This empirically rich book joins a growing group of scholarly works that probe the ‘un-national’ characteristics of Southern Africa's wars of decolonization by examining the experiences of Black members of apartheid South Africa's security forces, who fought on South Africa's side in Namibia's war of decolonization and the Angolan civil war. Bolliger engages an interdisciplinary literature on soldiers and police in Africa and elsewhere and traces how rank-and-file Africans’ experiences of training and drill, racial hierarchies, and their units’ mission and ideology shaped disparate military cultures. What results are what he calls ‘un-national’ histories that challenge popular understandings of these wars as struggles for ‘national liberation’. Such interpretations remain prominent in popular and academic discourses in and about Southern Africa and, in particular, Namibia.Footnote ¹

Bolliger engages the literatures of ‘un-national’ liberation and African soldiers and police together to original effect. Like historiographies of intermediaries and the ‘middle ground of colonialism’, ‘un-national’ histories examine individual experiences and motivations that run against the binary framework of resistance and collaboration. Luise White and Miles Larmer, who coined the term ‘un-national’, emphasize ‘how much of national liberation took place in and from spaces that were categorically different from the national frame’.Footnote ² The two literatures thus link people and spaces that unsettle the dominant framing of Southern Africa's wars of decolonization as, in Bolliger's words, ‘struggles fought by and for Africans against settler and colonial state militaries’ and, one might add, within unchanging colonial and national borders (2). In engaging ‘un-national’ liberation historiography and literature on African intermediaries together, Bolliger shows how Black troops’ experiences of the specific geographic and institutional origins of the three units he examines shaped troops’ behaviors and loyalties, while also highlighting how these troops’ ‘un-national’ motivations — including what White and Larmer term ‘broader ideological notions of change, ethno-regional allegiances [and] personal advancement’ — defined the conflicts themselves.Footnote ³

Apartheid South Africa's security forces were not monolithic. Bolliger draws on archival research and 131 interviews with Black veterans of three all-male units (military masculinity is another critical focus): the ‘indigenous’ battalions of the South West Africa Territory Force (SWATF), developed by the South African Defense Force (SADF) to ‘Namibianize’ the war against the South West Africa People's Organization (SWAPO) in 1977; the infamously violent paramilitary police unit Koevoet, formed in 1979 to assist in counterinsurgency efforts; and the SADF's 32 ‘Buffalo’ Battalion. The latter consisted of former Angolan guerrillas recruited in the mid-1970s from all three nationalist movements in Angola's civil war to fight SWAPO in Namibia and, after Namibia's 1990 independence, to combat protests and suppress clashes between the African National Congress (ANC) and the Inkatha Freedom Party in late-apartheid South Africa.

Bollinger's research reveals that, rather than fighting in favor of apartheid and white minority rule, Black SWATF and Koevoet members in northern Namibia held varying understandings of what apartheid security forces and SWAPO were doing — and joined for various, often localized, reasons. Some cited the instructions of traditional leaders, the violence of guerrillas in SWAPO's People's Liberation Army of Namibia (PLAN), and PLAN and South African-aligned forces’ crosscutting attacks against those they deemed to be enemies or spies. Those who enlisted at traditional leaders’ behest — particularly those in parts of northern Namibia where SWAPO struggled to gain a foothold — tended to understand their role as ‘protecting the border’ or ‘protecting the land’ against PLAN fighters, whom they viewed as targeting civilians indiscriminately (52). Other veterans recalled that their decision to join the security forces bore little relation to their personal beliefs and instead stemmed from the need to align themselves with patrons who could protect them. One former soldier from Owambo, who recalled attending SWAPO meetings while working as a migrant laborer in urban central and southern Namibia for a decade, was targeted by PLAN after working as an interpreter for his uncle, a headman in the north. The former soldier joined the security forces after PLAN looted and burned down his shop, mistakenly targeted his driver while targeting him, and assassinating his uncle (57).

Whatever former combatants’ personal experiences and motivations, Bolliger argues that the disparate genealogies of the three units affected their former combatants’ trajectories after the war. Following Michelle Moyd's emphasis on the ‘textured composition’ of African troops of colonial and settler security forces, Bolliger argues that Black troops’ experiences of the specific geographical and institutional origins of the three units he examines, and of the ‘military masculinities’ that officers sought to enforce, shaped distinct military cultures that influenced troops’ behavior and loyalties during and after the conflicts.Footnote ⁴ Bolliger suggests, for instance, that Battalion 32 members’ distinctive experience of having been repeatedly moved across borders and ordered to fight different foreign enemies by white commanders prevented them from developing a sense of a common cause and, after the war, contributed to their status as ‘strangers everywhere’. While former SWATF and Koevoet troops, as members of forces reputed for their professionalism and elite status, consistently referred to ideological battles against communism and for democracy in their accounts of their units’ missions, former 32 Battalion soldiers referred to their work in the apartheid security forces as a survival strategy and recalled dashed hopes of fighting to eventually return to Angola. Furthermore, SWATF members cited ‘civic action’ programs such as roadbuilding and providing medical services to residents of northern Namibia as part of their mission. Partly because former SWATF and Koevoet members had this background of professionalism and ‘civic action’, Bolliger suggests, they were able to participate in public discourse in a way that former 32 Battalion soldiers could not.

Bolliger argues that these soldiers’ histories are incomprehensible within narratives of national liberation or repression by a bounded colonial state. So, too, their ‘un-national’ experiences did not reconcile easily with the hardening of national borders and the boundaries of postliberation citizenships. Just as former 32 Battalion soldiers struggled to reconcile their wartime experiences with their past commitments to a particular vision of Angola's future, veterans of the unit often failed to find economic opportunity or acceptance in postapartheid South Africa, yet encountered government opposition to relocate to Namibia or Angola. One former soldier said that the military channels that had transported them from Angola to Namibia and South Africa during the war ‘dried up’, leaving them without documents unnecessary during the war but essential for cross-border travel today (152). On the other hand, the SWAPO government excluded former Koevoet and SWATF soldiers from the legal definition of a veteran, preventing them from collecting benefits and compensation, but these former troops have had some success claiming compensation — and thus, they argue, the rights of full citizenship — by allying with groups of ex-SWAPO detainees and dissenters whose histories similarly clash with official history. Bolliger both shows the historical shakiness of governments’ denial of former enemies’ citizenship rights and enables readers to trace connections and disconnections that help explain why some Black former apartheid security forces went on to work for private security and military companies in Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

Despite the book's overarching argument that South Africa's wars in Namibia and Angola were ‘un-national’, Bolliger's evidence suggests that these wars were characterized to an important extent by debates about what the region's postapartheid future would look like. Nations featured prominently in these debates. For instance, Christian Williams argues that SWAPO's ‘spy crisis’ in exile demonstrated the acuteness of the movement's concern to order the nascent Namibian nation.Footnote ⁵ While many of Bolliger's informants joined the security forces for pragmatic reasons, SWAPO's nationalism enjoyed support in northern Namibia, and some former 32 Battalion members expressed their prior commitment to specific Angolan liberation movements’ national visions. Bolliger convincingly argues that the wars of Angola and Namibia's decolonization were not ‘national liberation struggles’ in a simplistic sense. But the contours of continuity and change in the roles of national and ‘un-national’ ties in these conflicts are not always clear. Bolliger alludes to ‘un-national ties’ that preceded the armed struggles of the second half of the twentieth century ‘but were activated during the 1970s and 80s’ — for instance, to transnational migrant labor ties (8, 181) — but he does not elaborate about why these ties played an augmented role at some points and receded into the background at others. If migrant labor ties played a key role, this may suggest a much longer periodization for the historiography of South Africa's wars in Southern Africa. Were there more or less national periods of these conflicts? When and why? If they were ‘un-national’, were they linked to South African imperialism or South Africa's ‘labor empire’?Footnote ⁶ And were Southern African conflicts especially ‘un-national’ in comparison to other wars of decolonization, in Africa or elsewhere?Footnote ⁷

Although Bolliger does not answer all these questions, his work sets an agenda for scholars looking to challenge the assumptions, geographical parameters, and perhaps periodization of conflict in Namibia, Angola, and South Africa in the second half of the twentieth century. He paints a vivid picture of the ‘vast and uneven “middle ground”’ of colonialism, engaging the historiography of African intermediaries by showing that there were not just two sides — African and colonial — but many.Footnote ⁸ Given the historical divides that Bolliger identifies between northern Namibia and the rest of the country, future studies might examine the experiences of Black former soldiers from central and southern Namibia. Still, by centering the experiences of Black former members of apartheid South Africa's security forces, Bolliger underscores the evidentiary flimsiness of the region's official histories and opens the way for further examination of what Southern Africa's unevenly ‘un-national’ conflicts entailed for their diverse actors.