Scientia Militaria : South African Journal of Military Studies - Volume 35, Issue 1, January 2007

The role of external involvement within Africa is not a new phenomenon by any tandard; in fact, Africa's recent political history is rife with similar examples. From the onset of colonisation, European powers have been subjugating and manipulating Africa's people for their vast supplies of natural resources and raw materials. The Africa of today is no different, with a noticeably growing trend of external involvement within the continent. The changing geostrategic realities of the post-9/11 world have entrenched Africa as a new strategic destination due to the prevalence of crucial resources and possible markets and the security interests of global powers. The shift in focus towards Africa as a strategic partner in the changing geo-political realities of the contemporary international system has posited the emergence of the so-called 'new scramble for Africa'. In essence, this scramble revolves around the widespread interest in Africa's resource-rich countries as a vital source of security for the world's economic powers. Recent engagement within Africa is rooted in the quest of foreign countries to secure access to finite resources and raw materials as well as to open export markets.

Constructivism challenges the prevailing approaches to international relations and security. It attempts to explain, inter alia, how actors acquire their identities, and how these identities shape actors' material and non-material interests. These constructed identities and interests further define mutually constructed rules, norms and institutions, which enable states and other actors to act accordingly. For constructivists, actors approach social facts in terms of the meaning, significance, value and beliefs these actors ascribe to such facts. Once an actor has constructed the social purpose (i.e. its identity and/or interests) of a particular social fact, the actor ascribes new meaning to this fact. The next step for the actor and others would then be to construct social practices based on mutually constructed norms, rules and institutions to engage with this social fact. States, therefore, could have different identities and varying interests at different times (Barnett, 2005:251-270).

It is widely known that from the introduction of the Defence Amendment Act of 1967 (Act no. 85 of 1967) until the fall of apartheid in 1994, South Africa had a system of universal national service for white males, and that the men conscripted into the South African Defence Force (SADF) under this system were engaged in conflicts in Namibia, Angola, and later in the townships of South Africa itself. What is widely ignored however, both in academia and in wider society, is that the South African military relied on conscripts, selected through a ballot system, to fill its ranks for some fifteen years before the introduction of universal service. This article intends to redress this scholastic imbalance.

As a member of the Commonwealth, South Africa aligned its defence policy closely with that of Great Britain in the years between the two World Wars. Apart from taking responsibility for its own defence, the Union of South Africa was also expected, at its discretion, to support Britain in the case of a European war. By the mid-1930s South Africa faced a possible external threat as the aggressive, imperialist policies of Germany, Italy and Japan began to take shape. South African Defence Minister, Oswald Pirow, endeavoured to obtain 15-inch guns from Britain to bolster Cape Town's defences against sea-raiders. Despite her strategic interest in safeguarding the Cape sea route, Britain's own efforts at rearmament, however, made her unwilling to part with guns of that calibre. Instead, in June 1936, the British government agreed to lend the monitor HMS Erebus, carrying two 15-inch guns, to the Union of South Africa. Redesignated Erebus Heavy Battery, South African Garrison Artillery, it was to serve as a floating artillery battery in Cape Town harbour. Two detachments of South Africans were trained in Britain to man the Erebus, but war broke out before the Erebus could sail for the Cape. Some of the South African crew on the Erebus allegedly 'refused duty' and were put ashore. The Erebus scheme was subsequently cancelled and the South Africans sent home. The aim of this article is to determine the origins of the Erebus scheme and the reasons for its demise against the background of Anglo-South African relations immediately before and after the commencement of the Second World War. This entails an investigation of Anglo-South African relations both at interstate and popular level. The article outlines the birth of the scheme amidst the diverging views of the British Admiralty and the South African Minister for Defence, Oswald Pirow, on Cape Town's defence needs. It highlights the political division in South African society over participation in a 'British' war on the eve of the Second World War and investigates the relationship between the South Africans and Britons on the Erebus. It concludes with a brief assessment of the role of the removal of some of the South African crew from the Erebus and the change of government in South Africa in the cancellation of the Erebus scheme.

Since time immemorial, societies, states and state builders have been challenged and transformed by the need and quest for military manpower. European states relied on conscript armies to 'pacify' and retain colonies in parts of the non-European world. These facts underscore the meticulous attention paid by the British to the recruitment of their colonial forces in Africa. In the Niger basin for one, conscious efforts were made by individual agents of the British Crown and at official level to ensure that only members of designated groups were recruited into those colonial forces that facilitated the establishment of the Nigerian supra-national state. The end of colonial rule and shifts in military recruitment policies hardly erased the vestiges of colonial recruitment from the Nigerian military. The study on which this article is based and which examines Britain's policies on military human resource recruitment as state-building initiatives, argued that military coups d'etat in Nigeria can be traced back to colonial and post-colonial recruitment patterns for military human resources.

Defying their British rulers, the Boers of the Transvaal rose in rebellion in December 1880. A British column, moving between Bronkhorstspruit and Pretoria, was attacked by a Boer commando and almost annihilated and the seven British garrisons in the territory were invested by bands of Boers, ignited by a burgeoning Afrikaner nationalism and a desire for independence. The events caused a flurry in distant Britain, where the government, inundated with domestic concerns and wary of further stimulating Afrikaner nationalism, decided to grant self-rule to the Transvaal. Yet, in the meantime, events in South Africa moved apace. The relief column, commanded by Major General Sir George Pomeroy Colley, was defeated three times within almost as many weeks and the garrisons lost all hope of reinforcement. The political settlement, patched eagerly together by a London focussed on pressing domestic troubles, was condemned by Greater Britons in Britain and South Africa.

Die Buffel Struikel: 'n Storie van 32 Bataljon en Sy Mense (The Buffalo Stumbles: A Story of 32 Battalion and Its People) was written originally in Afrikaans. The author is an Afrikaans-speaking white South African who, as a member of the well-known South African 32 ""foreign legion"" Battalion, participated in the Namibian Border War in the 1970s and 1980s. The war was fought by an army whose operational language for the major part was Afrikaans. However, two reasons call for a review of this book in English. Firstly, with the Western powers facing a serious insurgency threat in Iraq and elsewhere, the world has an urgent need for a new understanding, thinking and perspectives about counter-insurgency. Secondly, the book can be seen as a watershed contribution to the so-called Border War literature that, until now, has been dominated by contributions of journalists and writers with questionable motives.

The 1992 United States-led international military operation into Somalia was a multilateral effort persuaded by and under the aegis of the United Nations (UN) to thwart a humanitarian crisis as a result of political cataclysm, civil unrest and natural disaster. The Unified Task Force (UNITAF) was mandated to create an environment conducive for the distribution of emergency aid against earlier attempts, which were derailed by warlords and the marauding gangs. The achievements on the humanitarian objectives were ephemeral because when the mission ended in 1993, an operation to make possible the political imperatives commenced, but all these efforts ended in violence. The ensuing withdrawal of its forces by the United States prompted the demise of UN operations and eventually the intervention was concluded with the political impasse unresolved.