70 Ian Van Der Waag Ian Van Der Waag's a Military History Of

70 Book Reviews

Ian van der Waag, A Military History of Modern South Africa. Cape Town: Jonathan Ball, 2015 & Havertown, PA: Casemate, 2018. Pp. 388. $19.77. ISBN: 9781868424184.

Ian Van Der Waag’s A Military History of Modern South Africa is a thoroughly researched and documented treatise. The study adopts a comprehensive per- spective that connects foreign and defence policy and institutional military history to ongoing process of South African “state formation” from 1899 to c. 2000. For the period under the author’s consideration, he ably demonstrates the value in analyzing these connections. However, by restraining the chronological scope to this hundred-year block of time, important analytical opportu- nities may be missed.This question of chronological framing informs the shape of the current review. Firstly, the van der Waag argues that the beginnings of South Africa’s violent state formation are found in the defeat and amalgamation of the Boer Republics from 1899. Yet, the evidence suggests otherwise, as the events of twenty years earlier, when the British Imperial Forces fought, defeated, and ransacked Cetshwayo’s Zulu Kingdom, attest. These earlier events also played a critical role in laying the foundations of the modern South African state. Sec- ondly, there is a gap of over a decade between the conclusion of the manuscript c. 2000 and its publication in 2015—a period during which important military transformations occurred. Ending his study somewhat arbitrarily in the year 2000, van der Waag is able to only offer six short years of reflection on the military policy of Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress (ANC) during their struggle to re-establish South Africa’s foreign policy after the pariah era of apartheid. Following apartheid, South Africa had to overcome the near- insurmountable challenge of integrating a new South African National Defence Force (SANDF), comprised of former guerrillas, the conventional South African Defence Force (SADF), Transkei, Bophuthatswana, Venda and Ciskei (TBVC), the Self Protection Force (SPF) of Kwa-Zulu Natal, white officered appendages including armed groups in Angola, Mozambique and Zimbabwe.1 This trans- formation was barely underway by the author’s closing date in 2000, but many events that occurred shortly afterwards are critically important if one is to fully include the post-apartheid era in such a study. This review will occur in two parts. The first seeks to analyze the book van der Waag has written, addressing the question of early periodization and then providing an assessment of his main arguments. The second part stands some-

1 Haas 2016, 43–53; Shubin, 2008; Bush 1987, 594; van der Waag 2015, 301–302.

Journal of African Military History © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/24680966-00202005 Book Reviews 71 what apart, and draws on van derWaag’s monograph alongside other sources to consider the rapid changes to South Africa’s military organization and mission during the years between 2000 and the present.

1 PART 1—Military History and State Formation in South Africa, 1879–2000

Van der Waag’s Military History is organized in eight chapters, arranged in succeeding periods according to major conflict epochs during which the military played a central role in the state-making process. These chapters run through “1899–1902: The Last Gentleman’s War?”; “The Integration and Union, 1902–1914”; “The FirstWorldWar 1914–1918”; “The Inter-War period,1919–1939”;“The Second World War, 1939–1945”; and “Change & Continuity: The Early Cold War, 1945–1966”, before addressing the “laager mentality” of the defensive apartheid state in the “Hot War in Southern Africa, 1959–1989” and finally Nelson Man- dela’s outward-facing military policy in “The South African National Defence Force, 1994 to circa 2000”. Van der Waag’s book is a product of dedicated re- search conducted in libraries spanning Europe, the United Kingdom, the Unit- ed States and South Africa. His work draws upon an impressive array of materi- als generally unavailable to time-pressed researchers, and will prove a valuable guide for interested parties in the diplomatic, academic, and civil society sec- tors, as well being an important addition to all relevant public and private libraries. With a methodology focusing on defence policy, force design and perfor- mance, the author begins his study in 1899. In this choice, he might be guided by the British High Commissioner to South Africa, Sir Bartle Frere, who argued for vision of South Africa as a political confederation rather than separate African or Boer states.2 From this conviction, the modern military history of South Africa began when only when various independent African polities and Boer republics had been subdued and amalgamated by the British into a single union c. 1900. What is left absent from the discussion is that South Africa’s history of violent state formation in fact began twenty years earlier, during the first six months of 1879, beginning with the Battle of Isandlwana in January and ending with the destruction of Cetshwayo’s Zulu Kingdom in August 1879, after the Battle of Rorke’s Drift.3 While Cetshwayo won the first round in the Battle of

2 Knight, 2003. 3 Dugdale-Pointon, 2001; Knight, 2003.

Journal of African Military History 3 (2019) 67–78