Apartheid’s Black Soldiers (eBook)

Un-national Wars and Militaries in Southern Africa

Lennart Bolliger (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2021
292 Seiten
Ohio University Press (Verlag)
978-0-8214-4741-3 (ISBN)

Infos

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 "e;collaborators"e; and "e;traitors"e; 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.

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 1.10.2021
• Reihe/Serie: War and Militarism in African History
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Militärgeschichte
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Wirtschaftsgeschichte
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung
• Themenwelt: Technik
• Schlagworte: 32 Battalion • Angola • Apartheid • Bush war • colonial militaries • Decolonization • Koevoet • Lennart Bolliger • military collaborators • Namibia • Oral History • South Africa • SWATF
• ISBN-10: 0-8214-4741-6 / 0821447416
• ISBN-13: 978-0-8214-4741-3 / 9780821447413