Ordinary Springboks: White Servicemen and Social Justice in South Africa, 1939-1961 (review)

Some 334,324 South Africans served with the Union Defence Force during the Second World War. Sixty-three percent of these servicemen were "white" and they form the focus of Ordinary Springboks, an innovative study by Neil Roos, an educationalist at the University of Pretoria. Feeling that class and race, "the binary categories conventionally used by social scientists to interrogate South African society," were inadequate, Roos sought a fresh approach for this study. Invoking David Goldberg and others on racist culture, he argues that there was an evolving consensus among white South Africans "on the political and social primacy of their whiteness" and this, Roos contends, offers a better framework for the study of their history as both white men and as war veterans (p. 195). The men are therefore used by Roos as a lens through which to study popular whiteness in mid-twentieth-century South Africa. Bonds developed between them while on active service, some of which, he argues, stood the test of time. In East Africa, Egypt, and Italy, the theatres where the majority served, they formed notions of and held hopes for a "better world" as well as for "some form of post-war social justice, an ideal," Roos notes, "that was in segregated South African society heavy with ambiguity and contradiction" (p. 1).

Although shared expectations and experiences undoubtedly shaped these men, white South African servicemen were not uniform. They differed, sometimes vastly, in terms of their social origins, their wartime experiences, and, by implication, their expectations and aspirations for the postwar world. Roos argues that those that enlisted first were poorer, the military being a receptacle for the white unemployed (a point, incidentally, that still requires statistical testing). Their hopes, for a better life and postwar prosperity and social justice, shaped too by the Army Education Scheme, were limited to a large extent as an aspiration for whites only. However, as Roos shows, such social justice was not always of a racist nature. Men like Joe Slovo and Rusty Bernstein, who were prominent in the "shift toward armed resistance in 1961," numbered among these veterans and in the 1950s featured in the anti-Apartheid struggle of the Congress of Democrats movement.

Moreover, the experiences of these ordinary Springboks were variegated. The first to go served in East and then North Africa, where they fought alongside a good many "native" colonial troops; while those that went "up north" after 1943 were drawn largely from the middling classes and served in Italy, where the South African government would not send black servicemen in numbers. This begs a further set of questions: was there a geographic variant in the notions of social justice? Did those South African servicemen, drawn from the white poor and exposed to their "non-white" compatriots, have a greater sense of social justice and, more particularly, social justice for all? Or, perceiving a possible threat in black mobility, did these men embrace more exclusive notions? This is left largely unexplored.

Furthermore, the English-Afrikaner language divide was still a basic partition in white society, a division that lasted until at least the 1970s. The former seemingly fought for King and Country; the latter, enlisting for reasons primarily economic, fought largely for a living. There were, of course, many that broke this mould. Sir De Villiers Graaff, for example, was from a wealthy, anglicised, Cape Afrikaner family, who, having served in the 2nd SA Division, entered parliament after the war and later led the United Party, on a ticket calling for the protection of ex-servicemen and at least a measure of social justice for South Africans generally grouped and labelled as "non-White." These attempts, whether heartfelt or politically opportunistic, were feeble in the extreme. Following the electoral victory of the National Party in 1948, the officer corps of the defence force was purged...