What Is The Ethnic Makeup Of The South African Military
South Africa Recruiting More Blacks for Its Regular army
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September 16, 1979
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LENZ Regular army Base, South Africa Last year, Frans Raseroka, like thousands of young Due south Africans, went to war.
From a base camp in the remote bushland of South‐W Africa, he fought several engagements against the black guerrillas fighting for that territory"s independence. During a four‐month stint, his unit killed several of the insurgents battling S African command of the territory without losing a man of its ain.
Normally Due south African soldiers render from the war as heroes, honored for their role in turning back the "Communist onslaught" that the Government sees behind the guerrilla claiming. Simply because Sergeant Raseroka is black, in a country that reserves much that is best for whites, he took off his uniform earlier setting out for his home near the Transvaal town of Hammanskraal.
"My friends don't like information technology," the 23-yearold soldier said over a drinkable in the noncommissioned officers' mess here. "They enquire, 'How can you bring together the army every bit long as the black homo is oppressed in this state; how can you get and fight for the white homo when it is the white homo who is pushing us down?' "
For many years, the white Afrikaners who boss this country were just as strongly opposed to the enlistment of blacks in the South African Defense Force. But recently fear of arming potential enemy has begun to recede before the difficulty of finding enough whites to do the job.
Inevitably, the induction of blacks has followed the prevailing social patterns. Although the Government has committed itself in principle to equal pay for blacks in its service, the war machine still have discriminatory pay rates. The gap, though narrowing, remains broad. A white loftier school graduate entering the regular army as a recruit starts at $3,600 a twelvemonth. His analogue who is an Indian or is of mixed race starts at $3,025 while a black starts at $2,210.
In that location is no mandated segregation, but the exercise so far has been to grouping the races in split up units and to provide split canteens, washing facilities and other amenities when nonwhites are attached to a white unit of measurement.
Commandant Hendrik Swanepoel, commander of the 21st Battalion here, defended the practise and said that it was advisable to avert placing men of different races in situations that might cause friction. "Whatsoever one may feel about information technology, the fact is that our whites are not selected on the basis of their affinity for the black human being," he said. "Yous've only got to have one damn fool using racial language and yous've got a bloody mess."
Some Hard‐Liners Upset
The growing number of blacks on military bases has upset some difficult‐liners, particularly Afrikaners who are the majority of whites in the regular army. Commandant Swanepoel conceded that he had shared the misgivings, feeling that the descendants of "men who fought against my forefathers," meaning blacks who battled white settlers, should not be armed.
"As a affair of fact, I was completely against information technology," he said. "But now that I've worked with these people, I'm absolutely convinced of their loyalty and their willingness to fight for the cause. What more could we want?"
A console appointed by Prime Minister P. W. Botha, who is also Minister of Defence, has urged a gradual expansion in the recruitment of nonwhites — men from the mixed‐race and Asian communities, too equally the blacks. Such units announced likely to play an increasingly pregnant role in combat duties, too as in the back up functions assigned to blacks in the past.
Blacks Had Marginal Role
To the north, in Zimbabwe Rhodesia, the white minority has long depended on a army that is more than 85 percent black. Just in South Africa, blacks have never played more than than a marginal military office, and the movement to broaden their participation has stirred deep feelings on both sides of the racial divide.
White anxieties have been articulated by the far‐right Reformed National Party, which has warned whites that black soldiers tin can never be loyal to the "white civilization" that the party favors. Among many blacks, constrained by a law providing criminal penalties for those counseling against military service, black enlistment is seen as a betrayal.
At first the hostility was a trouble for Sergeant Raseroka , one of perhaps 1,000 blacks in a standing army of about ten,000. Only after 5 years in uniform, he has an answer for those who criticize his role in the "white man'due south army," beyond citing the attractions of an income of $312.70 month, free medical care and a pension.
'We Must Defend It'
"Irrespective of what is happening in this land, we must defend information technology," Sergeant Raseroka said, earning approving nods from other black noncomissioned officers. "If we fight for this state against its enemies, we have a right to claim our share in it, alongside the white human being."
Asked who the country's enemies were, several of the black soldiers spoke of the "Communist threat" to S Africa's Christian way of life and to the gratuitous enterprise system. The similarity of their responses suggested that instructors have made an bear on with lectures that stress Soviet "imperialist" aims in the region and what is chosen the Communist motivation of the African National Congress, which is seeking to overthrow white rule.
Peradventure accordingly, the Lenz base, where all blacks recruited into the army are trained, lies just across the fringes of Soweto, the black ghetto that has become the focus of militant activities against apartheid. Here an all‐white officer corps has built up the 21st Battalion, the commencement of a planned series of combat‐trained units including blacks.
Trained 'Homeland' Armies
The battalion consists of about 400 men. Much of the battalion'south work in recent years has involved grooming modest armies for what the Government calls the tribal homelands, areas it has set aside for blacks. These armies include the 150‐man force that guards the Transkei, first of the tribal reserves that accepted a nominal independence from South Africa. new assignment is the development of five combat‐trained battalions that will supplement the army'southward regional commands inside South Africa.
Commandant Swanepoel, the battalion's leader, is a rugged 34-year-one-time Afrikaner who spent 4 years as a military aide to Mr. Botha when he was Defense Minister. The selection of the commandant, whose rank is equivalent to lieutenant colonel, suggests the importance Mr. Botha attaches to "sharing the defense burden," as he has expressed it, between whites and those of other races.
Mr. Botha's push to involve more nonwhites in the fighting forces stems from number of factors, including the need to increase the size of the regular military machine institution, previously limited to most 20,000, including army, navy and air strength units. By a South African tradition, much of the manpower in the forces, including most men in footing combat roles, has always been fatigued from the Citizen Strength, a trunk of near 150,000 trained reservists, mostly whites, who are required to exercise annual stints in compatible.
Whites' Draft Flow Doubled
The system is plush, unwieldy and increasingly unpopular, since it requires men upwards to 45 years of age to spend every bit much as 3 months at a time away from their civilian jobs, many of them on the dangerous northern frontiers of South‐West Africa, too known every bit Namibia. Although Mr. Botha doubled the term of the whites‐only armed services typhoon two years ago, stretching it to ii years from one, his planners evidently concluded that the just way to build up a permanent fighting force to meet the growing threat on the country's borders was to tap the huge pool of blackness manpower.
In that location are also political advantages in the shift to greater recruitment of blacks, all volunteers and then far, although some armed forces planners favor a limited draft eventually. "The fact that you have black soldiers fighting on your side willingly evidently has external political value," said Commandant Swanepoel as he watched black recruits drilling here. "With blacks in S African Army uniforms, y'all tin say, 'Heck, this proves that this is not a white man's struggle anymore.' "
Adm. Ronald A. Edwards, in accuse of manpower at Defense Headquarters in Pretoria, saw domestic political repercussions also. In an interview, the 56year‐old Earth State of war II veteran who will presently become commander of the navy, said the growing use of blacks in the army could be a catalyst for South African lodge as a whole as it inches abroad from the rigid racial patterns of the by. "In some ways we're spearheading the thing," he said. "We're chipping away at things that have encrusted themselves onto our national life over the years."
Navy Has Mixed•Race Crews
Admiral Edwards noted that the army had not been alone in expanding recruitment of nonwhites, although it is all the same the only service making much employ of blacks. From a commencement in 1963, the navy has a number of tankers, survey ships and minesweepers manned past men of mixed race, and recently information technology has begun assigning personnel of mixed race to combat duties in frigates. The navy, whose main base of operations at Simonstown lies close to the eye of the mixed‐race population in the Cape Peninsula, also has deputed several officers of mixed race.
Indians, mainly from the Durban expanse, also take been recruited into the navy and assigned to support ships. And the outset Indian naval officer was recently graduated from the Military Academy at Saldanha, north of Cape Boondocks.
The air force, smallest of the three services, has fabricated little employ of nonwhites, only it has scrapped a regulation limiting pilot grooming to whites. Recently, two Indians applied for pilot training but were turned down, according to Admiral Edwards, for lack of aptitude.
In the regular army, the tradition of recruiting nonwhites goes back to the state's beginnings, when the first Dutch settlement at the Cape recruited Hottentots into its Defense force Corps. In World State of war I the Cape Corps, a unit of measurement of mixed‐race personnel that now serves in South‐West Africa, won combat decorations in Palestine. Blacks, mixed‐race and Indian soldiers were widely used in support roles in World War 2. Some of these were with the S African contingent in the British Eighth Army when it defeated Field Marshal Erwin Rommel'due south Afrika Korps at El Alamein in 1942.
The New York Times
,Blackness sergeants talking with Commandant Hendrik Swanepoel at Lenz Army Base in South Africa. Sgt. Frans Raseroka is at right.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1979/09/16/archives/south-africa-recruiting-more-blacks-for-its-army-south-africa-in.html
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