Journeys of Redemption and Reconciliation: The Return of South African Defence Force Veterans to Angola

Abstract

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