A call to expand the canon and consciousness of conscription – Rory du Plessis

A CALL TO EXPAND THE CANON AND CONSCIOUSNESS OF CONSCRIPTION

RORY DU PLESSIS

CONTEXTUAL RESPONSES

Between 1968 and 1993, the apartheid government conscripted over 600,000 white men (Baines 2012:5). Thus, for the majority of the men during this period – including over 50 percent of the male artists featured in the Another Time, Another Place exhibition – conscription was a shared initiation rite into the hegemonic and hypermasculine space of the South African National Defence Force (SANDF). In this space, the conscripts encountered a state apparatus that embodies bell hooks’s term “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy”. To elucidate, during apartheid, the SANDF served to uphold white minority rule, protect capitalism from any inroads from communism, as well as preserve the country’s natural resources and industry for the benefit and wealth of the white population. The space of the SANDF was an interlocking system of domination whereby patriotism and patriarchy, as well as white supremacy were propagated as ruling ideologies and tremendous efforts were made to indoctrinate the corpus of soldiers into accepting and upholding these ideologies.

In post-apartheid South Africa, the conscripted white men are now confronting their experiences of the SANDF. Although conscription was a common rite of passage for white men, their encounters remain unique and each person carries with them distinctive ‘battle scars’. These ‘battle scars’ are professed in the recent “burgeoning of autobiographies, biographies and prosographies, memoirs, as well as fiction and other imaginative literature” (Baines 2019:521; see also Baines 2012). Although these texts aim to offer a personal and unique account, academic investigations have revealed how they share common narrative tropes and structures (Baines 2019; Doherty 2015). For example, in several memoirs of the South African Border War written by conscripts, a common trope is the usage of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) by the authors. By deploying PTSD, Christo Doherty (2015: 25) argues that the authors are provided with a means to speak of their wartime experiences as traumatic memories rather than engaging with the “ethical implications of their own involvement in the war”. In this sense, the public narration of their testimony focuses on their trauma and victimhood, rather than on an acknowledgement of their coerced or voluntary role as perpetrators of violence.

In reviewing social media posts about conscription (see also Baines 2012), I find it to be a perturbing trend how they focus on narratives pertaining to a crisis of masculinity. These narratives underscore how the former conscripts are now suffering an identity crisis as their masculine self-identity has undergone mortifications: their manhood was tied to battlefield combat and patriotism to the apartheid state, both of which are now sources of disrepute and disgrace. The men raise their voice to express how they were used by the apartheid state as rifle-fodder and military pawns, how they are now treated as scapegoats for war crimes perpetrated by the apartheid state, as well as how they have neither a role nor place in the post-apartheid landscape. In sum, they are victims, they are suffering, they are traumatised, and their self-identity is in a state of distress, torment and anguish. These narratives thus present the men as victims and in need of sympathy. Consequently, what goes missing is the opportunity for the men to engage in reconciliatory discourses and acts: to be open to reconceptualising their self-identity to affirmative models of manhood, to seek amends, as well as to promote equality between the sexes and races.

Figure 1: Military barracks at Heidelberg (early 1979). Courtesy of Carol Hardijzer.

Figure 2: National servicemen on the Zambezi River (near Katima Mulilo), 1980. Courtesy of Carol Hardijzer. In terms of art, conscription is a topic that has reached some exposure (see Symons 2019) but it is mainly articulated and explored through themes of power (see Campbell and Froud’s essays in Volume 2 of this catalogue), as well as through a limited canon of conscription imagery – representations of the warfront, militarised mise-en-scènes, as well as panoramas of wreckage and carnage. By artists expanding this canon by searching for new imagery, they will add fresh perspectives to increase our understanding and consciousness of conscription.

One novel imagery resource for artists pertains to the snapshots taken by conscripts during their time of service (see Blake 2011; Hardijer 2019; Symons 2019). These snapshots can be described as “forbidden photography” (Hardijer 2019) as it was illegal for conscripts to have in their possession a camera and they were also prohibited from taking photographs. Thus, the snapshots are a potent visual resource as they present an unsanctioned and personal record of the conscripts’ lived experiences. The snapshots are disarming for the viewer as they capture aspects of conscription that have received very little public exposure and have thus far been overlooked by artists. The viewer therefore is confronted by imagery that challenges their knowledge of conscription.

In the set of snapshots held by a private collector, Carol Hardijer (2019), two photographs grip my gaze. The first photograph depicts a group of servicemen undergoing training (Figure 1). I am struck by the youth of the servicemen. The two figures in the second-row on the left look like young adolescents who have smiles beaming with boyhood jauntiness. I contemplate how their faces changed at various times of their journey. Once they received the call-up papers, did they express delight or trepidation? Did fear and worry seize their faces at some point in

their time of conscription? Another aspect that gains my attention is how the figures are grouped together in tight proximity that may symbolise fraternity and friendship. But, I am also acutely aware that not one of the men’s hands are open to holding one another. The hands of the figures are either clenched in a fist or dangle limply over another’s shoulders. This feature sparks my curiosity and I begin to ponder if a hand open to touching another male body would be taboo in the homosocial setting of the military. In other images from the set of snapshots (see Hardijer 2019), the hands of the conscripts are open to touching rifles, belts and military vehicles but we do not see them in an embrace with another body. I wonder about how the men curated their body language, curbed their expressions of bondedness, as well as limited their emotions in order to exude a machismo and

bravado. Consequently, I consider how the conscripts’ lived experiences may have been scripted by patriarchal ideals of manliness, masculine conduct and how these shaped interpersonal connections.

By drawing upon Ariella Azoulay’s (2008:14) call to introduce “dimensions of time and movement” in the interpretation of photographs, I am no longer able to see or find a fixed meaning in the image. I recognise that the smiles and symbols of fraternity are a single moment captured by the camera but this does not constitute all times and movements encountered by the men during their time at the SANDF. The image thus captures a “single memory” and one that is certainly a “restricted and narrow memory by and large” (Hardijer 2019). The key to contextualising and interpreting the image requires us to engage in dialogue with the ex-conscripts. To this end, to answer my questions about expressions of bondedness, as well as identifying the moments when faces are snared in shock, I need to turn away from the photograph and enter into open communication with the exconscripts, to listen to their stories, and thereby expand my horizon of understanding.

Figure 2 depicts a group of conscripts posing the pictorial maxim of the three wise monkeys: “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil”. The posing was most likely done in jest but I interpret it as an aide-memoir of how silence and censorship shrouded conscription in the apartheid era, as well as how silence and scant awareness of the contradictory experiences of conscription characterises our post-apartheid present. The photograph is an invocation to see, to hear and to speak about conscription and, in doing so, to bring to light the juxtaposition of conscription accounts testified by a multitude of voices. I envisage artists from the Another Time, Another Place exhibition to embrace such photographs as inspiration for their works. In particular, I have in mind Anton Karstel who can produce paintings of the snapshots in his characteristic thick slabs of paint (see Figure 3). The strata of paint layers will make the figures indistinct but will also de- stabilise the viewer from apprehending a fixed meaning. The impasto brushwork and strata of paint will add “intrigue, exegetical depth and interpretive potential” (Pollak & Kuijers 2018: 12) in the work and thus invite the viewer to explore tensions, contradictions and juxtapositions in the identity, experiences and life stories of conscripts. In this way, such artworks will ignite our curiosity; offer an opportunity to constructively engage with the testimonies tendered by the ex-conscripts, to bear witness to the injustices of the past, and pose new questions to expand our consciousness of conscription.

Figure 3: Anton Karstel, ‘n Groepie Swaksigtiges en Twee Blindes wat Rugby Speel, 2010. Oil on canvas. 60 x 70cm. Courtesy of Anton Karstel.

REFERENCES

Azoulay, A. 2008. The Civil Contract of Photography. Translated by R Mazali & R Danieli. New York: Zone Books.

Baines, G. 2012. A virtual community? SADF veterans’ digital memories and dissenting discourses. Afrika-Studiecentrum, Leiden. [O]. Available: https://hdl.handle.net/1887/18413 Accessed 15 November 2021.

Baines, G. 2019. Confessions of a conscript, disclosures of an historian: An autohistoriographical essay. Life Writing 16(4):513-526.

Blake, C. 2011. Troepie Snapshots – A Pictorial Recollection of the South African Border War. Johannesburg: 30° South Publishers.

Doherty, C. 2015. Trauma and the conscript memoirs of the South African ‘Border War’. English in Africa 42(2):25-56.

Hardijzer, C. 2019. Forbidden Images (1960s to 1980s) – Illegal photographs captured by young men conscripted into the South African Military. [O]. Available: www.theheritageportal.co.za/article/forbidden- images-1960s-1980s-illegal-photographs-captured-young- men-conscripted-south Accessed 15 November 2021.

Pollak, L & Kuijers, I. 2018. POST- ERGO ANTI – Anton Karstel’s exploration of South Africa’s cyclical legacy of violence, in the catalogue Anton Karstel 1995 – 2018. [sl]:[sn]:8-26

Symons, S. 2019. ‘Shadows asking an echo to dance’. Navigating ambiguity: how former conscripts (1980-1990) navigate memories of induction into the SADF and whiteness in the post post- apartheid society, PhD Thesis, University of Pretoria, Pretoria.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rory du Plessis is a Senior Lecturer and Programme Coordinator

of Visual Studies at the School of the Arts, University of Pretoria.

He obtained a PhD in Mental Health from the Centre for Ethics

& Philosophy of Health Sciences at the University of Pretoria.

He is the co-editor of the academic journal, Image & Text, as well

as author of Pathways of Patients at the Grahamstown Lunatic

Asylum, 1890 to 1907 (Pretoria University Law Press, 2020).