Michael O’Reilly
SOUTH AFRICAN troops may have pulled out of Namibia years ago, but deep in the Angolan bush, Rocco de Wet — Grensvegter — battles on.
Clad in the brown South African Defence Force uniform and sporting a butch moustache, the photo-comic hero is still waging his one-man war against the likes of the evil Major Cuba who captures and tortures him against the backdrop of a hammer-and-sickle flag.
There is no doubt as to Major Cuba’s loyalties, even though he addresses his comrade, Miguel, in Afrikaans. He mocks the Grens-vegter for being “net mens, al dink sommige Swapo-lede jy is `n soort bosgod” (only human, even though some Swapo members think you’re a kind of bush god) and locks him up with his other victims, a beautiful girl and her brother, before drinking a toast to a picture of “Ons leier, President Fidel Castro”.
Later, Rocco escapes (of course), and kills Major Cuba, saying: “Jy het ver gereis om in Afrika te sterf” (You travelled far to die in Africa) over his body.
Rocco is one of a stable of Republican Press photo-comic heroes and heroines who do monthly battle in black-and- white pulp magazines, their faces contorting hammily with love, anger, pain or indigestion while word-bubbles spout from their mouths. But unlike the buckskin wearing Wit Tier (White Tiger), the stetson doffing Ruiter in Swart or the bikini-clad Tessa, who fight their good fights in ambivalent lands and times, Rocco seems to be on a solo mission to reverse the fortunes of an recent conflict.
Not so, says Fred Buys of Republican Press. “The magazine is a fantasy thing — it doesn’t deal with political issues at all.
“We’re not producing those stories anymore — the Rocco de Wet series was made at least eight years ago and we’re just re-releasing old episodes.”
But while Rocco might live on in the realms of myth, his publishers move with the times. The cover price is in rands — and post-independence, Namibian dollars.