Apartheid’s Black Soldiers
Ohio University Press (Verlag)
978-0-8214-2455-1 (ISBN)
New 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 history interviews and archival sources, Lennart Bolliger challenges the common framing of these wars as struggles of national liberation fought by and for Africans against White colonial and settler-state armies.
Focusing on three case studies of predominantly Black units commanded by White officers, Bolliger investigates how and why these soldiers participated in South Africa’s security forces and considers the legacies of that involvement. In tackling these questions, he rejects the common tendency to categorize the soldiers as “collaborators” and “traitors” and reveals the un-national facets of anticolonial struggles.
Finally, the book’s unique analysis of apartheid military culture shows how South Africa’s military units were far from monolithic and instead developed distinctive institutional practices, mythologies, and concepts of militarized masculinity.
Lennart Bolliger is a lecturer in international history at Utrecht University. Previously, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Asian and African Studies of the Humboldt University of Berlin and a visiting researcher at the History Workshop of the University of the Witwatersrand. His research has previously been published in the Journal of Southern African Studies and the South African Historical Journal.
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
| Erscheinungsdatum | 04.10.2021 |
|---|---|
| Reihe/Serie | War and Militarism in African History |
| Verlagsort | Athens |
| Sprache | englisch |
| Maße | 152 x 229 mm |
| Themenwelt | Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte |
| Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Militärgeschichte | |
| Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Wirtschaftsgeschichte | |
| ISBN-10 | 0-8214-2455-6 / 0821424556 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-0-8214-2455-1 / 9780821424551 |
| Zustand | Neuware |
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