The African continent was an absolute hotbed of fighting during the Cold War. As the old colonial
empires of Europe receded, two new empires reached out across the globe to take their place,
championing new world orders based on either crony capitalism or militant communism. One place this
conflict infected was South West Africa — now Namibia — where the South African Defence Force
fought a 23-year-long war that, in the minds of many, has been forgotten. In this video,
we tell the story of the South African Border War and Namibia’s struggle for independence.
Like so many modern conflicts with colonial origins,
the best place for us to start is the end of the First World War. South West Africa
had been a German colony until 1915 when it was invaded by South Africa, then a British dominion.
After the war, the region became a League of Nations mandate. However, as South Africa was
a powerful and developed neighbour they retained administrative control over the territory.
When the UN superseded the League of Nations in 1945, they requested the South African government
apply for a trusteeship over the territory. The South Africans one-upped them, asking to
annex it instead. The UN was like, “WTF? No, you can’t do that,” but South Africa did it anyway.
By the late 1940s, South West Africa was effectively run as a South African province.
But what did this actually mean? Apartheid.
The South African government exported one of the world’s most oppressive regimes,
one that Nelson Mandela described as “diabolical in its detail, inescapable in its reach,
and overwhelming in its power,” to their newly gained territory of South West Africa. This worked
in the favour of the few thousand German and Boer settlers, but seriously screwed over the other
90-odd per cent of the territory’s inhabitants — the indigenous Africans. Every aspect of their
lives was regulated, scrutinised, and policed with extreme prejudice by their new overlords
The thing with systematic institutionalised oppression
on a national scale is people don’t like it. As the 1950s wore on into the 1960s,
South West African resistance groups started popping up across the territory.
They staged demonstrations and boycotts, and the police usually responded with bullets.
One of the main resistance groups was the South West African People’s
Organisation or SWAPO. Their goal was to take back land and industry from the occupying
South Africans and enact sweeping welfare, healthcare, and educational reforms. The US
was on good terms with South Africa, so they did their bro a solid and declared SWAPO communist.
When the REAL communists over in the USSR found out, they were more than happy to send military
aid to South West Africa’s border regions — to prepare SWAPO for a grand revolutionary struggle.
Realising very quickly that a side had been picked for them,
SWAPO fell in with the communists; although they didn’t have much of a choice.
With the aid of Soviet instructors, SWAPO developed a potent guerilla force known as
the Liberation Army or SWALA. From September 1965, SWALA guerillas began infiltrating South
West Africa from secret bases in Zambia. By August 1966, the South African Defence
Force were hot on their trail, tracking the insurgents to their base at Omugulugwombashe.
The inexperienced insurgents were taken by surprise by an elite force of
SADF paratroopers and police. For the South Africans, Operation Blouwildebees — as it was
known — was a minor counter-insurgency mission. But for SWAPO, it was the start of the long
war for independence. The South African Border War, as it was known in Pretoria, had now begun.
With increasing conflict on the border, the South Africans cracked down even harder on the Namibian
population. This, in turn, fed more military recruits to SWALA, leading to more fighting,
and the cycle continued. But even with their ranks swelling, and even with new armouries from
the Soviet Union, SWALA couldn’t take on the SADF in a conventional battle, so they got asymmetric.
After renaming themselves the People’s Liberation Army of Namibia
the freedom fighters got to work planting landmines on SADF patrol routes. This
tactic was super effective against the lightly-armoured paratroopers and police.
PLAN also launched assaults on lightly-defended regional police stations and installations.
In January 1973, 50 insurgents armed with machine-guns, rockets,
and mortars obliterated an entire police base in the Caprivi — now Zambezi — region
near Zambia. Despite being veterans of the Rhodesian Bush War, the police defenders
were soundly defeated. When reports got back to Pretoria, the South Africans were furious.
If the insurgents wanted a fight, the South African Army was going to give it to them.
Between 1973 and 1974, the SADF’s budget increased by 150%.
15,000 troops rolled out along South West Africa’s northern border,
clearing and demarcating it as the “Cutline.” SADF soldiers patrolled the Cutline 24/7,
looking for signs of infiltration from Angola. But Angola was having troubles of its own.
In April 1974, Portugal’s authoritarian
dictatorship was deposed and its colonial holdings were set free.
Three groups — UNITA, FNLA, and the MPLA — rose to fill the power vacuum left in Angola.
The MPLA was aligned with the Soviets and received huge amounts of weapons from them. This gave them
the edge they needed to push UNITA and FNLA out of Angola’s capital. In response, the CIA did
what it does best and started funneling weapons to FNLA. By 1975, things were seriously heating up.
For the SADF, all communists looked the same, so they lumped the MPLA in the “enemy” pile
with PLAN. They then disguised 2,500 soldiers as mercenaries and sent them over the border to
fight alongside UNITA, commanded by confirmed giga-chad Jonas Savimbi. They had one goal:
But the MPLA had friends, and in November 1975, 12,000 Cuban soldiers showed up with heavy weapons
and a full Soviet flotilla. This grand communist force crushed the CIA-backed FNLA
and Savimbi’s UNITA. The South Africans were forced to pull back to the border.
The MPLA took Angola, and the Soviet-backed PLAN
suddenly started getting a LOT more help for their fight in South West Africa.
SWAPO chief Sam Nujoma commented: "It was as if a locked door had suddenly swung open … we could at
last make direct attacks across our … frontier and send in our forces and weapons on a large scale."
PLAN guerillas attacked the cutline regularly, but they were nearly always intercepted by small
SADF patrols. The brunt of the fighting was done by these small sections,
leading to this phase of the conflict becoming known as the “Corporal’s War.”
The SADF wanted to send large units over the Angolan border with armour
and air support in an attempt to crush the PLAN, but the politicians were against it.
The war had dragged on over a decade now, and every time a white South African body came home,
it got less popular. The Apartheid regime tried to sell the public on a war of communist containment,
but many saw it as neocolonial expansionism.
It was getting expensive too, as South Africa had now become the primary check to communist forces
backed up by the industrial might of the USSR and raw Cuban manpower.
In 1978, after a spate of successful border raids by PLAN, the SADF finally got the
go-ahead to cross the border in force. As part of Operation Reindeer, 370 paratroopers of the
44th Parachute Brigade attacked the Angolan mining town of Cassinga. The soldiers had been
told it was a PLAN administrative headquarters, but this is where history gets a little murky.
SWAPO and the Cubans claimed that Cassinga wasn’t an insurgent base,
but a refugee camp that just happened to have some fighters passing through.
A passing Swedish photographer noted the camp had both facilities for refugees
and a uniformed PLAN presence, insinuating that neither side was telling the whole truth.
What resulted was a massacre. The SADF hit Cassinga with airstrikes,
then the paratroops led a ground assault. Sources concur that they killed around 600 people.
In return, the paras only suffered three dead.
Undoubtedly, the PLAN soldiers would have put up a stout defence, but the fact they only killed three
soldiers suggests that most of those dead weren’t PLAN, as South Africa claimed, but civilians.
The international community reached a similar conclusion, and old allies like the United States
and Britain openly condemned South Africa. Global opposition to Apartheid was growing,
and even though they were fighting the commies, no one thought the SADF were the good guys anymore.
From the 70s to the late 80s, the war dragged on with no end in sight. SADF troops made repeated
incursions into Angola to hunt down PLAN forces while trying to prevent those same forces doing
the same to them. The Soviets refused to back down too, and continued supplying top-tier weaponry to
the insurgents. On the ground, the SADF were more than a match for the inexperienced insurgents,
but they were spread too thinly to effectively press their advantage. There was even a short
ceasefire from 1984 to 1985, but that fell apart after both sides broke the rules.
The final and largest battle was fought intermittently between August 1987 and March 1988
around the city of Cuito Cuanavale in Angola. The SADF had pushed deep into Angola, and the
MPLA and Cubans were pushing back. They launched a massive offensive with tanks, APCs, aircraft,
and thousands of troops. In front of them stood 700 SADF soldiers, along with old mate Savimbi
and over 50,000 of his boys. The communists were routed, but managed to regroup in the city. For
seven months, Savimbi’s UNITA and the SADF were unable to break through the communist defences,
but the MPLA and Cubans couldn’t push them back either. It was a stalemate.
After back-and-forth fighting for nearly two-and-a-half decades,
a stalemate was what everyone needed. It forced the major players to come
to the negotiating table and sketch out a plan for peace.
By 1989, the Cubans went home, the Soviets closed the armoury, Angola was finally able
to hold an election (which Savimbi tried to start another war over when he didn’t win),
the South Africans pulled back to their own border, and Namibia finally got independence. As
Apartheid disintegrated, Namibia was finally free to govern itself, and South Africa became far more
interested in domestic affairs. The Border War ended on March 21st 1990, 23 years after it began.
THAT was the loooooong story of the South African Border War, the 23-year-long war
the world forgot about. But what do YOU think? Why do YOU think the SADF fought for so long,
so far away from home? Why do YOU think Cuba was so keen to help out the MPLA? And, do YOU think
the war was simply the death throes of colonialism in Africa? Let us know in the comments!