Tag: South African army

Stand by me

In ‘Bush Brothers’, premised on de Witt’s experiences in the Angolan war, reflected on by war historians as South Africa’s ‘Vietnam’ in terms of the damage it wrought and its purposelessness, you get to understand the horror of violent sudden loss, the impact of friendship and terror of the unknown.

Riding dragons

RADIO DRAMA REVIEW: KOUE KAIINGS. ONE THING THAT the mandatory conscription of young men in South Africa during apartheid did was break people literally, and blow them to bits. Another was to break them from the inside out, in a way that the crude eye of rudimentary medical […]

Secret weapons

IF YOU WERE conscious in South Africa between the 1960s and 1990s, when the apartheid army held sway over South Africa’s male youth, the premises of Korporaal Lemmer en die Rowers, this week’s Afrikaans-language radio drama on Radio Sonder Grense will bring swarms of goosebumps, blending army humiliation […]