From Soldier to Civvy. South African National Service, by Cameron Blake

From Soldier to Civvy. South African National Service, by Cameron Blake. Penguin Random House South Africa. Imprint: Zebra Press. Cape Town, 2010. ISBN 9781770221345 / ISBN 978-1-77022-134-5

From Soldier to Civvy. South African National Service, by Cameron Blake. To Eric, a true friend and owner of The Africa Star in Cape Town, where most of the interviews occurred, your generosity helped to make this book happen.

Cameron Blake  

When the original manuscript of Troepie: From Call-up to Camps was completed in March 2008, it was considered too long for a single publication. The publishers and I decided to split the content and preserve half of it for a second book, one that provided fresh perspectives on National Service and the Border War. The eight National Servicemen's accounts in From Soldier to Civvy, while restructured to make for more comprehensible reading, have not been divided into different chapters as done in Troepie. Each man's story is told individually, from beginning to end, and the interviews as they appear here remain as close as possible to the men's original accounts. These former Servicemen - a Recce, a dog-handler, a mortarist, a Parabat, a gunner, a loadmaster, a military policeman and a marine - speak frankly and in detail about their various careers in the military, from everyday experiences to the intricacies of their army or air force duties. The book also contains interviews with civilian women: mothers, wives, sisters and girlfriends, who talk about how conscription in South Africa and the Border War affected them and their men. Women's accounts are almost always excluded from or deemed irrelevant in military history records. They ought to be heard, as their versions provide a new and different perspective on the past. The chapter titled 'Now' consists of a collection of interviews conducted with several former conscripts, who contemplate the past and its effect, if any, on their lives today. As in Troepie, these accounts are subjective: they are based on personal memories and beliefs, and are recounted here as they were told to me. Many of the interviews, which are anonymous, reflect a certain lack of'political correctness'. When the interviewees were asked how they currently feel about the past and their mandatory call-ups, a large proportion of them became impassioned and political, and gave their honest opinions on the subject. At the time of the Border War, the ruling National Party government rhetoric of the 'Russian threat' and 'black rule' was extremely powerful. National Servicemen, along with the remaining white South African population, were indoctrinated into believing in an enemy: communist-backed, black nationalist Marxist 'terrorists' intent on seizing the Republic of South Africa by whatever means necessary. It must be said, though, that not everyone I interviewed believed that then, and not everyone believes it now. Some have changed their outlook drastically. I hope this book sheds a little more light on a period of South African history that tends to be largely ignored. The better we understand our past, the more quickly we can move positively into the future. I also hope that younger generations of South Africans will benefit from and make sense of, in their own way, this collection of oral history.

This is an excerpt from From Soldier to Civvy. South African National Service, by Cameron Blake.

Title: From Soldier to Civvy
Subtitle: South African National Service
Author: Cameron Blake
Publisher: Penguin Random House South Africa
Imprint: Zebra Press
Cape Town, 2010
ISBN 9781770221345 / ISBN 978-1-77022-134-5
Softcover, 15 x 23 cm, 320 pages