Contesting Masculinities: Two Border War Memoirs

Abstract

This article begins by discussing what Christo Doherty in his article “Trauma and the Conscript Memoirs of the South African ‘Border War’,” published in English in Africa 42.2 (2015), calls the “explanatory schema” for the analysis of “anti-heroic” conscript memoirs. At the centre of Doherty’s schema is the concept of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), with its satellite concerns of “trauma narratives” and the “victim-perpetrator.” In contrast, my analysis of two memoirs hinges upon a concern with the contest between hegemonic and counter-hegemonic discourses of masculinity that prevailed in the 1980s. The memoirs I focus upon are two that are briefly discussed by Doherty – Rick Andrew’s Buried in the Sky (2001) and Anthony Feinstein’s Battle Scarred: Hidden Costs of the Border War (1998/2011). The aim of the article is to apply to the memoirs an analytic framework that does justice to a wider range of intra- and inter-masculine dynamics than can be accommodated by a trauma-centred analysis.