Bolliger, L. “Apartheid’s African Soldiers: A History of Black Namibian and Angolan Members of South Africa’s Former Security Forces, 1975 to the Present.” PhD thesis, University of Oxford, 2020.
In this study, I examine the history of black Namibian and Angolan soldiers who fought in apartheid South Africa’s security forces during the Namibian war of independence and the Angolan post-independence civil war from 1975 until 1989. I ask how and why these soldiers got involved in South Africa’s security forces, and what the legacies of that involvement have been, in particular for the individual soldiers and their families. Based primarily on black former soldiers’ own accounts, I argue that their experiences deeply disrupt dominant narratives of heroic struggles of ‘national liberation’ against colonial occupation. While scholars have remained almost entirely silent on the histories of African soldiers of colonial and settler armies during the period of decolonization, nationalist narratives have either ignored or denounced them as ‘mercenaries’ and ‘collaborators’. I complicate such portrayals by highlighting the limits and divisions of the wars of ‘national liberation’ in Namibia and Angola. More specifically, I trace the long history of different forms of ‘collaboration’ during colonial conquest and occupation and examine black soldiers’ complex motivations for joining and remaining in South Africa’s security forces.
Source: excerpt from thesis abstract as culled from https://ora.ox.ac.uk
