Mon séjour en Afrique du Sud (Cape Town)

The SA Navy has embarked on a secret project to create a partial equivalent of the Royal Marines’ Special Boat Service – to patrol Africa’s rivers and coastlines in support of peace-keepers and in pursuit of rebels, terrorists and pirates.

The project, codenamed Xena, is expected to field an operational boat squadron (OBS) consisting of 16 lightly armed patrol boats each, according to Rear Admiral Bernhard Teuteberg, the SA Navy’s chief director of maritime strategy.

A report on Xena by defence analyst Leon Engelbrecht said each unit of about five (more likely four) OBS boats would be supported by “a mobile shore facility, including accommodation and a containerised headquarters fitted with advanced command-and-control equipment”.

Each boat is expected to be just over 10m long, skippered by a naval petty officer, plus a coxswain and two gunners – one operating a fore-mounted .50 calibre machinegun and one a 7.62mm-calibre light machinegun at the stern.

Teuteberg told Saturday Star that the new OBS would form part of the navy’s Maritime Reaction Squadron, formed two years ago. The squadron consists of two other parts: an operational diving team and a reaction force of naval women and men, who will be transported six to a boat.

Teuteberg said the difference between the new South African system and the British was that the Royal Marines were “proper marines who go ashore and secure beach-heads”, whereas in South Africa that function will be performed by conventional navy-transported infantry: Cape Town’s 9 SA Infantry Battalion in either its new “sea landing” or rapid-response roles, backed up by the reserve Cape Town Highlanders.

Whereas the Royal Marines’ Special Boat Service is in fact a covert, special-forces outfit, designed to secure harbours and so forth, that role in South Africa is performed by 4 Reconnaissance Regiment, based at Langebaan, Western Cape, and which reports to the chief of joint operations.

Instead, our navy’s OBS will report to Fleet Command in Simon’s Town and have the following roles, Teuteberg said:

l Search-and-rescue, similar to the operation to save the 587 crew and passengers of the Greek liner Oceanos that sank off the Transkei coast in 1991.

l Forming boarding parties to storm enemy ships or merchantmen suspected of poaching or carrying contraband, as with the South African and Australian fisheries officials’ boarding of South American poacher Viarsa 1 in 2003 after a 7 000km chase.

l Patrolling Africa’s lakes and waterways, as with the naval operation of five Namacurra-class patrol boats on Lake Kigali as part of the peacekeeping operation in Burundi.

l Protecting the SA Navy’s four new frigates from the threat of “asymmetrical warfare” by pirates or terrorists, a threat demonstrated by the attack on the USS Cole off Yemen in 2000 by suicide bombers in a small boat packed with explosives.

For two brief periods of its history, South Africa used to have marines. During World War II, 78 South Africans served with the Royal Marines and in 1951 the SA Navy formed its own SA Corps of Marines, which operated the country’s shore batteries and some anti-aircraft batteries. The corps was dissolved when the batteries were mothballed in 1955.

But in 1979 the Marines were re-formed and, aside from harbour protection duties, served during the bush war in South-West Africa/ Namibia, patrolled the Zambezi River, and served as infantry on the border and even in a counter-insurgency role in the townships. When the bush war ended in April 1989, the navy was downscaled and the Marines disbanded again.

Yet now, South Africa’s increased peacekeeping operations in Africa, with SANDF engineers running a ferry across the Congo River, for instance, the need for an OBS to operate on the continent’s rivers and lakes has again come to the fore.

Currently, the SA Navy notes it has “limited OBS capability comprising boats, armaments and a rudimentary communication system that were hastily put together out of items readily available from existing inventory”.

The boats referred to are the Namacurra harbour-patrol boats, which could be refitted to serve as OBS boats – except that they have twin-outboard motors and the navy prefers twin waterjets for its new OBS, so the word is that the navy is out shopping for an entirely new craft.