Episode 5 – The South African Defence Force re-arms as the Angolan war of independence overflows into South West

It was inevitable that the South West African People’s Organisation or SWAPO would begin to mobilise south of the border. Pretoria’s response according to war researcher Leopold Scholtz was based on their unwillingness to acknowledge that SWAPO formed a real danger to South Africa’s domination in South West. The first years of the battle against SWAPO was going to be led by the South African Police and not the army. Much has been said and written about this approach with the military hawks in the National Party pressing for a more determined response and the political leadership referring to avoid escalation. They were watching what the Americans were facing in Vietnam and did not like what they were seeing. The South African Army at this stage was pretty neglected compared to what would happen in the late seventies. They suffered from the after-effects of the Second World War. They also suffered from an ideological shift where many of the top officers had been pushed out of the SADF by the Nationalist led Afrikaan’s speaking political order of the day. The English were not wanted by these nationalists whose narrative was one of extremism, particularly when it came to that terrible war of 1899-1902 – the Anglo-Boer war. The minister of Defence, Frans Erasmus had institute affirmative action to promote Afrikaners at all costs – and if that meant weakening the army in the short term he didn’t care. As long as the people who looked and sounded right were promoted he was a happy man. So were his fellow Nationalists. This has a curious ring to it in the 21st Century, with the African Nationalists basically doing the same thing to whites in the military.