Vietnam Analogies and Metaphors: The Cultural Codification of South Africa's Border War

Abstract

Figures of speech function as linguistic devices of standardisation and cultural codification. Vietnam analogies and metaphors have been widely invoked with respect to South Africa’s Border War. This article seeks to understand why this is so by way of an analysis of the parallels between the conflicts in Southeast Asia and southern Africa. It suggests that Vietnam has become a template for representing southern Africa’s conflicts. This is not necessarily a consciously derivative process. Rather, it is in keeping with the way in which the re-imagining and memories of wars tends to replicate one another even though they might be geographically and temporally remote. It is my argument that the cultural memory of past wars shape present war experience to a remarkable degree and that the representation of the Border War has been influenced by the global diffusion of American culture.