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Notes
1 For the purposes of this contribution, our use of “African” encompasses both Black and San identities. However, we recognize that some white southern Africans also identify as “African”. In fact, as one of us has written elsewhere, some white troops drew upon their experience of bush warfare and proximity to Black and San soldiers to further deepen their ties to the continent, and indeed cement their self-identity as Africans. See: Richard Levi Raber, “‘In the Eyes of the New Government, We Are Covered in Mud’: Cultural Memory, Generational Conflict, and the Imprint of Militarization on Two Former Military Communities” (PhD dissertation, Indiana University, 2024).
2 Consider: Shireen Ally and Arianna Lissoni, eds., New Histories of South Africa’s Apartheid-Era Bantustans (New York, NY: Routledge, 2017); Timothy Gibbs, Mandela’s Kinsmen: Nationalist Elites & Apartheid’s First Bantustan (Auckland Park, ZA: Jacana Media, 2014). Steffen Jensen and Olaf Zenker likewise edited a poignant special issue on bantustans, here they introduce it: Steffen Jensen and Olaf Zenker, ‘Homelands as Frontiers: Apartheid’s Loose Ends’, Journal of Southern African Studies 41, no. 5 (2015), 937-52.
3 For the regime’s redefinition of itself and its outreach towards the continent, see: Jamie Miller, An African Volk: The Apartheid Regime and Its Search for Survival (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2016). Likewise, consider Josiah Brownell’s excellent exploration of how Katanga, Rhodesia, Bophuthatswa, and Transkei as well as their supporters and opponents engaged with their respective claims to sovereignty and international legitimacy: Josiah Brownell, Struggles for Self-Determination: The Denial of Reactionary Statehood in Africa (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2022).
4 See Kyle Burke’s work on the anti-communist international: Kyle Burke, Revolutionaries for the Right: Anticommunist Internationalism and Paramilitary Warfare in the Cold War (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2018).
5 Kenneth W. Grundy, ‘A Black Foreign Legion in South Africa?’ African Affairs 81, no. 318 (1981), 101-14.
6 Consider: Jason Robinson, ‘Fragments of the Past: Homeland Politics and the South African Transition, 1990–2014’, Journal of Southern African Studies 41, no. 5 (October 2015), 953-67.
7 On nostalgia: Laura Phillips, ‘The peculiar nostalgia for the former Bantustans in South Africa’, Africa Is a Country, 27 March 2018, https://africasacountry.com/2018/03/the-peculiar-nostalgia-for-the -former-bantustans-in-south-africa (accessed November 9, 2022); and Leslie Bank and Clifford Mabhena, ‘Bring Back Kaiser Matanzima? Communal Land, Traditional Leaders and the Politics of Nostalgia’, in New South African Review 2: New Paths, Old Compromises?, ed. John Daniel, Prishani Naidoo, Devan Pillay, and Roger Southall (Johannesburg, ZA: Wits University Press, 2011), 119-41. The interested reader might also consider: Jacob Dlamini, Native Nostalgia (Auckland Park, ZA: Jacana Media, 2009).
8 Daniel Douek, ‘”They Became Afraid When They Saw Us”: MK Insurgency and Counterinsurgency in the Bantustan of Transkei, 1988–1994’, Journal of Southern African Studies 39, no. 19 (2013), 207-25.
9 Michael Lawrence and Andrew Mason, ‘The “Dog of the Boers”: The Rise and Fall of Mangope in Bophuthatswana’, Journal of Southern African Studies 21, no. 3 (1994), 447-61.
10 Laura Philips notes the fractured and challenging nature of the Lebowa archives: Laura Phillips, ‘Boxes in the Bantustan Basement: The Trajectories and Possibilities of the Lebowa Archive,’ Archive & Public Culture: Research Initiative, 25 October 2013, http://www.apc.uct.ac.za/apc/projects/archival_ platform/boxes-bantustan-basement-trajectories-and-possibilities-lebowa-archive (accessed November 9, 2022).
11 Pedro Aires Oliveira, ‘Saved by the Civil War: African “Loyalists” in the Portuguese Armed Forces and Angola’s Transition to Independence,’ The International History Review 39, no. 1 (2017), 130, 135.
12 Gerhard Seibert, Coup d’état in São Tomé e Príncipe: Domestic Causes, the Role of Oil and Former ‘Buffalo’ Battalion Soldiers (Pretoria: Institute for Security Studies, 2003); João Gomes Porto, ‘Coup d’état in São Tomé and Príncipe’, African Security Review 12, no. 4 (2003), 33-5.
13 One of us has adopted this formulation, see: Lennart Bolliger, Apartheid’s Black Soldiers: Un-National Wars and Militaries in Southern Africa (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2021). This is borrowed from: Luise White and Miles Larmer, ‘Introduction: Mobile Soldiers and the Un-national Liberation of Southern Africa’, Journal of Southern African Studies 40, no. 6 (2014), 1271-4.
14 Angella Johnson, ‘The broker of war and death’, Mail & Guardian, 28 February 1997.
15 Lephophotho Mashike, ‘Age of Despair: The Unintegrated Forces of South Africa’, African Affairs 107, no. 428 (2008), 447. See also: Peter Lock, ‘Africa, Military Downsizing and Growth in the Security Industry’, in Peace, Profit or Plunder? The Privatisation of Security in War-Torn African Societies, ed. Jakkie K. Cilliers and Peggy Mason (Pretoria: Institute for Security Studies, 1999), 11–36.
16 Kevin A. O’Brien, ‘Private Military Companies and African Security 1990–98’, in Mercenaries: An African Security Dilemma, ed. Abdel-Fatau Musah and J. ‘Kayode Fayemi (London: Pluto Press, 2000), 63.
17 Stephen Ellis, ‘Of Elephants and Men: Politics and Nature Conservation in South Africa’, Journal of Southern African Studies 20, no. 1 (1994): 58. See also: Ros Reeve, and Stephen Ellis, ‘An Insider’s Account of the South African Security Forces’ Role in the Ivory Trade’, Journal of Contemporary African Studies 13, no. 2 (1995), 227–43.
18 O’Brien, ‘Private Military Companies and African Security, 1990-98’, 47, 56.
19 On Executive Outcomes, see also: Khareen Pech, ‘Executive Outcomes—a Corporate Conquest’, in Cilliers and Mason, Peace, Profit or Plunder?, 81-109; Guy Arnold, Mercenaries: The Scourge of the Third World (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999); and Eeben Barlow, Executive Outcomes: Against All Odds (Alberton, ZA: Galago Books, 2007).
20 Peter W. Singer, Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry, 2nd ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 102-3. A rival organisation to Executive Outcomes known as IRIS also recruited SADF veterans as well as former MK soldiers: O’Brien, ‘Private Military Companies and African Security, 1990-98’, 59.
21 Abdel-Fatau Musah and J. ‘Kayode Fayemi, ‘Africa in Search of Security’, in Musah and Fayemi, Mercenaries, 17.
22 As mentioned in footnote 17, an exception is P.W. Singer’s work which touches on this: Singer, Corporate Warriors.
23 Kyle Burke, Revolutionaries for the Right: Anticommunist Internationalism and Paramilitary Warfare in the Cold War (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2018).
24 Luise White, The Assassination of Herbert Chitepo: Texts and Politics in Zimbabwe (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2003), 11.
25 Evert Kleynhans and Will Gordon, ‘Legislative Disconnect or Institutional Gatekeeping? Challenges of Researching South Africa’s Past’, Scientia Militaria 48, no. 1 (2020), 97-114; Brooks Marmon, ‘Research Notes: Negotiating South African ministerial archives (Defence & Foreign Affairs)’, Cold War History 22, no. 3 (2022), 359-62.
26 There are challenges in accessing materials at later stages as well. According to Marmon, ‘material from 1970 to 1978 is considered nominally available, but is in practice partially closed’: ‘Research Notes’, 360.
27 Consider: Phillips, ‘Boxes in the Bantustan’, Archive & Public Culture: Research Initiative.
28 Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report, Volume 1 (Cape Town, ZA: Juta, 2003), 201-43; Verne Harris, ‘”They Should Have Destroyed More”: The Destruction of Public Records by the South African State in the Final Years of Apartheid, 1990–94’, Transformation 42 (2000), 29-56.
29 In informal conversations with former members of the apartheid security forces, we have been told that certain records ended up in the hands of private individuals.
30 Harris, ‘”They Should Have Destroyed More”’, 37-8.
31 Jacob Dlamini, The Terrorist Album: Apartheid’s Insurgents, Collaborators, and the Security Police (Cambridge, US: Harvard University Press, 2020).
32 This phenomenon may actually be most pronounced amongst ex-Rhodesian forces, consider Luise White’s excellent book: Luise White, Fighting and Writing: The Rhodesian Army at War and Postwar (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021). In our experiences engaging with white South African veterans(-authors), many read these texts as well.
33 William Minter, ‘The Armored Bubble: Military Memoirs from Apartheid’s Warriors’, African Studies Review 50, no. 3 (December 2006), 152.
34 This is not exclusive to the Cold War nor apartheid contexts, for instance, see: Thomas Kühne, The Rise and Fall of Comradeship: Hitler’s Soldiers, Male Bonding and Mass Violence in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 7-8.
35 This includes Sisingi Kamongo and Leon Bezuidenhout, Shadows in the Sand: A Koevoet Tracker’s Story of an Insurgency War (Pinetown, ZA: 30° South Publishers, 2019); Teresa Kutala Firmino, ‘Rewriting History: Pomfret Community Stories’ (master’s thesis, University of the Witwatersrand, 2018); and Tshisukila Tukayula De Abreu, The Soviet MPLA Virus in Southern Africa (SADC): My Life in the Angolan and Namibian Wars (TT de Abreu, 2023), Kindle.
36 Dino Estevao and Lennart Bolliger, ‘Scars of War: Forty Years Later’, The Namibian, 11 December 2020, https://www.namibian.com.na/207098/archive-read/Scars-of-War-Forty-Years-Later; Dino Estevao and Lennart Bolliger, ‘No Longer an Orphan’, The Namibian, 18 December 2020, https://www.namibian.com.na/207289/archive-read/No-Longer-an-Orphan (both accessed January 11, 2023).
37 Kapilolo Mario Mahongo with contributions by Jose Manuel-de Prada Samper and Marlene Sullivan Winberg, Kapilolo’s Kulimatji: A !xun San Storyteller’s Memoir (Cape Town, ZA: Manyeka Books, 2018). One of us has written about this atrocity: Richard Levi Raber, “‘In the Eyes of the New Government, We Are Covered in Mud’: Cultural Memory, Generational Conflict, and the Imprint of Militarization on Two Former Military Communities” (PhD dissertation, Indiana University, 2024).
38 Tomsen Jutas Nore, ‘The !Xun and Khwe San and Conflictnin Angola and South West Africa from the Late 1960s to 1970s’ (honours thesis, University of South Africa, 2023). He can be reached at: [email protected].
39 Consider: Sandra Greene, ‘Whispers and Silences: Explorations in African Oral History’, Africa Today 50, no. 2 (2003), 42-53; Luise White, The Assassination of Herbert Chitepo: Texts and Politics in Zimbabwe (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2003).
40 Alessandro Portelli, ‘What Makes Oral History Different?’, in The Oral History Reader, ed. Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson, 2006 ed. (New York, NY: Routledge, 1998), 36; Alistair Thomson, Anzac Memories: Living with the Legend, 2013 ed. (Clayton, AU: Monash University Press, 1994), 11-15.
41 “Missing Voices” Oral History Project, 2004–2012, A3079, Historical Papers Research Archive, University of the Witwatersrand: http://historicalpapers-atom.wits.ac.za/9aty7 (accessed February 9, 2024).
42 See also: Julie Taylor, ‘History, Gender and “New Practices of Self”: Re-Interpreting Namibia’s Independence War Through the Work of Tuli Mekondjo and Helena Uambembe’ (master’s thesis, University of the Witwatersrand, 2022).
43 See, for instance: Luregn Lenggenhager, ‘Nature, War and Development: South Africa’s Caprivi Strip, 1960–1980’, Journal of Southern African Studies 41, no. 3 (2015), 467-483; and Luregn Lenggenhager, Ruling Nature, Controlling People: Nature Conservation, Development and War in North-Eastern Namibia Since the 1920s (Basel: Basler Afrika Bibliographien, 2018).
44 This is true of African forces recruited by other white minority regimes in southern Africa during the Cold War: João Paulo Borges Coelho, ‘African Troops in the Portuguese Colonial Army, 1961-1974: Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique’, Portuguese Studies Review 10, no. 1 (2002), 129-50; and M. T. Howard, Black Soldiers in the Rhodesian Army: Colonialism, Professionalism, and Race (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2024).