In 1967, the South African Minister of Foreign Affairs, Hilgard Muller, formally accepted that SWA was a separate territory in international law. In 1972, the UN Secretary-General, Kurt Waldheim, and his personal representative, Alfred Escher, visited the territory and elicited from Prime Minister John Vorster a promise that South Africa would not annex SWA. Vorster also undertook to scrap the partitioning of the territory and to keep it together as one international legal entity.[6] Although this was a long way from the international demand for immediate independence, it represented a certain limited movement on the South African side. By negotiating with the UN, Vorster also accepted in practice that the world body had a say in SWA’s future. Exactly how South Africa’s SWA policy evolved will be analysed in a later chapter.
Organised resistance to South African rule started in 1959 with the founding of the South West Africa National Union (SWANU) and the Ovamboland People’s Organization (OPO). The latter was renamed the South West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO) the next year and became the focus of resistance to the South African occupation, while SWANU dwindled into obscurity.[7]
There can be no doubt that South Africa’s race discrimination policies contributed considerably to the rise of dissatisfaction among many blacks. The heavy-handed way in which the government suppressed public demonstrations exacerbated black discontent. In December 1959, a protest against the forcible resettlement of Windhoek’s black township exploded into violence in the so-called Old Location. The police reacted harshly and shot 11 people dead and wounded 54. As Marion Wallace remarks in her history of Namibia: “This pivotal historical moment thus served further to radicalise the population and to unite opposition to South African rule, as well as causing [Sam] Nujoma and other OPO leaders to take the decision to go into exile.”[8]
Pastor Siegfried Groth, a German churchman who in later years became one of SWAPO’s greatest critics, wrote of the situation in the 1960s:
Namibian men and women were no longer prepared to accept oppression and humiliation. The prisons in Ovamboland were full to overflowing. Hundreds of people, including women, were whipped in public. The victims had to undress and were then brutally beaten on their buttocks with a six-foot-long palm-tree cane.[9] Anyone who tried to resist the South African dictatorship received electric shock treatment and was imprisoned without trial for months or even years.[10]
This led directly to SWAPO’s decision, in 1962, to resort to armed struggle in order to end the South African occupation of SWA, or Namibia, as the country was called by the organisation. However, it was not until September 1966 that the first shots were fired.[11]
The Border War in South West Africa and Angola pitched two armed coalitions against each other in a protracted conflict that lasted 23 years and ended, not with a clear-cut victory for either side, but in a compromise. On the one hand, there was the South African government and its armed force, the South African Defence Force (SADF), in alliance with the Angolan rebel movement União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola (UNITA), or National Union for the Total Independence of Angola. (A second Angolan rebel movement, the FNLA, was eliminated early on and did not play a meaningful role.) On the other hand, there was the Namibian liberation movement, the South West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO), in alliance with the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA), or Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola – recognised as the government of Angola – and the communist dictatorship of Cuban President Fidel Castro, as well as the Soviet Union.
This brought about at least three layers of conflict. One was a civil rights struggle against the South African government’s policy of institutionalised race discrimination against black people, better known as apartheid. The second was an anticolonial liberation war for the independence of SWA against the South African occupation of the territory. And lastly, although the first two layers were generated by an indigenous dynamic, there was the global Cold War between the Communist bloc and the West (of which South Africa saw itself as a part) superimposed on it.
It is seductive, especially from an ideological point of view, to interpret the conflict simply as a war against the injustices of apartheid and colonial domination, or resistance against the dangers of communist imperialism. Actually, all three paradigms are valid. The three layers were, as happened elsewhere in the world, fused together so tightly that to try to separate them would be at the cost of truth. If we could bring all three layers together under one roof, it would be that of revolutionary war, which manifested itself in insurgency and counterinsurgency warfare.
From a professional military viewpoint, the Border War is also very interesting. It was a revolutionary war, an insurgency and counterinsurgency war, a fast-moving, mobile, conventional war and ended in an attritionist set-piece conventional war. Not many wars have all these characteristics in one. This makes a proper analysis of this war all the more necessary.
2
The Border War is generally assumed to have started on 26 August 1966 when a force of 130 men –121 policemen and 9 members of 1 Parachute Battalion hastily attested as temporary policemen in Alouette III helicopters – under the command of Captain (later Colonel) Jan Breytenbach attacked a base of the People’s Liberation Army of Namibia (PLAN, SWAPO’s armed force) base at Ongulumbashe in Ovambo.[1] Apparently, because of its unwillingness to acknowledge that SWAPO formed a real danger to South African domination in South West Africa, the government decided to entrust the fight against the insurgency not to the Defence Force, but to the South African Police (SAP). This would remain the case until 1974, when the SADF did take over responsibility.
At this stage, the army still suffered from the after-effects of neglect during the post-Second World War era, and particularly from the exodus of experienced English-speaking members. This was a direct result of the policy of the first National Party Minister of Defence, Frans Erasmus, who instituted a kind of affirmative action in favour of Afrikaner officers.[2]
Most of the army’s weaponry dated from the Second World War, although a limited modernisation programme had started in the early 1960s.[3] The infantry’s Lee-Enfield rifle was replaced with the R1, and the Bren light machine gun (LMG) with an LMG of 7,62-mm calibre. The infantry also had a number of Saracen armoured personnel carriers (APCs) dating from the early 1950s. But their most important antitank weapon was still the old Second World War-vintage six-pounder gun and 3,5-inch rocket launcher (the ENTAC antitank missile was imported in 1966). The process of replacing the old 3-inch mortar with the 81-mm had barely begun. The First World War-vintage Vickers would remain the main medium machine gun for a good decade more. The army had purchased some 206 Centurion tanks from the UK in the 1950s, but quickly sold half of them to Switzerland. For the rest, Shermans and Comets from the Second World War were still operational.
The army did have a useful new armoured car, the Eland – an improved version of the French Panhard – with a 90-mm gun. But the four-wheeled Eland (affectionately known as the “Noddy”, due to the way it rocked when riding over uneven terrain) had limited mobility in the African bush, was powered by an inflammable petrol engine instead of diesel, and carried only 20 shells for its gun, so it was not really adequate.[4] The artillery was equipped with light 25-pounder (88-mm) and medium 5,5-inch (140-mm) guns, both dating from before 1945.[5]
The voluntary military service system was replaced in 1962 with a ballot system, according to which some young white men had to serve for nine months. But this was too short a period to train them and then utilise them operationally, and so in 1968 the period of general military service was extended to 12 months. However, most infantry battalions were not very good, a rigid Second World War mentality still being pervasive.
I was trained in 1966 at the old Army Gymnasium in Voortrekkerhoogte, outside Pretoria, and can confirm