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