BIG READ | Buffalo Soldiers

On a hot summer’s day in early 1976, an unusual scene played itself out at a camp for Angolan refugees called Chitado, north of the Cunene River and about 30km west of the Ruacana falls when a large, disciplined body of black men singing lustily marched at the double on the camp commandant’s headquarters.

Though it was on the Angolan side of the border, the Chitado camp was run by Commandant Hank Badenhorst of the apartheid South African Defence Force (SADF), whose office was in a large house where he was constantly harassed by hordes of desperate refugees demanding he help them escape Angola, even thrusting fistfuls of escudos at him.

But the escudos were worthless as Portuguese rule in Angola had ended months previously, a process begun almost two years prior when leftists in its military staged a coup in Lisbon nicknamed the Carnation Revolution after the flowers with which jubilant citizens had buttonholed rebel soldiers.

A newly left-wing Lisbon shed its African colonies with whose liberation movements it had been in a debilitating 13-year war; the transition to black rule had gone smoothly on the islands of Cape Verde and São Tomé and Princípe in West Africa, though in what became Guinea-Bissau, the ruling Marxist party executed 7,447 blacks who had served in the Portuguese militia, and in Mozambique, a counter-coup staged in September in Lourenço-Marques by conservative whites, blacks and mestizos against the unilateral imposition of a Marxist Frelimo government lead to about 9,500 deaths.

In Angola, events would be bloodier still: though the Alvor Accords of January 15 1975 under which the Portuguese agreed to hand over power to a tripartite transitional administration in Luanda tasked with drafting a new constitution, and independence set for November 11, the 400th anniversary of the founding of the colony, it all fell apart in fratricidal slaughter on March 23.

The Angolan cauldron would prove to be not only one of Africa’s longest-bleeding civil wars, but would come to indelibly shape and define the SADF of the late apartheid era.

The three-cornered battle between Agostinho Neto’s Sovietist MPLA, Holden Roberto’s Christian democrat FNLA, and Jonas Savimbi’s Maoist Unita drew in a scratched-together SADF invasion force in Operation Savannah. In an astonishing blitzkrieg from October 15 1975, it advanced 3,159km in 33 days to try to support the FNLA to undercut an imminent MPLA victory; a brief and ultimately disastrous northern incursion by the SADF in support of the FNLA made it as far as being able to see the lights of Luanda by November 10.

The Angolan cauldron would prove to be not only one of Africa’s longest-bleeding civil wars, but would come to indelibly shape and define the SADF of the late apartheid era.

It was out of this drama that the battalion of black men at the Chitado refugee camp had emerged. And their drill to Badenhorst’s HQ was witnessed by a man who had and would shape the late SADF’s “sharp end” more than any other: Commandant Jan Breytenbach, brother to renowned left-wing writer-poet Breyten Breytenbach, and founder four years previously of the special forces Recces, who would later co-found 44 Parachute Brigade, then the Guerrilla Warfare School.

“A small, energetic and sinewy black man heading a column of troops, all stripped to the waist, came to a halt on the open ground facing Hank’s house,” Jan Breytenbach recalled. “They turned right and stood at ease, sweating and panting while their commander harangued them. It was Kioto. He dismissed them and they ran to their tents. Kioto obviously still had his men under control.” Commandante Kioto was the nom de guerre of Pedro Gomes, an FNLA commander who had added his battalion to Operation Savannah’s Battle Group Alpha under Commandant Delville Linford, which consisted mostly of two companies of Bushmen who had served in the Portuguese secret police’s feared Flechas (Arrows) counter-insurgency unit.

“Hank introduced us. It was the first time I had met Kioto,” Breytenbach wrote. “He was confident, extremely fit and hard as nails, both mentally and physically. He grinned from ear to ear when he heard who I was,” for Breytenbach had earned his chops commanding Savannah’s Battle Group Bravo, consisting mostly of three companies of FNLA troops. Together, Alpha and Bravo had been the operation’s primary spearheads, their lightning-fast moves responsible for much of its success.

But the FNLA had largely collapsed, while Unita failed to hold the Atlantic coast ports, central and southwestern towns and cities “liberated” by the South Africans. Kioto told Breytenbach that his companies had fought their way south “through swarms of rampaging Unita bands” and had held the city of Sá da Bandeira (now Lubango) under Unita fire and with the MPLA’s armed wing Fapla approaching, until disarmed by retreating SADF troops.

“I was doubly impressed at the way Kioto had kept his men together as a fighting body, even after being disarmed by his South African comrades in arms. Kioto and his men proved to be excellent acquisitions for Battle Group Bravo.”

But at that point, their integration and in fact the entire future of Breytenbach’s Bravo and Linford’s Alpha was in doubt as chief of the SADF Lt-Gen Magnus Malan had only the previous year allowed blacks to enter the SADF for the first time, and then only in non-combatant roles such as drivers.

But with a Marxist government by then accepted as legitimate by the Organisation of African Unity, when Malan visited Bravo at its Buffalo home base in the Caprivi Strip of South West Africa (now Namibia), Breytenbach stressed its achievements in ongoing cross-border operations against Swapo’s armed wing operating from exile in southern Angola.

Breytenbach said the immense advantage of having a battalion of black Angolans able to “infiltrate deep into Swapo and Fapla territory — a no-go area for our regular South African forces” — convinced Malan that the battle-group should be regularised as an SADF battalion.

Buffalo Battalion

And so, simultaneous with an expansion and reorganisation of black Namibian and Bushman troops, the SADF regularised Alpha and Bravo, bringing them onto the payroll. Alpha became 31 Battalion (31Bn), nicknamed the Bushman Battalion, while Bravo became 32 Battalion (32Bn), nicknamed the Buffalo Battalion for its new buffalo-head logo.

Three-Two’s “Buffalo Soldiers” would become the era’s most famous fast-raiding light infantrymen. Apart from former FNLA guerrillas such as Kioto’s men, the battalion also absorbed Angolan refugees, Unita defectors and Angolan migrant labourers, particularly miners, who had been trapped in South Africa or South West by the collapse of diplomatic relations with Angola. With the black FNLA commandantes all initially reduced to sergeants, white South African officers and foreign mercenaries rounded out its leadership.

They established forward operating bases at Omauni on the border between Ovamboland and Kavangoland and at Charlie November further west, and a counterinsurgency school in Caprivi called Dodge City as it was quirkily designed like a Western film set, and made life hell for the Namibian Swapo guerrillas gathering in bush camps across the border and attempting to insert themselves into their mother country.

But it was not at all easy, as Swapo adopted the military patronage of their Angolan Marxist allies in Fapla and rapidly developed from a guerrilla force into a largely conventional force that was often better armed than 32Bn and its fellows, and which gave as good as they received.

Yet the enemy was not the only force to inflict punishment on these black Angolans, as a harsh disciplinary regime was implemented under Breytenbach to weld them into such a formidable fighting force that their enemies called them Os Terríveis, The Terrible Ones.

Lennart Bolliger writes in his book Apartheid’s Black Soldiers (2021) that “from 32 Battalion’s inception, officers strictly and often brutally enforced discipline with the objective of ‘civilising’ Black soldiers and forming them into a cohesive fighting unit”.

Some Bravo/32Bn veterans told him their black non-commissioned officers (NCOs) came up with the idea of lashing troops with a sjambok, a rawhide whip, for infractions such as alcohol abuse, black-market dealings or entering the married section of Buffalo base as a single man. “In the words of one former soldier, life in 32 Battalion ‘was a life in slavery and bondage’.”

Disciplinary whippings, which ranged from 10 to 25 and reportedly even 50 lashes, took place with the unit commander watching and, astonishingly, Bolliger writes, “The punishment was also frequently extended to civilians associated with the unit, such as soldiers’ wives accused of adultery”, perceived as a destabilising factor. The whipped often passed out from the pain and had to be hospitalised afterwards.

While some unit veterans “felt that the violence and the mode of masculinity it enforced ‘worked’ in the sense that it ‘drove fear out’ of them”, others felt emasculated and degraded by the whippings (it is worth noting that the apartheid civilian Criminal Procedure Act of 1977 provided for corporal punishment for males under 29 only, and then only a maximum of seven lashes with a cane).

Executions

Chillingly, the officers illiberally interpreted Article 4 of the SADF Military Disciplinary code, which provided for execution for treason to cover lesser offences such as “desertion or retreat in battle to stealing or refusing an order.… In the first years of the unit’s existence, an unknown number of soldiers were executed…. According to a White former commander, White leaders and some of the Black platoon sergeants carried out the executions.”

Article 4 was abolished only in late 1977, so these drum-head field executions must have taken place in the two years between late 1975 and late 1977 and, Bolliger stresses, “were explicitly aimed to enforce fighting discipline among troops”.

Against that dark backdrop, the question of relations between white 32 Battalion officers and its black NCOs and troops looms large. One bitter senior black 32Bn soldier recalled for historian Piet Nortje in his book The Terrible Ones (2012): “The high ranks, the officers, were all racists, because they were part of the regime. We had to work for them, fight for them…. If you tried to run away and got caught, you were killed.”

But another black soldier told Bolliger: “During the war there was no colour. There was no Black, there was no White. We ate in the same place, drank from the same mug. We walked together. If the White got hurt, the Black came. When the Black got hurt, the White came…. In the bush there was respect because we were working together.”

Former FNLA commandante turned 32Bn NCO Tshisukila Tukayula “TT” De Abreu was more cautious: “It took a long time before they started to trust us. We did many operations and a few years more of training. We did a good job and we killed many people. They started to like us.”

De Abreu was one of the handful of black 32Bn soldiers who became officers, achieving the rank of captain, and later writing his own memoir, The Soviet MPLA Virus in Southern Africa (2024); Kioto meanwhile only attained the rank of staff sergeant.

By the end of the Border War in Angola in 1988, 32 Battalion, augmented with Ratel infantry fighting vehicles and artillery, had become a combat-hardened motorised infantry battalion, with its own reconnaissance wing, and 11 battle-honours on its unit colours.

Three-Two’s roll of honour for those killed in action would eventually number 136, excluding the about 100 killed while it was still Battle Group Bravo, about whom Breytenbach wrote in his memoir The Buffalo Soldiers (2002): “They lie in unmarked graves — if they were buried at all — out in the Angolan bush. They are the unknown soldiers of our time.”

The dawn of democracy in Namibia saw Three-Two withdrawn with the rest of the SADF to South Africa. But an ill-considered peacekeeping deployment of the battalion to Phola Park on the East Rand in 1992 added fuel to the fire of ANC distrust of the unit, as it produced rumours of mass rapes by the soldiers. Though these were determined by a commission of inquiry to be untrue, the ANC brought pressure to bear on the government and, to the dismay of most of its soldiers, Three-Two was disbanded on March 26 1993.

This was unfortunate as its proven multiracial esprit de corps, coherence, and combat efficacy could have laid the foundations, alongside the multiracial Recces, of the new multiracial South African National Defence Force (SANDF) founded the following year.

Instead, those Buffalo Soldiers unable to be absorbed into other units languished in obscurity at the disused asbestos mine of Pomfret in the North West, where they formed a ready pool for recruitment into mercenary private military companies such as Executive Outcomes, becoming a thorn in the side of democratic South Africa’s foreign policy for decades. Notoriously, about 60 of them spent a year in jail after the botched mercenary “Wonga Coup” attempt in Equatorial Guinea in 2004.

With the 50th anniversary of 32 Battalion’s founding last month, it is time to reconsider this most competent yet controversial military unit’s contested place in our history, and its veterans’ impact well into the current era.