With the exception of 32 Battalion (SADF) and Koevoet (SAP), these units became part of the fast-growing South West Africa Territorial Force (SWATF), an indigenous South West African force under South African command that was founded in August 1980. Whereas SWATF members comprised about 20% of the total South African military presence in 1980, this grew to 51% by 1985. During the 1980s, the force supplied about 70% of the military manpower in the territory – about 30 000 men. More than 90% of these were not white.[6]
The communist threat
The government’s more flexible approach in SWA did not mean that the South African government was willing to hand the territory over to SWAPO. During the 1970s and 1980s, the National Party government viewed the USSR as a major threat and Cuba as its surrogate. As Prime Minister PW Botha explained to Parliament in 1980: “The main object . . . under the guidance of the planners in the Kremlin is to overthrow this State and to create chaos in its stead, so that the Kremlin can establish its hegemony here.”[7] Botha’s Minister of Defence, Magnus Malan, often used a quotation ascribed to Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev in 1977: “Our goal is to get control over the two great treasuries on which the West depend – the energy treasury of the Persian Gulf and the mineral treasury of Central and Southern Africa.”[8]
As far as the USSR’s strategy towards South Africa was concerned, a 1981 analysis by Military Intelligence referred to “recent, very credible information” that Moscow expected SWAPO to “tie down” South Africa “through a protracted military struggle in SWA, while the so-called ‘united front’, of which the ANC onslaught against the RSA forms the other facet, is being developed”. Soviet activities in other southern African states, such as Zambia, Botswana, Zimbabwe and Mozambique, confirmed the time scale for the subjugation of southern Africa, which the Soviet Union had shortened “from ten to five years”.[9]
These kinds of analyses were, with certain reservations, shared by the Reagan administration. In a 1984 document, the CIA determined the USSR’s objectives in southern Africa as a programme “to supplant Western and Chinese influence”. Moscow “also seeks to consolidate the emerging leftist, pro-Soviet regimes in Angola and Mozambique, to bring the South-West African People’s Organization (SWAPO) to power in Namibia, and ultimately, to undermine the white minority regime in South Africa”. Angola, the analysis stated, “is central to these objectives, because it positions the USSR to support and influence Namibian and South African insurgents . . .”.
According to the CIA, the Soviets viewed their support for the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa and SWA “as a central element in their approach to Sub-Saharan Africa over the next decade”.[10] “Soviet long-term objectives may also include denial or obstruction of Western access to the region’s strategic mineral resources.”[11] The document stated that the Soviets sought access to ports for their air and naval forces. In an earlier assessment, the CIA also included the geostrategic securing of “Soviet sea lines of communication between the European USSR and the Soviet Far East” as a USSR military objective in the region.[12] However, the CIA acknowledged that southern Africa was “largely peripheral to core Soviet security interests and of lower priority than, for example, South Asia and the Middle East”.[13]
The main issue here is not whether these analyses were accurate or not. The point is that the NP government believed that South Africa was engaged in an “oorlewingstryd” (struggle for survival), as PW Botha put it.[14] Whoever wants to understand the South African security strategy during the 1970s and 1980s must take the National Party government’s fear of the Soviet Union seriously. Rightly or wrongly, this was their point of departure. Their security strategy was therefore in principle defensive.[15]
Probably without realising it, Russian academic Vladimir Shubin has since confirmed the South African and American fears about Soviet intentions at the time. In a 2008 book, he rejects the allegation that the Cold War influenced Moscow’s strategy towards South Africa, but he apparently understands the term differently from the way it was viewed in the West. He emphasises that Soviet support for African liberation movements was “regarded as part of the world ‘anti-imperialist struggle’, which was waged by the ‘socialist community’, ‘the national liberation movements’ and the ‘working class of the capitalist countries’ . . . For us the global struggle was not a battle between the two ‘superpowers’ assisted by their ‘satellites’ and ‘proxies’, but a united fight of the world’s progressive forces against imperialism.” Shubin also notes that the Supreme Council of the MPLA decided in 1982 that South Africa was its “main enemy”.[16]
The government’s initial security strategy, after PW Botha took over from John Vorster in September 1978, was to try to establish an anti-communist bloc in southern Africa as a counterweight to the Marxist alliance, consisting at the time of Angola and Mozambique, and aided by the USSR and Cuba.[17]
The government’s stance on SWA and Angola flowed from this strategy. In fact, South Africa accepted fairly early on that independence for South West Africa was unavoidable. Halfway through 1977, Minister of Foreign Affairs Pik Botha told Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith so during a visit to Salisbury. South African hopes, he said, were pinned “upon the formation of an interim government established to draw up the constitution for an independent Namibia”.[18]
But this still did not open a door for SWAPO. Pik Botha wrote to his US counterpart, Secretary of State Alexander Haig, that South Africa strove for an internationally recognised independence for SWA “under a government which does not subscribe to Marxist-Leninist doctrines”.[19] During a visit by Haig’s Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence, Dick Clarke, to South Africa in 1981, Botha explained that his government was not against independence for SWA as such. However, he insisted:
SWAPO must not be allowed to win an election in South West Africa. We were not prepared to exchange a war on the Kunene for a war on the Orange . . . If South West Africa would be governed by SWAPO, then a serious risk would rise that the Russians could threaten South Africa from the Territory. South Africa would then have to decide to invade the Territory in order to protect its interests. Such a situation would probably be less acceptable to the USA than the status quo. If SWAPO would govern South West Africa, Botswana would directly feel threatened, Dr Savimbi would be eliminated and South Africa would be totally encircled with Russian-inspired powers. If the entire Southern Africa then came under Russian tyranny, the strategic sea route around the Cape and its critical minerals would be lost to the West.[20]
In other words, yes to independence, but a definite no to a communist SWAPO government.[21] “There should be no doubt that South Africa did not want to have the red flag flying in Windhoek,” Pik Botha told US Assistant Secretary of State for Africa, Dr Chester Crocker.[22] A top-secret report by the Directorate of Military Intelligence bluntly stated: “The RSA is planning to let the constitutional set-up in SWA develop in such a manner that a pro-SA government comes to power there.”[23]
And so, on a security-strategic level, the war became an attempt to win enough time to create the conditions in which SWAPO would lose an election.[24]
At times, the South Africans did try half-heartedly to engage with SWAPO. General Georg Meiring – who was GOC South West Africa at the time – related to Hilton Hamann how he, Dr Willie van Niekerk (South African Administrator General in SWA), and Foreign Affairs consultant Sean Cleary flew to the Cape Verde Islands in 1985 to try to get SWAPO to participate in a transitional government of national unity. According to Meiring, the guerrilla movement’s reaction to this basically boiled down to: “Bugger you!”[25]
To Jannie Geldenhuys, who became one of the SADF’s most influential strategic thinkers, the time factor was important. In itself, he reasoned, time was neutral – it was on the side of those who utilised it best. Therefore, the important thing was perseverance: “Soviet Russia,” he wrote in his memoirs, “would in the long run not be able to keep up its attempt in Angola and with SWAPO. And if they withdrew, the scale would swing