Mon séjour en Afrique du Sud (Cape Town)

Reintegration of guerrilla forces into both military and civilian society after two prolonged Southern Africanconflicts has proved far from easy, two recent studies by the Institute for Security Studies have shown.

The issue has haunted South Africa over recent years, with repeated demonstrations by dissatisfied former guerrillas, whether they are Umkhonto weSizwe (MK) fighters, now facing grinding poverty, who were not integrated into the SANDF, or former Azanian People’s Liberation Army guerrillas, still languishing in jail for what they say are political offences.

Although Zulu militarism was just as based on the subjugation of others as Boer militarism was, Zulu set-piece tactics turned the victory of Isandlwana into the defeat of Ulundi, whereas Boer mobility kept their “flying commandos” in the field until fully two years after Pretoria had fallen to the British.

This would have far-reaching effects on guerrilla warfare doctrine around the world, from the resistance cells in the Philippines, to the rapid-deployment sotnia of the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine (RIAU) during the Russian Revolution, to the Irish Republican Army’s own “flying columns”.

According to South African Guerrilla Armies, by the late MK commander Rocky Williams, the Boer commandos’ influence was such that the military structure of the Union Defence Force “for decades … was to remain a militia-type organisation”.

Compared to the Boers’ five years of commando experience, MK had a good 33 years in the field – and was possessed of a much clearer political-military strategy than the Boer generals, whose works they scoured. They also drew from the writings of North Vietnam’s Vo Nguyen Giap and Ché Guevara. What the ANC learnt from these disparate tacticians was how to combine mass political mobilisation with guerrilla warfare.

Williams notes that despite initial reservations about MK after its formation in 1961 because of the “inherent religiosity of the Congress Alliance and its fundamentally humanist nature”, the force soon became subservient “to the political and civil authority of the ANC”. MK’s other strengths, Williams says, were its “moral restraint” and its ethnic representivity – and, he notes, its minimal hierarchy.

This formula echoes that of other politico-military formations: for example, the RIAU elected its officers and was, while operationally autonomous, under the political control of Congresses of Peasants’, Workers’ and Insurgents’ Deputies. Today, the Zapatista National Liberation Army in Mexico similarly falls under community oversight, which militates against militaristic abuses of power.

The stress of MK’s exile somewhat damaged civilian control, Williams suggests, arguing that although “the subordination of MK to the political authority and direction of the ANC … was never seriously questioned, it is perhaps not unsurprising that MK developed a quasi- militaristic identity that sometimes resulted in differences of opinion between the MK leadership and those of the [ANC’s] National Executive Committee”.

And yet, with 22 000 personnel, many of them highly trained, ready for conventional redeployment, MK would appear to have been much better placed than the Boer commandos to shape the new defence force of the state-under-construction in its own image.

But Williams argues the apartheid “old guard” simply had more money, more skills and more personnel with which to impose their doctrine on the integration process.

The result, he says, was not only a historical loss for the ANC, but for the new SANDF itself, which ignored some of the advantages of irregular warfare – including the scrapping of an agreed-upon Unconventional Brigade – and the loss of the force-supporting tradition of unarmed “civilian-based defence” that the liberation movements had honed to perfection during the resistance.

What happens to those who get demobilised was the focus of From Soldiers to Citizens (2007) by João Gomes Porto, Imogen Parsons and Chris Alden – who write on former guerrillas of the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (Unita) in that country’s central highlands.

Their study shows the 46 940 Unita fighters who returned to civilian life after the war are overwhelmingly supported by their communities. This social integration is hugely assisted by their church and political affiliations: ex-combatants remain tight with each other, though often suspicious of local authorities, who tend to be drawn from the ruling MPLA. Within two years of laying down their arms, half already considered themselves civilians.

But after 27 years of war, the authors write, citing Kees Kingma, true civilianisation depends “on the process of democratisation, including the recovery of a weak [or collapsed] state and the maturing of an independent civil society”.

Ironically, if MK’s experience is anything to go by, guerrilla experiences may have more lessons for “civvy street” than for the army – and I don’t mean only in terms of boardroom ambush tactics.

Williams argues that guerrillas bring with them the legitimacy of popular struggle; flexibility of tactics and doctrine; and the concept of the soldier as thinker, rather than as mere ammunition mule.

I’d argue that the kind of independent civil society envisaged by Kingma could well be midwifed by ex-guerrillas with the kind of flexible thinking and respect for democratic community that have made the world’s most remarkable fighting forces harbingers of genuinely freer societies.