/ 1 September 2000

The boys on the borderline

Shaun de Waal WE FEAR NAUGHT BUT GOD: THE STORY OF THE SOUTH AFRICAN SPECIAL FORCES, “THE RECCES” by Paul Els (Covos Day) There must be many fascinating stories to tell of the men who were the elite troops of the apartheid military machine, and many lessons to be drawn from their history. A rivetingly interesting book could no doubt be written about the “Recces”, but Paul Els’s We Fear Naught But God is not it. Els gives us the story of the Special Forces from 1969, when the formation of such units were first mooted, to their final disbandment in 1992. Along the way, we get summaries of various campaigns, mini-biographies of some key soldiers, a few anecdotes, and information on insignia and the like, as well as some verse, if such it can be called, by members of the commandos. Oh, and a CD of Recces’ music containing songs such as Komesho Nonyati (“forward with aggression”), Rhodesia Answered Then (“After The Betrayal, they came South and did it in style”), and Puff the Magic Dragon. Unfortunately, it is all very dull. The book begins to read as blandly as the minutes of a tennis club. There is no critical perspective, no historical context, and no insight into what must have been often traumatic or at least ambivalent experiences for the men involved. In a chapter on “resistance movements in Southern Africa”, for instance, the two paragraphs on the African National Congress are drawn from a 1982 edition of the South African Defence Force magazine Paratus, which can hardly be viewed as an unbiased document. “The Soviets found the ANC to be an ideal front organisation and it was infiltrated and taken over so thoroughly that the SA Communist Party … and the ANC are today virtually synonymous.” This enemy of the state was, apparently, a solid bloc called the “USSR-ANC-SACP”. This has as much of an antique ring to it as the term “terrorist”, which Els employs elsewhere. He relates a few stories of different campaigns, along with some unmilitary anecdotes (hippos capsizing boats, for example), which seem to be the memories of soldiers Els has spoken to. But they have no status beyond that of bar-room tales. Yet, in the photographs in the book, there is an extraordinary sequence showing commando members stripped naked, blindfolded, and undergoing mock- interrogation by men in blackface. This, a caption informs us, was part of a “Know Your Enemy” exercise, and doctors were on hand to ensure that the men were fit to continue. What were the psychological repercussions of such an experience? We are not told. More broadly, what went on the minds of Recces fighting apartheid’s covert and semi-covert wars? What was it like on the frontline? Did they drink heavily (“Let’s have more whisky and cane … Let’s have more brandy and rum,” goes one of the songs) or smoke dagga? Did anyone suffer from post-traumatic stress? How did they feel about the fact that they won a few battles but lost the war? Els is unaware of or uninterested in any such complexity; his Recces are simultaneously God-fearing ordinary men and highly trained war machines who carried out their duties with expert courage, and that was that. The book’s blurb is at pains to distinguish the Recces from the apartheid state’s shadier killers – “These men were not assassins who eliminated spies in hotel rooms” – but the text admits elsewhere that after the disbandment of the Special Forces many of them joined organisations such as the Civil Co-operation Bureau (which was a semi-criminal death squad) and Executive Outcomes (which seems to hire out mercenaries to troubled African countries). We Fear Naught But God will be of interest only to those wishing to preserve a one- dimensional, flavourless portrait of the past: there is not enough in it to engage the general reader, even one deeply concerned with our tortured history. The Recces may have feared naught but God; they should have feared the march of history.