‘Blacks can Win Everything, but the Army’: The ‘Transformation’ of the South African Military between 1994 and 2004

Abstract

Analyses of military transformation in South Africa have been preoccupied with the numerical, technological and organisational superiority of the South African Defence Force (SADF) and how all these shaped the outcomes of the process. The critical shortcoming of existing analyses is to locate the process of military transformation in the context of a transition from apartheid to democracy. The transition process involved many explicit and implicit compromises. On the military front, there was an agreement that there would be no purge of security forces to pursue human rights abuses. Furthermore, instead of creating a new defence force, the SADF was used as a base on which to build the South African National Defence Force (SANDF). This meant that the SADF would absorb other armed forces to form a new national defence force. However, the superiority of the SADF is not adequate to explain its absorption of the other armed forces. It is to the compromises that characterised South Africa's transition process that we should look if we are to explain the domination of the SADF. The African National Congress (ANC) made several military compromises in order to attain political power with the assumption that gaining political power would enable it to take control of the military. While necessary for the attainment of political power, these compromises led to tensions in the SANDF and threatened the stability of the new national defence force.