WHAT IS IT to be a white man, in South Africa? Yes, this comes with all the currently fashionable loadedness of hetero-normativity and bias, privilege and exclusionary issues, but cast your vision back in time. Being born white and male in South Africa between the 1950s and the 1970s was about your mandatory presence in the army. You received your conscription papers some years before you finished high school. If you were poor, you had no loopholes to get out of it. It marched in tandem with those ideas of manliness in the rest of the western world as it attempted to break and remould you in tune with the white racist politics of the time. But what if you were quite excited about the idea of being in the army? If you had no Great Plans ahead, or political agendas in your value systems, and wanted to test your personal muscle and bravery in a scary world of physicality, as you moved out of your parents’ home for the first time in your life? Steve de Witt’s autobiographical foray into his experience as a ‘troepie’ (a private soldier) in the notorious South African border war, Bush Brothers (2023) is a highly readable and lucid account of the smell and terror of being a teen in a war that has nothing to do with him, but it is also about the notion of male camaraderie and the sheer thrill of adventure.  

The kind of things that happen to you ideologically, when you join a situation that has a promise of complete and joyous escapade is a narrative line not often explored. It is unpopular. Perhaps it feels too lightweight for an exploration of how ‘joining in’ as a young person has become hugely loaded with the massive weight of a fully grown ideology. Perhaps it overlooks the hot energy and ideas of being a hero that are part of a young person’s right to explore. Generally, in essays and stories focused on war, there’s a grand narrative that casts a spotlight on the shiny innocent perpetrator being sucked into a world of badness, hostility and damage, but de Witt, with his sense of gritty realism, humour and horror, and his strong, well-structured writing characterised by direct speech and the zip and flow of dialogue doesn’t kowtow to this trend.

In Bush Brothers, premised on de Witt’s experiences in the Angolan war which has been reflected on by war historians as South Africa’s ‘Vietnam War’ in terms of the damage it wrought on the young men who were there, and its basic purposelessness, you get to understand the horror of violent sudden loss, the impact of male friendship and terror of the unknown. You get to reach out into the bowels of the specific use of slang of the time and the context that evokes texts of the ilk of Koos Kombuis’s autobiography Seks, Drugs and Boeremusiek: Die Memoires van ‘n Volksverraaier (2015). As with Vera Brittain’s First World War memoir, Testament to Youth (1933), you get to understand the fabric of the time, without being loaded with victimhood and contemporarily fashionable and unequivocal rights and wrongs as being ideas as different from each other as black is from white. You get to understand the horror and throwaway cruelty of the machine of war, but the work is about the nature of friendship rather than the crippling reverberations of PTSD.

This is not to diss works of the ilk of JH Thompson’s An Unpopular War: From Afkak to Bosbefok of 2006, which comprises verbatim reflections on key horrors by young men regarding the South African army or Gordon Torr’s harrowing text Kill Yourself and Count to Ten (2014), which looks at the broken men and their stories. It doesn’t underplay the value of films along the lines of Oliver Hermanus’s Moffie of 2020, or Christian Olwagen’s 2018 film Kanarie. It’s also not to normalise the terrible things perpetrated in any war situation. It does, however, demonstrate that the so-called ordinary guy who somehow does emerge on the other side of the behemoth of apartheid values, with all its sexist and racist horrors, roughly intact, also has a voice.  

• Bush Brothers: Life and Death Across the Border by Steve de Witt is published by Tafelberg, Cape Town (2023).