from oral
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“Lennart Bolliger’s exceptionally well-researched monograph on the experiences of Black African soldiers who fought in the war for Namibian independence on the side of apartheid South Africa makes a major contribution to our knowledge of that war and of what happened to those who fought in it. Apartheid’s Black Soldiers is essential reading for anyone concerned with the history of the liberation of Southern Africa and the region’s postliberation politics.” -- Chris Saunders, professor emeritus of historical studies, University of Cape Town
“Lennart Bolliger’s book explains with admirable clarity the vexed, troubling history of African soldiers who fought in Southern Africa’s ‘un-national wars’ against liberation armies engaged in the long struggle against colonialism and apartheid. Drawing on a rich collection of oral interviews with the soldiers themselves, Apartheid’s Black Soldiers refuses any easy readings of these soldiers‘ motivations. Instead, Bolliger situates soldiers within the local, regional, and transnational contexts of their recruitment, their basic economic needs, and their interpretations of the immediate political and military circumstances engulfing them. As a result, this book offers key new perspectives on African soldiers who are often described as ‘sellouts’ but whose motivations were far more complicated than that.” -- Michelle R. Moyd, author of Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa
"Bolliger pays close and careful attention to the military cultures of the different units that made up South Africa’s counterinsurgency spearhead. He also attends to the afterlives of apartheid’s Black soldiers, showing the complex ways they have found a political voice in contemporary Namibia and tried to eke out an existence on the margins of South African society—or on the battlefields of Africa’s never-ending wars. This is an important book, and it will add immeasurably to our understanding of war in southern Africa.” -- Jacob S. T. Dlamini, author of Safari Nation: A Social History of the Kruger National Park
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction. Un-national Soldiers in Southern Africa during and after Decolonization
1. “The Ovambos Did Not Take Part in the War against the Germans”: Fractures and Divisions in Colonial Namibia and Southern Angola
2. “We Live between Two Fires”: The Reasons for Joining the Apartheid Security Forces in Northern Namibia, 1975–89
3. “The War Was Very Complicated”: The Formation and Development of 32 Battalion, 1975–84
4. “Every Force Has Its Own Rules”: The Military Cultures of South Africa’s Security Forces in Namibia and Angola
5. “Dictation Comes from the Victor”: The Postwar Politics of Black Former Soldiers in Namibia, 1989–2014
6. “We Are Lost People”: Citizenship and Belonging of Black Former Soldiers in South Africa, 1989 to the Present
Conclusion: Un-national Wars of Decolonization and Their Legacies
Notes
Note on Interviews Conducted by the Author
Bibliography
Index
