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Abstract
Every war is fought twice: militarily and then discursively. The war of words or discursive struggle tends to be particularly acrimonious following civil wars. This is true of South Africa’s Border War/Liberation Struggle, during which the white minority’s ‘terrorist’ became the black majority’s ‘freedom fighter’. Notwithstanding the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the legacy of this conflict remains divisive. Contestations over the meaning and memory of the war have manifested themselves in a number of ways. These include tensions during the integration of the South African Defence Force (SADF) and the armed wings of the liberation movements. A commemorative crisis has also followed the erection of new memorials, such as Freedom Park, to honour heroes and heroines of the Liberation Struggle. A fracas followed the decision of the Park’s trustees to omit the names of deceased SADF soldiers from the Wall of Names. This paper examines how Freedom Park became the site of struggle between self‐styled representatives of SADF veterans and cultural elites of the post‐apartheid order. It suggests that this controversy exemplifies the functioning of memory politics in transitional societies.
Notes
1. Steenkamp (Citation2007, p. 4) makes the point that ‘the SADF and MK [Umkhonto we Sizwe] /APLA [Azanian People’s Liberation Army] never clashed operationally in any significant way’. This may be so, as the liberation armies never developed the capacity to wage anything but a war of insurgency and chose their battles accordingly, while Namibia and the frontline states served to buffer the white minority regime from direct attacks. But the War of Liberation was not confined to ‘operational areas’; it was waged throughout the entire country.
2. Universal conscription of all able‐bodied white males replaced the lottery system that had existed since 1952. The call‐up was extended to ‘coloureds’ and Indians after the creation of the Tricameral Parliament that accorded these groups token rights and added responsibilities of citizenship. White males in South West Africa were also conscripted by the SADF and from 1980 national service was extended to all Namibians – excluding Owambos, because they were deemed to be supporters of South West Africa Peoples’ Organization (SWAPO) – who were assigned to the SWATF and the South West African Police (SWAPOL).
3. See, for instance, Jürgens’ (Citation2000) partly fictionalised autobiography, Many Houses of Exile.
4. For discussions of this literature, see Baines (Citation2003, Citation2008) and Roos (Citation2008).
5. A miniature replica of the statue was presented posthumously to the next of kin of those who died in action during the aborted Angolan invasion of 1975 (known by the codename ‘Operation Savannah’).
6. The toll of those killed while on active duty remains unclear. In a statement to Parliament in 1982, the then Minister of Defence, Magnus Malan, said that the SADF had a casualty rate of 0.012% (or 12 in every 100,000) of the average daily strength of its armed forces in South West Africa. It is not clear whether this figure includes casualties from accidents and suicides, but this figure is a gross underestimation of the actual situation. According to Professor R. Green, the official death rate of white troops killed on the border, expressed as a proportion of all white South Africans, was three times that of the US forces in Vietnam (Catholic Institute of International Relations Citation1989, p. 31, citing The Cape Times, 4 January 1985). My research suggests that the number of national servicemen who died in accidents or by their own hand while in uniform outnumbered those killed in action by about 3:1 and that the total number of troops killed during the 1970s and 1980s numbered about 5000. This figure does not include black members of the SADF or its surrogate forces. Steenkamp’s (Citation2006, p. 20) estimate of 715 SADF personnel killed in action between 1974 and 1988 is clearly too low. John Dovey’s roll of honour lists 1986 SADF members killed on active duty over the period 1964–1994 (but has no data for 1980 and 1981) (see Dovey Citation2009). Stiff’s roll of honour of those killed in active service numbers 2095 and is based on the tally of names listed at the Klapperkop site, supplemented by his own research (Appendix in Webb Citation2008).
7. Freedom Park is to be completed in 2009 at an estimated cost of R719 million, according to The Daily Dispatch (Daily Dispatch Citation2007).
8. For a set of images of the Wall of Names, see: http://www.freedompark.co.za/cms/index.php?option=com_joomgallery&func=viewcategory&catid=19&Itemid=46.
9. A Freedom Park Trust Media Release on 31 August 2006 announced that the names of more than 2100 Cuban soldiers would be inscribed on the wall (Freedom Park Trust Citation2006b). This has since been accomplished.
10. See, for example, Anonymous (Citation2008, pp. 12–13), reproduced as Appendix N in Breytenbach (Citation2008, pp. 585–587).
11. Hofmeyr’s statement that ‘the omitted soldiers never resorted to killing fellow South Africans’ (see Jetstreak Citation2007) might have held for most individuals who wore the SADF uniform, but not for the institution. As such, it is either deliberately self‐serving or incredibly naïve. Apart from failing to acknowledge that SADF troops deployed in the townships killed anti‐apartheid activists and MK/APLA cadres in the course of their duties, it ignores the evidence of cross‐border operations by special forces (such as the Matolo raid by Recces on Maputo in January 1981) that killed exiled South Africans. Hofmeyr also ignores the evidence of the ‘hit squads’ and other ‘dirty tricks’ directed by the Military Intelligence Division and the SADF front organisation, the Civil Co‐operation Bureau (CCB) (see Sanders Citation2006). For a set of images taken on the occasion of Hofmeyr’s dedication, see: http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://i169.photobucket.com/albums/u230/Boerevryheid/Vryheidspark%2520Pretoria/Pretoria11.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.boerevryheid.co.za/cms/index.php%3Fpage%3Dvryheidspark-pretoria&usg=__p6y5LGg6H64YCOWpm1ia5QwqcTs=&h=450&w=600&sz=108&hl=en&start=18&tbnid=gZXdUcPEx6ZZpM:&tbnh=101&tbnw=135&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dpretoria11%26gbv%3D2%26hl%3Den.
12. Kidd and Murdoch (Citation2004, p. 4). It has also been possible to honour both sides of the American Civil War at memorials erected on battlefields such as Gettysburg.
