COME YE MASTERS OF WAR

The invasion of Angola in support of CIA-backed UNITA mercenaries was still three years away. The Soweto uprising was five years away. The murder of Steve Biko was six years away. But the war in South Africa had already begun.

It wasn’t the war we expected, and it wasn’t against the traditional enemy. As far as the South African government was concerned that was already over. Mandela was on Robben Island, the ANC was in disarray, the PAC was in exile, and the Communists had long been routed. These were the golden years of apartheid. The Afrikaner oligarchy, sustained by lucrative precious metal exports, nourished by the spiritual support of the Nederlandse Gereformeerde Kerk, and guided by the Machiavellian strategies of the notorious Broederbond, was at the height of its pure white powers. Now they had the time, the money and the inclination to turn on that other enemy of the slegs blankes state – a disaffected white youth suckled on the poisonous tits of rock & roll, dagga and sexual deviance.

It was the cancer within, the snake in apartheid’s Garden of Eden, the more pernicious for living among you, eating at your tables, sleeping in your bedrooms, attending your schools and universities. And the more hateful for disgracing the god of Calvin, the Afrikaner Covenant and, worst of all, the white skin they were born with.

There wasn’t much you could do about them at school or at home. You could force them to sing Die Stem every morning, you could lecture them from noon till night on the righteousness of the apartheid cause, you could rewrite the history books to prove they were chosen to do God’s work in Africa. You could berate them or beat them into mute obedience. You could prevent the filth of television from perverting their hearts and minds by keeping it away from South Africa’s sunny shores. You could ban Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Das Kapital and pictures of naked women. Segregated beaches and segregated schools and segregated suburbs would keep them from communing with the Sons of Ham.

You couldn’t stop them from listening to Lourenco Marques radio or from reading books or from playing the guitar or from asking questions of one another behind closed doors, or behind the cricket hut on the far side of the field at break, smoking Texans and swapping stories about the erections of nipples and the smell of gwat.

But wait until the year of their eighteenth birthdays and they were yours, wholly, unconditionally and completely - property of the state, slaves of the system, vassals of the victors, to do with as you saw fit. To number them, name them, shear them, train them, dress them, feed them, shame them, shape them. The weed out the weak, the weird and the unwilling. To make them fit. And to make them fit.

So here they are then, bedraggled from the night on the train, still in civvies, shorts and slops, smiling, talking, joking, waiting. The youth of today, scruffy and scrawny, soutpiel and rockspider, from the Cape and the Free State, from E.P. and Natal, sons of farmers and sons of bankers, sons of dentists and boiler-makers, outside the gates of Voortrekkerhoogte, on the third of January 1971.

“Aandag!”