Jan Taljaard in Petoria
‘AND this,” shrilled the corporal, the fierce pitch of her voice asserting itself as part of an armoury of authority, ”… this is the breech block! What do we call it?”
”The breech block …” 30-odd voices mumbled in hesitant reply.
”I shout at you, therefore you shout at me! What do you call it?”
They sang: ”The breech block, korporaal!”
”That’s better!”
It was perhaps not as poignant as in Henry Reed’s poem where they named rifle parts while japonica glistened ”like coral in all of the neighbouring gardens”, but the war lessons at 5 Signals Regiment outside Pretoria this week had a meaning all of their own.
As a lone bougainvillaea rumpled its leaves to frown displeasingly at the noonday sun, the obvious ironies quickly insinuated themselves to the observer. Ironies such as the fact that the 370 women being trained by instructors from the former South African Defence Force were not so long ago receiving their war lessons from inside self-defence units and the units of former liberation armies.
Having undergone the induction phase at the initially troubled Wallmannstal base, the women were now in the seventh week of ”bridging” training, with another five weeks remaining.
Of course there were problems, explained the unit’s staff officer, Colonel Diederik Reynecke. Both instructors and trainees suddenly found themselves part of a changed environment; there were ”unrealistic” financial expectations from the trainees; different cultural customs had to be taken into account; the need for ”traditional” health services suddenly cropped up; and there was that old scourge of military instructors – – a lack of fitness. ”Unfortunately, they were a bit unfit and some of them also a bit overweight,” an officer almost apologetically explained.
The unit achieved brief notoriety a couple of months ago when the trainees refused to get up one morning. This must have been a first for any formal military unit in South Africa. ”But we packed them off to the detention barracks at Boksburg for the weekend and they came back with a new understanding of what military discipline entails,” another officer confided.
While the naming of items continued, the crisply made beds and smart parade drill movements attested to the newfound military discipline. Cards above the beds told more about the occupants: one hails from Orange Farm and has a mother as her closest relative, another is from Hillbrow, and a third is from the Eastern Cape and attends the Methodist Church.
These women are not necessarily being trained for the traditionally supportive military roles. In the past, the almost exclusively white female recruits were for the most part screened from the battle field, the focus of their weapons training stopping short at the supposedly more feminine pistol. ”This is the era of equal opportunity for the sexes,” stated an officer in the manner of a man who is still busy convincing himself. ”They are being trained in all the weapons at platoon level.”