Posted on November 20, 2011
J. H. Thompson
Zebra Press, 2006
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission seems to have told us that we were no longer a nation of bitter accountants whose definition of justice is driven by the ruthless logic of white debt and its black discharge. It did this by convincing us that forgiveness and unity were the words that abolished the system of an eye for an eye and we believed them when it all it did was, at best, to wipe the columns of the ledger clean so we could begin filling the debt and credit columns afresh. The very existence of the narratives captured by J.H Thompson in An Unpopular War: From Afkak to Bosbefok compels us to ask ourselves difficult questions about those we include when deciding victimhood, struggle heroes, guilt and trauma and whether the critical tools we use are sufficient for this particular task. If white males are perpetrators who manifested their racial power by oppressing blacks and trying to erase their voices and opinions from national discourse, how then can we begin to understand these confessions that claim trauma and victimhood? On whose terms do we judge that they have subjected themselves to a trauma similar to the one they inflicted upon multitudes of black South Africans? How do we begin to work through the fact that they have abused themselves at the hands of their own system?
An Unpopular War is collection of stories from thousands of white South African men who were conscripted into national service during Apartheid. Their recollections are arranged in chronological order: men describe leaving home, their time during training, their time spent on the borders of Angola and Mozambique, their return to South Africa during the early 1990s and their experiences quelling township violence in the same period. The stories range from the humorous - a group of gay soldiers recall how they streaked in protest across their army camp and no one punished them because none of the other soldiers could bear to look at their naked bodies - to the serious - a man remembers seeing dead bodies he'd pilled carelessly into a shallow mass grave burn black and then white and move when the flames he'd lit caused their muscles to contract. Yet the thing that binds all the narratives in a lose purpose is a strange desire to confess, in a TRC-like manner, all the sins each soldier committed against themselves, against their fellow soldiers and against those they killed. This desire is strange to me as a reader because I don't know whether to judge it as good or bad and if I do, on whose terms do I begin to understand it?
One soldier describes how dumping dead bodies in a grave and setting them aflame he had to pull one out because it was moving. He says the camp doctor looked at him "with complete shock and revulsion' and that he (the soldier) wondered how many other living bodies he'd thrown in the pile. He then describes how he wanted to 'cleanse' himself after that experience but the camp had no water. Instead he "walked out to the perimeter walls and tired to watch the sunset, wondering if [he] had really become the monster he saw in the doctor's eyes"Â (200). Another describes how a Justice S stood next to him and while a pile of the "enemy' dead burned, uttered, "Dis mooi fantasies.' [This is beautiful, this is fantastic] and how he "was pleased that they were not our dead"Â (202). Another describes how he was "so angry with these people...you just didn't care...you lose your self-respect and don't feel emotion for or empathy for anyone. The person you fought has a mother and father back home too...you don't think about that at the time. That time comes later...a lot of people are not proud...I have friends who saw a lot of action in the seventies and eighties...we talk about things among ourselves, but even then superficially. Even now, 30 years on, if you get to the emotional side of things, we'll change the subject or watch rugby or get a beer or something"Â (185).
The men described here are contradictions; they are both killers and victims. Let's look at both definitions and their implications. If we decide that they are perpetrators and killers who were conscripted in order to further the ends of a state that protected their livelihood from the swaart gevaar, we do not want them to be classified as victims. How can they be, we'd argue, when the people they treated so inhumanely are the true victims? The logical problems here turn in on themselves. Firstly what gives us the authority to decide victimhood? Typical nationalist discourse has excluded these men as victims because they are not victims in the way that apartheid struggle heroes are victims. What way is that? Also how can they not be victims if their stories read very similarly to the ones presented by struggle comrades during the TRC? What we're saying here is, you were victims of your own system and because of that we don't think you can join our enclave of (decided) victims because we would see that as us rewarding you and somehow we think you don't deserve that because you were perpetrators too. How did we decide that being a perpetrator is worse than being a victim?
The questions here are about power and definition. If we do include white men as experiences of conscription, name them victims and affirm the trauma they suffered how do we ensure that they won't use their status as victims in order to gain (absolute) power? If we include them on the wall of names at Freedom Park, how do we ensure that their names (and victimhood) will not crowd out the other names? How do we ensure that the white male victim will not be exploited in the cause of right-wingers who seek to completely negate the victimhood, suffering and attainment of power of those who struggled against apartheid?
The debate concerning the legitimacy of white male experiences is a symptom that indicates that the reasoning that drives the way we talk, analyse and interpret Apartheid and Post-apartheid history closes spaces and opportunities for meaningful engagement rather than opening them up.
Busi Mnguni is an Honours student in the Department of English at the University of Cape Town.