| Shared Digital Memories: South African Defence Force Veterans as a Virtual Community |  Printable version
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Date: Thursday 20 October
Time: 15.30-17.00
Venue: Room 3A06, Pieter de la Court building, Wassenaarseweg 52,
Leiden
Speakers:
Gary
Baines, Associate Professor, History Department, Rhodes University,
South Africa and
visiting
fellow at the African Studies Centre Leiden
Discussant:
Dr Stephen
Ellis (African Studies Centre)
You are kindly requested to register for this seminar.
More than 600,000 white males were conscripted by the apartheid
regime between 1967 and 1993. Their shared experiences in the nutria
brown uniform of the South African Defence Force defined them as a
distinctive cohort in the apartheid regime’s militarized society; as a
community of veterans. Whilst some joined established veterans’
associations, such as the MOTH (Memorable Order of the Tin Hats) and the
South African Legion, others sought out the company of those in their
units or who had participated in the same operations. Such male bonding
occurred in unit pubs, shell holes and other places where veterans got
together to swap stories and assert their (masculine) militarized
identities. However, such traditions and the very institutional memory
of the SADF itself have been threatened by the formation of the South
African National Defence Force (SANDF) following the integration of the
statutory and non-statutory forces.
Some SADF veterans have consequently gravitated to the apparent
political neutrality of cyberspace to tell their stories in order to
contest their invisibility and stigmatization in post-apartheid South
Africa. The camaraderie of the ‘virtual pub’ (Kendall 2002) has largely
replaced face-to-face meetings such as unit reunions or gatherings of
veterans. These veterans lay claim to commonality based on circumstance
and shared experience, especially those that have experienced the
intensity of combat. They have established a network of sites to share
their stories and reminisce and, in some cases, provide platforms for
advice on matters like post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The
exclusive membership of these networks creates discursive laagers where
veterans use language that is not readily understandable for the
uninitiated. This seminar will suggest that connections forged between
SADF veterans in cyberspace have served to preserve memories of their
military pasts and articulate discontent with South Africa’s political
transformation.
Gary Baines is an Associate Professor of History at Rhodes University,
Grahamstown, South Africa. His areas of research subsequently expanded
to include South African culture, especially film, literature and music.
He then ventured into the fields of public history, memory studies, and
the apocalyptic imagination. Dr Baines is currently engaged in a project
on the afterlife or legacy of the ‘Border War’, especially for the young
white males conscripted by the South African Defence Force (SADF) to
fight for the apartheid state.
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