The Saga of South African Pows in Angola, 1975–82 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Ways of Death: Accounts of Terror from Angolan Refugees in Namibia
Africa, 2000
In their accounts of the war in Angola, refugees from south-eastern Angola who now live in Rundu (Namibia) draw a distinction between warfare in the past and the events that happened in their region of origin after Angolan independence in 1975. Although they process their experiences through recounting history, these refugees maintain that the incidence of torture, mutilation and massive killing after 1975 has no precedent in the area's history and forms an entirely new development. This article investigates the reasons for this posited modernity of killing, torture and mutilation. The placement of the recent events outside local history is shown to represent an expression of outrage, anger and indignation at the army's treatment of the civilian population during the recent phase of the war. The outrage not only concerns the scale of the killing, torture and mutilation but is also linked with the issue of agency. The informants accuse UNITA army leaders in particular of want...
Beyond the Border War: New Perspectives on Southern Africa's Late Cold War Conflicts
"For some fifteen years little attention has been paid to South Africa's late Cold War conflicts and the memories of soldiers who fought in them. Likewise, combatants with the liberation movements have all but been forgotten or otherwise marginalised in the new political dispensation. But the recent controversy over the exclusion of the names of SADF soldiers from the Freedom Park memorial wall and the popularity of publications and the existence of Internet sites that host personal accounts of the war suggest that there is significant public interest in these matters. The discovery of mass graves and questions about the treatment of detainees in SWAPO camps have kept the war in the public eye in Namibia. This volume offers new perspectives on the Border War through the paradigms of diplomatic and military history, cultural and literary studies, as well as victimology. Contributors to this volume have challenged the boundaries, broken the silences, even tackled some taboos about the war. They have put the Border War firmly back on the academic agenda thereby mirroring its place in the popular imagination."
Britain's response to South Africa in Angola between 1975 and 1990
lse.ac.uk
South African troops were involved in Angola's struggle for independence from around 1975 to 1990. Rather than support the struggle for independence, South Africa aimed to use the struggle for its own ends -perhaps even to incorporate the territory into the Republic. The problem was that South Africa was regarded as a pariah due to its policy of Apartheid, and would therefore not receive international support for its endeavours. This dilemma was solved for the Republic by the Cold War as the Angolan independence fighters were being supported by Cuba and the USSR. Using the struggle against communism as a front, South Africa was able to elicit support from the USA and Britain, the extent of which depended on who was in power in those two countries.
A Far-Away War: Angola 1975-1989
2016
This book is a welcome addition to the growing body of literature on the conflict increasingly referred to as the ‘Southern Africa Thirty-Year War’. That armed conflict extended from the Mpondo Rebellion, which started in 1960 and the uprisings in northern Angola in 1961, to the final whimpers of township unrest in South Africa in the early 1990s. It included the protracted insurgencies of the former Portuguese territories of Angola and Mozambique, the brutal Rhodesian ‘Bush War’ for Zimbabwean liberation, the foreign involvement in the Angolan civil war, the fight for the independence of Namibia and the ‘Struggle’ in South Africa.
Mkatashinga: Narratives of the Mutiny in ANC Camps in Angola (1983/84)
Journal of Global Faultlines, 2019
The 1984 mutiny in the Angolan camps of the African National Congress (ANC) has been the stuff of legends. For a long time two contradictory interpretations were prominent. One interpretation painted it as, completely, the work of apartheid agents and agent provocateurs. The other painted it as an instance where patriotic democrats took a stance for justice and they were crushed by an undemocratic ANC. The information that recently came out of the memoirs and biographies of former soldiers paints a more nuanced picture that reveals the situation to be more complex than the ANC's official view and those of its distractors. While there can be no way of absolutely ruling out enemy interference, all narratives point to the presence of genuine challenges that could have been handled better. The absence of senior leadership from the camps also ensured a weak response to these.
Journal of Veterans Studies, 2020
The term 'Border War' (and its Afrikaans equivalent Grensoorlog) were used by white South Africans to describe the war that was waged in Namibia and Angola from 1966 to 1989. The low-intensity war initially involved the South African security forces in counter-insurgency operations against PLAN (Peoples' Liberation Army of Namibia) guerrillas within Namibia. Then the South African Defence Force (SADF) employed 'hot pursuit' operations in which its troops frequently crossed the Angolan border on the heels of PLAN insurgents, as well as pre-emptive strikes and cross-border operations that involved attacks on specific SWAPO (South West Africa Peoples' Organization) bases inside Angola. Gradually, the war against SWAPO was expanded as the SADF provided support for its proxy the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) that formed a buffer in southern Angola to hinder PLAN's infiltration of Namibia. This increasingly brought the SADF into conflict with Angolan and Cuban troops that were seeking to destroy UNITA. As the scope and intensity of the war escalated during the 1980s, the SADF shifted its strategy from counter-insurgency to mobile armoured warfare. The SADF penetrated further into Angolan territory and actually occupied large swathes of the southern parts of the country for extended periods. Although the SADF seldom engaged Popular Armed Forces for the Liberation of Angola (FAPLA) and Cuban forces intentionally, contacts became commonplace. These culminated in large-scale battles, most famously the battle of Cuito Cuanavale in 1987-88. 1 Since the end of the conflict, a number of SADF veterans have undertaken trips to the erstwhile Angolan battlefields. Two such journeys have been recorded in the form of travelogues: the one taking the form of a motorized convoy that amounted to tourist safari and the other the form of a penitent pilgrimage by a solo cyclist (Baines 2018). These veterans revisited war sites primarily to pay tribute to their own dead and engage in acts of person-to-person rapprochement. The journeys served to connect the veterans with their former enemies and, to a lesser degree, with the Angolan people. This paper proposes to examine two further projects by SADF veterans who returned to Angola. The first involved the making of a film called My Heart of Darkness that records the journey of former paratrooper Marius van Niekerk who returned to Angola in 2007 in search of redemption from