Brigadier Roland de Vries and Colonel Solly Mollo in The Mark Gevisser=20
Colonel Rocky Williams, an Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) commander now=20 at the defence secretariat, remembers how officers from MK and the South=20 African Defence Force bonded, courtesy of Charles Glass, round the=20 braaivleis fire. An MK guy would look at his watch and say, =D2My God! It=
23h00! I better get moving =D1 my wife=D5s gonna moer me!=D3. It would be a=
revelation, says Williams, for the SADF officers: =D2Wow! These ouens have=
wives too and they also need to get home! Forget ideology! Bury the past!=
A soldier is a soldier; a man is a man; the hearth is the hearth and we=D5d=
better get back to it or we=D5re all gonna be in bigtime kak!=D3 It happened in the army workgroup of the Joint Military Co-ordinating=20 Council, responsible for planning integration and the new defence force=20 last year. That April =D1 just days before the election =D1 group leaders=
Roland de Vries (an SADF brigadier) and Solly Mollo (an MK instructor,=20 now a colonel), succumbed to one of those Roelf-and-Cyril moments in=20 Plettenberg Bay, where De Vries had commandeered the troops for some=20 R&R and a sail on his Hobie Cat.=20 As I sit with them over beers at Voortrekkerhoogte=D5s Army College, De=20 Vries tells the story: =D2The locals said there had not been wind for a mon=
But God smiled on us. The wind blew! The guys from Robben Island were=20 terrified of the seas. I took them all out, one by one, out past Robberg = =D1 I=20 counted 40 sharks there once in half an hour =D1 and when I was with Solly,=
he slipped and the boat capsized. Rough seas, that day. Me and Solly were=
talking so much! It was while we were sailing that we decided that =D4Unity=
is Strength=D5 is nonsense and that the new South Africa=D5s motto should=
rather be, =D4Diversity is Strength!=D5=D3 I have this image of two men, both highly-respected military commanders,=20 bobbing around in the rough seas off Robberg, surrounded by 40 sharks,=20 brainstorming a new motto for the South African National Defence Force.=20 Although Mollo was studying to become a lawyer when he was called in to=20 negotiate for MK last year, both men believe in the brightness of the=20 SANDF=D5s future with such fervour that they are sometimes quite blinding.=
Perhaps because they found each other, white and black South African,=20 through it.=20 De Vries was, until recently, officer commanding the vast Seventh=20 Division, responsible for 50 000 citizen force troops. Now the SANDF=D5s=20 Director of Transformation, he is one of the army=D5s authorities on mobile=
warfare, and he commanded a mechanised infantry brigade during the=20 SADF=D5s incursion into south-east Angola in 1987. Mollo was recruited by=
De Vries last year to be the Senior Staff Officer (Personnel) of 7 Div. Bot=
are headed =D1 at one another=D5s side =D1 for very high places indeed. They have become colleagues and friends: the families holiday together=20 where, while Oom Roland makes a potjie, Oom Solly and his mother, a=20 matron at the Dennilton Hospital, sing Afrikaans hymns. Says Mollo: =D2I am=
an African child (=D2Ek ook!=D3 interjects his boisterous friend). He is my=
brigadier. To me he=D5s my father. A revelation to me. At first I said to=
myself, =D4I don=D5t understand this one.=D5 You wouldn=D5t believe he=D5s =
Sure, there=D5s rank =D1 even at the bar, De Vries calls Mollo =D2Solly=D3 =
Mollo calls him =D2Brigadier=D3 =D1 but they most certainly don=D5t behave =
way I expect soldiers to. I dodged the draft, but not, at first, for politi=
reasons: I was just too damn terrified. As a white boy in Total Onslaught=
South Africa, the army told me what it was to be a man: men killed, men=20 protected. Men were strong, silent and sure. Women existed so that men=20 could have something to protect; something to kill other men over. The=20 army was the place that broke your spirit: it shaved your hair off and=20 kicked the shit out of you. It was certainly no place to be if you were a J=
a klutz, a four-eyes and a moffie. (I only learned later, from friends, how=
wrong I was on that last score).=20 I could only listen with wonder, then, as De Vries =D1 sentimental and=20 psychopop in equal measure =D1 told me how he and Mollo got people=20 talking in the army workgroup: =D2We had what I call =D4tribal stories=D5, =
around the fire and telling each other our most intimate things. I get=20 goosebumps thinking about it. If you have trust, you have a high level of=
interaction based on the win-win situation.=D3 Forget the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Brigadier Roland de=20 Vries has another idea: =D2We want to arrange campfire evenings where we=20 get a whole lot of civilians together sharing tribal stories.=D3 I have=20 absolutely no doubt that, after a campfire evening with De Vries, the=20 Azanian Students=D5 Movement heavies would be embracing their white=20 teachers and calling them =D2Ma=D3.=20 Now he wants to take an integrated team off to see the battlefields of=20 Angola so that, De Vries says, =D2we can appreciate each other=D5s tactics=
This is one reason why he, the military theorist, is so thrilled by=20 integration: he has long urged the army to merge guerrilla tactics with=20 conventional methods: =D2Integration is a great opportunity to put this int=
practice and learn from each other!=D3 He loves Shaka, Rommel, Napoleon, Mao, De La Rey, Giap =D1 not=20 because of what they individually fought for, but because they were such=20 brilliant proponents of mobile warfare. What makes him unique as an=20 SADF-trained theorist, says Mollo, is that he will look at Shaka or Mao at=
When asked about his ideology, De Vries answers, =D2I am a Christian=D3, an=
cryptically, tells a story about how he would never stay put in his church=
Sunday school as a child, but rather ran =D2all around Vanderbijlpark visit=
all the other Sunday schools=D3. The message is clear, and underscores what=
people involved in the military transformation process have told me: he is=
an experimenter, a maverick who has risen in the ranks because, despite the=
fact that he goes his own way, he is an inspirational commander and=20
But he begins his book on mobile warfare, published in 1987, with the=20 statement that =D2there is no doubt about the profane aims of the RSA=D5s=
communist-inspired enemies=D3. He would say that he is a military=20 professional, serving the needs of whichever government was in power; I=20 tend to agree with General Colin Powell, however, when he says there is no=
such thing as an =D2apolitical=D3 military commander. My guess is this: that De Vries, like many other Afrikaners, has undergone=
not so much a Damascene conversion as an awakening: he says, quite=20 frankly, that those times with the army sub-group were =D2the best times of=
my life=D3; he is one of those Afrikaners who love the new South Africa for=
the freedom it has brought them from narrow-minded control.=20 He tells the story of how he refused to allow a Rhodesian task force to=20 work out of his base in that country in 1979 because they were gunning=20 down children. But still, he was a Brigadier in the SADF in the Total=20 Onslaught days. He fought in Angola and he killed. Then again, so did=20 Mollo. Perhaps, the ex-MK instructor ventures, that=D5s why some soldiers=
from MK and the SADF have found it easy to connect: =D2When you talk=20 about the defence community, you talk about people who know what life is=20 and know what death is. We know what it means to build trust. We all have=
the same kind of tribal stories.=D3 Williams claims that no part of South African society has transformed as=20 rapidly as the military, and says that part of this is due to =D2the myth t=
we=D5re a unique breed, perpetuated through ritual, with all its parapherna=
and mystique. Although the ideologies might be different for MK or the=20 SADF, the mystique is the same.=D3 But there=D5s also a reality, he adds: =
very pragmatic side to soldiering =D1 about getting a job done in relation =
a certain order.=D3 But Mollo is the first to say that =D2not everyone will be like Solly Mollo= and=20 land up in 7 Div working under Brigadier de Vries. You have MK officers=20 in many units sitting around doing nothing, because their commanders are=20 ignoring them or feel threatened by them.=D3 And there is still much racism=
Mollo tells the story of a group of former MK officers who went on a=20 training course: a rifleman, a little boy, called them kaffirkoppe to their=
And these are officers=D5 issues; for ordinary soldiers things are much=20 tougher. The mutiny at Wallmanstal last year =D1 for which both SADF and=20 MK are to blame =D1 shows that, while De Vries and Mollo might be=20 models for integration, they are certainly not archetypal.=20 Now integration has swollen the SANDF to such an extent that 40 000=20 troops are going to lose their commissions over the next four years. Then there is that word, =D2integration=D3. Spend an evening with de Vries =
Mollo at Voortrekkerhoogte and it=D5s clear, from the very outset, that the=
culture they share is not one that integrates MK and the SADF. Solly Mollo=
=D1 like the MK he comes from =D1 has been absorbed, rather than=20 integrated, into a phenomenally powerful culture and tradition: that of=20 South African militarism.=20 Sure enough, there has been =D1 in the case of de Vries at least =D1 some=
magical counterabsorption. But despite the scathamiya songs that drift over=
from the training fields, despite the way Mollo greets an old comrade with=
an eita da as well as a salute, this is still Voortrekkerhoogte, a fortress= of=20 conformity and hierarchy and control. If I had to do the pro patria mori=20 routine and was given a choice of commander to follow into battle, it=20 would be De Vries. But if I were 18 again, and there were still=20 conscription, I=D5d be outta here.