Tangeni Amupadhi
IN CONFLICT by Anthony Feinstein (David Philip)
In Conflict is one man’s account of how he compromised his own beliefs to fight in defence of apartheid. Anthony Feinstein put off national service in the then South African Defence Force (SADF) by going straight from school to university, where he became increasingly convinced that South Africa’s military presence in the then South West Africa was wrong. But he was soon forced to decide between conscription, exile and conscientious objection -exile meant separation from family and friends; conscientious objection meant a jail sentence. ”The great moral dilemma confronting young white men of my generation in South Africa. I settled for conscription.”
Feinstein was 26 years old when he was drafted. He had just completed his studies as a psychiatrist and assumed he would not come in direct contact with the ”enemy”. But he was posted to a base deep in the war zone -a base whose bar was decorated with the jawbones of two slain enemies.
Then there was the day when Swapo (South West African People’s Organisation) fighters ambushed Feinstein’s company, and Feinstein forgot all about his moral objection to South Africa’s presence in Namibia.The ambush lasted under 30 minutes. He describes the feeling after regrouping and counting the losses:
”There was no repugnance and fear had long since departed. In its place was the most wonderful sense of joy, an elation at being alive, that life was indeed beautiful and that all these grisly human parts at my feet were nothing, meaningless, because the important thing was to be alive.”
After returning from ”the border”, Feinstein was amazed to find family and friends uninterested in his experiences. ”I thirsted after a simple thank you from someone I respected and who had an understanding of what it was like to go off to a distant war and cheat death.”
By writing this interesting book, Feinstein appears to be attempting to exorcise the demons left by his war experiences. Hopefully it will help other South Africans to talk more about their varied experiences in the years of apartheid.