Apartheid’s Black Soldiers : Un-national Wars and Militaries in Southern Africa Paperback / softback

by Lennart Bolliger

Part of the War and Militarism in African History series

Paperback / softback

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Description

New oral histories from Black Namibian and Angolan troops who fought in apartheid South Africaâ€™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 movementsâ€™ armed wings.

Despite these soldiers' significant impact on the regionâ€™s military and political history, this dimension of southern Africaâ€™s anticolonial struggles has been almost entirely ignored in previous scholarship. Black troops from Namibia and Angola spearheaded apartheid South Africaâ€™s military intervention in their countriesâ€™ 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 Africaâ€™s security forces and considers the legacies of that involvement.

In tackling these questions, he rejects the common tendency to categorize the soldiers as â€œcollaboratorsâ€ and â€œtraitorsâ€ and reveals the un-national facets of anticolonial struggles. Finally, the bookâ€™s unique analysis of apartheid military culture shows how South Africaâ€™s military units were far from monolithic and instead developed distinctive institutional practices, mythologies, and concepts of militarized masculinity.