Apartheid's black soldiers: Un-national wars and militaries in Southern Africa
Abstract
In his recent book, Apartheid’s black soldiers: Un-national wars and militaries in Southern Africa, Lennart Bolliger examines the history of black soldiers from Namibia and Angola who served in the security forces of apartheid South Africa from 1975 until 1989. He focuses specifically on the three all-male units that consisted predominantly of black troops that were commanded by white officers – 32 Battalion of the South African Defence Force (SADF), 101 Battalion of the South West Africa Territorial Force (SWATF), and the infamous paramilitary police unit, Koevoet. During this period, these soldiers primarily fought against the People’s Liberation Army of Namibia (PLAN) – the military wing of the Namibian liberation movement, the South West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO) – in the anticolonial struggle in Namibia, as well as the post-independence civil war waged in Angola. The book builds on some earlier works by Bolliger, as well as another work co-authored with Will Gordon.
Copyright (c) 2022 Evert Kleynhans

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Authors, copyright holders, may use the publishers version for teaching purposes, in books, theses, dissertations, conferences and conference papers.
A copy of the authors’ publishers version may also be hosted on the following websites:
- Non-commercial personal homepage or blog.
- Institutional webpage.
- Authors Institutional Repository.
The following notice should accompany such a posting on the website: “This is an electronic version of an article published in Scientia Militaria, Volume XXX, number XXX, pages XXX–XXX”, DOI. Authors should also supply a hyperlink to the original paper or indicate where the original paper (http://scientiamilitaria.journals.ac.za) may be found.
Authors publishers version, affiliated with the Stellenbosch University will be automatically deposited in the University’s’ Institutional Repository SUNScholar.
Articles as a whole, may not be re-published with another journal.
The following license applies: