24 September 2011
Posted in
Theatre
Paul Herzberg on re-visiting the country where he was forced to fight for the South African Army in the 1970s, and how the conflict inspired his play The Dead Wait
One image has dominated my imagination for 20 years: a white soldier carrying a black insurgent on his back through the bush, ally and foe locked together. It is the central image to a play that was based, in part, on my experiences as a conscripted soldier in the Angolan war of the 1970s.
In 2010 I returned to the Namibian border, where I had served 34 years earlier. During the time of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, with so much ideological opposition to both theatres of war, it struck me with particular force what it must be like for a soldier serving in a conflict he has come to abhor.
The army in which I had served, however, was not made up of volunteers. During the apartheid era, conscientious objection was an option, but only for the truly heroic. It meant automatic jail, after which you were offered a choice: the army — or jail again. You could attempt to leave the country, but the names of all white men on the military register were handed to zealous airport officials.
I was conscripted twice: first, in 1971, when national service was nine months, ending with the spectre of a three-month camp to complete a full year. You knew at some point the army would get you again — and again — to make up for the luxury of that shorter service. When the brown envelope finally came through my door, the timing was appalling: after four years of university, my graduation chimed perfectly with the height of the Angolan war.
In 1976 I found myself back in uniform, but this time I was dispatched to the Namibian border a week after Operation Savannah, which saw the South African Defence Force (SADF) penetrate so far north they were within 20km of Luanda.
The second experience affected me deeply and provided raw material for a play, The Dead Wait, produced at the Royal Exchange in Manchester and Market Theatre in Johannesburg, which has won various awards, and is soon to be a film.
It was a location recce for the film in 2010 that finally took me back to where I had served in 1976. My return to Rundu, nestled behind the great Okavango River, was momentous for many reasons. But it was like returning to a world so different that I struggled to locate the original camp where I had been stationed. Here, the past was, indeed, another country.
In the years between my national and border service things had changed. South Africa was caught in a volatile period and much was happening on its borders and within. Black Consciousness had exploded in the townships, the Portuguese had fled Angola, and Soweto was in flames.
This war was like no other, in that it was almost entirely secret. Soldiers were forced to pledge their silence — the authorities were desperate that word did not escape internationally about events on and beyond the Namibian border. Aspects of that war were so harrowing that thousands of ex-soldiers on both sides still suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, a war that saw the largest battles in Africa since Tobruk and has left a legacy of landmines more prolific than any other country on earth.
The apartheid regime, fearing repercussions of a newly elected Marxist government in Angola, mustered 100,000 soldiers to the border. At the same time thousands of Cuban soldiers gathered to the north, uniting with Angolan forces, leading to the battle of Cuito Canavale in 1989, which heralded a turning point in the war.
Hundreds of hot-pursuit attacks were launched. Thousands of Angolans and Namibians were slaughtered and many white and black South African troops also died. It was South Africa’s Vietnam. After my three months ended, I no longer felt I could be a citizen of the apartheid state, at the eternal mercy of its army. I left for the UK six weeks later.
In 1992 I began a conversation with a man on a train in London. He told me of an incident that had befallen his nephew in the border war. He was on an Angolan mission and his unit had captured a wounded black freedom fighter. The commander had it in for the young soldier and, suspecting his black captive might be important, ordered the soldier to carry him on his back until they reached the border for interrogation. The freedom fighter whispered into the soldier’s ear as they moved through the bush and in the mayhem a bond began to grow. The commander responded to their unlikely friendship by ordering the soldier to execute the man he had carried, which he did.
This image, one man on the back of another in the bush, ally and foe locked together, haunted me. Using my long absence from the country, I found a way to build a play round the anecdote, to connect it to contemporary South Africa. That play was The Dead Wait, and it was a recce for the film version, that finally took me back to where I had served. No longer were the dirt roads policed by truckloads of white troops. The former army base was derelict, with shattered windows and bushes growing up from its cracked concrete floors. Yet the town seemed to be flourishing. With my director and producer I searched in vain for where the camp had been pitched — the place I saw in my memory seemed, quite simply, to have vanished.
But the longer we stayed, the more things made sense. Many of the towns along the border on the Namibian side have a frontier feel to them — burgeoning business, a regular flow of humans across the border. Indeed, many Angolans come to shop in northern Namibia. The former white army’s presence has little to show for itself; there are more pressing problems than maintaining military bases built as a tool of oppression.
Opposite Rundu is Calais village. I recall watching the flickering lights of Calais across the Okavango. We were told that it was occupied by the MPLA (the People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola) and that attacks could easily be launched from the other side. Calais always seemed to represent something deeply sinister to our troops: the place where the communists and insurgents and the bogeyman of Africa were congregating.
Now, in 2010, our local scout, who had contacts on the other side, announced that the Angolan general in charge of the border could organise a brief trip across the Okavango to Calais for us to take photos on a lightning recce. There was something cloak-and-daggerish about the operation, but eventually we were ferried across the river from a rickety jetty to the landing port of Calais.
It was like going from Miami to Kazakhstan. Angola remains impoverished, with Calais itself a small village of run-down buildings and shanty dwellings populated by the most open and friendly populace imaginable.
Our host, a handsome mixed-race general, was hospitable, and we were stunned to find his own home was a simple little house. As we sat in his living room being served local beer, an array of NCOs and officers popped by to greet their commander.
It became clear that our presence was seen as special, and the general ensured that his wide-screen TV, clearly his pride and joy, was playing constantly in the background, on a channel which he felt would impress us: CNN. After a few hours of polite chat, we were given carte blanche to take photos in the village, where our presence continued to provoke much interest, especially from local children.
We were ferried back to the landing port (in the same 1960s Russian ambulance) and taken by boat to Rundu. Calais had finally been demystified, and it was clear that then, as now, Angola remains a very poor country, accepting aid from whomsoever it can.
As we left Rundu the next day we passed cement gates with an old SADF logo emblazoned across its arch, and I recognised the entrance to my old camp. Memories rushed back and I realised that in 1976 we had been stationed outside Rundu, and that the run-down buildings we had visited in the town were the former officers’ quarters.
Despite our three days there, I did not, in the end, revisit the site of my old camp. But on reflection, it is better that way. The terrible occupation of Namibia by South Africa, and the bloody and covert war that was launched from the border for so long, should remain a murky and sinister memory, a reminder that government sponsored oppression is something to which South Africa should never return.
As we drove away, I turned back for one final look: and that lurking image suddenly offered itself to me beneath the army gate — the young white soldier carrying the black insurgent, with whom, despite being trapped in that terrible war, he had formed such an unlikely friendship.
Paul Herzberg is an actor and writer. The Dead Wait was shortlisted for the Verity Bargate Award, performed at the Market Johannesburg and Royal Exchange (Paul played Papa, the commander), where it was nominated for best play / production / actor, winning in the last category. It was adapted for BBC and German radio, and developed for the screen by the UK Film Council.
©Copyright Paul Herzberg
The kids of Calais.
