TRC Final Report

Volume 4

Chapter 8

Subsection 2

12 Professor Seegers also drew attention to the very large numbers of white men who were involved in the national service system. The average number of people who reported for the annual intake of conscripts was approximately 22 000. From 1960 until it was scrapped, approximately 428 774 people reported for compulsory military service.⁶ (See appendix 2 for details).

13 A psychologist whose clients include ex-SADF conscripts echoed these views. In a written submission to the Commission, Ms Trudy de Ridder of the Trauma Centre for the Victims of Violence and Torture, Cape Town, reported that:

Most ex-conscripts report that they, their peers and their community saw service in the SADF as a natural part of growing up and ‘becoming a man’... The national education system consistently presented military training as a given part of the rites of passage of white men and the moral duty of anyone concerned with defending order and morality (Christianity) against the forces of evil and chaos (Soviet-inspired Communism)...

My recent experience with ex-conscripts has been characterised by their insistence that they could not have had the tools or information to challenge this view - especially at the age of seventeen or eighteen. Most report that, once in the SADF, resistance to the fact of conscription, the chain of command or the politico-military objectives was unthinkable. In fact, most still associate their military experiences with a sense of pride - in their capacity for physical and psychological endurance...

14 At the Commission’s special hearing on children and youth in Johannesburg on 12 June 1997, this perspective was clearly expressed by Mr Christo Uys,a council member of a prominent Afrikaner youth organisation, the Junior Rapportryers Beweging (JRB):

We were born in the struggle. The war on the border was in the process and within South Africa there was a freedom struggle. Today it is seen as a very just struggle, but the effect thereof wasn’t always as just. And this was the struggle that we fought in the police and in the army. We did our service and those of us who weren’t in the police or did our national service; we prepared ourselves at school and university to play an active role in the economy of South Africa.

Sometimes it is often overlooked and forgotten that we also played a role in the struggle against Communism; today it is seen to be ludicrous but we believed that we did play a positive role there.

And in essence, our struggle was against anarchy. Today we listened how anarchy was prevalent in black communities - how it affected people’s lives. There were references made to kangaroo courts, necklacing. This also affected us.

As a national serviceman in the army, I believed and I was sure that I contributed to keep people’s lives safe. We also heard a lot of different atrocities that took place and the moment that an Afrikaner says it, it is not believed. But you know that, while I was in the army, I didn’t talk to people or receive commands or instructions that led to the violation of human rights.

The fact that we today have the infrastructure in this country that is the best in Africa, the fact that we have the potential to grow economically, that to me is proof that we succeeded in making a great contribution towards a peaceful transition in South Africa.

You know democracy is a wonderful thing, but you cannot eat it and it doesn’t keep you warm in winter. If in South Africa there was a [very hasty] transfer to a new democracy in South Africa, we could also have awoken today in Bosnia...

As young Afrikaners, we are proud of our cultural heritage and we are proud of the role that we play in this country. And we believe that our struggle was imbedded in core values that we learnt in our families and our struggle will come to the fore every time these values are endangered.

15 Individual testimony at the hearing on conscription also provided a window on the ways in which white society as a whole either supported or failed to take issue with the national service system. Professor Johan Hattingh, who also gave testimony as an ex-captain in the Citizen Force, read from a letter his mother wrote to him when she heard that he was preparing a submission to the Commission:

Johan, a perspective relating to the Defence Force of which the Truth Commission will never hear is, [first], the role which parents of soldiers played. Despite parents’ serious concerns and anger regarding what was happening to their sons, they had to remain positive to be able to assist their sons, come what may.

Secondly, the women in South Africa (white women) became active and started rendering services - these were the Defence Force women, the Southern Cross Fund and the church women. We collected money to furnish in a cosy way coffee bars where soldiers could relax; we bought furniture, etc. There was also money collected for rooms of prayer, for various bits and pieces of furniture and games, etc. We corresponded with soldiers and we assisted families of soldiers locally. We sent parcels with biscuits to all the army bases [she adds with some humour that she later heard that there was such a flood of biscuits that the soldiers began pelting each other with them!].