Beyond the Border War: New Perspectives on Southern Africa’s Late–Cold War Conflicts (review)

Beyond the Border War deals with the armed conflicts in southern Africa in the 1970s and 1980s that pitted South Africa against neighboring countries. The South African government was intent on preserving apartheid at home and white rule over present-day Namibia. The Soviet Union provided large-scale support to Angola, and Cuban troops intervened directly on behalf of the Angolan government. The United States, for its part, supported rebels in the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) led by Jonas Savimbi and allied with South Africa. To South Africa, the intervention in Angola and occupation of Namibia amounted to a defensive stand against the tide of decolonization after the collapse of the Portuguese colonial empire in the early 1970s.

In this anthology seventeen scholars from a wide variety of disciplines ranging from history to anthropology to literary analysis present new and to some extent revisionist perspectives on the Border War. Most of the contributions fall within the category of cultural history and deal with discourse, social construction of identities, gender, memory, reconciliation, ideological manipulation, and so on.

As noted by editor Gary Baines, the term “Border War” is both ambiguous and problematic because it implies that the war was fought defensively to protect South Africa’s international borders. In reality, the fighting took place far inside Angolan territory. However, the term does make sense given the volume’s particular focus on white South Africans’ self-perception as fighting a defensive war of regime survival against the threat of Communism and black barbarism. The term also partly explains why South African destabilization efforts in the frontline states other than Angola and Namibia are not discussed in the volume. Regular South African Defence Forces were not engaged in major military campaigns in places other than Angola and did not occupy foreign territory except in Namibia.

The Cold War played a large part in this border war by offering a setting for geopolitical alignments along Cold War lines. Co-editor Peter Vale shows in his somewhat poorly edited contribution that South Africa’s intervention in Angola fitted well into the Cold War discourse and U.S. strategic doctrine. Though a somewhat embarrassing ally to the United States, South Africa was an ideal match for Henry Kissinger’s doctrine of politically subcontracting the containment of Communism, as well as for the Reagan administration’s policy of supporting anti-Communist forces in the Third World. As Elaine Windrich shows, propaganda from both the United States and South Africa was needed to portray UNITA as a national liberation movement with legitimate claims to represent the people of Angola.

Edgar Dosman addresses the Cuban intervention in an essay about the defense of Cuito Cuanavale in the spring of 1988 that turned the tide of war against South Africa and paved the way for the South African withdrawal from Angola and Namibia and the latter’s independence in 1990. By effectively intervening, Cuba succeeded in withdrawing from a civil war with much more honor than the United States was able to in Vietnam or than the Soviet Union later did in Afghanistan. Cuba’s intervention was the most important factor contributing to a resolution of the conflict, even though the United Nations (UN) has since taken credit for the peace settlement. Robert Gordon demonstrates that the UN’s peacekeeping effort in Namibia was not nearly as successful as later claimed by the UN and that the successful outcome of the transition should be attributed to other factors.

Daniel Conway and Michael Drewett address the issue of conscription for all white South African males, introduced in South Africa in the 1970s. Conway analyzes the increasing resistance to conscription in the 1980’s as reflected in the End Conscription Campaign. Drewett demonstrates how propaganda and popular culture aided the conscription efforts by using traditional gender stereotypes to frame the Border War and its support. National military service was...