Special Hearings — Conscription Hearings — 1997-07-23

MR GAGIANO: No I take the point, I take the point, I mentioned it to Wilhelm before, I am not sure about it.

PROF SEEGERS: Okay.  I think I'll stop here.  But that is as much as I would like to say.  My keen concern about this is to get more accurate figures, not necessarily figures that we are now constructing but figures that the SADF and the institutions worked with at that time.  In other words what were their perceptions at that time.
 Let me say one final empirical caution is that not all national servicemen went into the SADF.  A number of them went into the SAP and my figures was less than a thousand but I am not quite sure whether that holds, we'll have to see, and a number of them were placed on secondment to State institutions.  So the SADF is not the only public institution that can tell us about what happened with national service. National service of course fell under the authority of the Department of Manpower and not under the SADF itself which is an interesting feature.  And in fact if you applied for alternative service or conscientious objection or deferment your address was not in the first instance the SADF.  Thank you.

CHAIRPERSON: Thank you very much Annette.  My intuition tells me that people want to ask questions and so we will allow for six minutes question time and then we will have to call the next speaker.  Are there any people who are interested in probing or clarifying questions?  I was quite struck by the point you made about the cadet system, we have - or at least I have always suspected that there was a link but I didn't realise that this was built into the Defence Act.  Can you just talk a bit about this?

PROF SEEGERS: Yes, it's quite an interesting point and I think it's a very important point, is that South Africa's defence legislation remained or stayed remarkably stable during periods between 1912 and 1990.  There were important additions to it but not that, and the framework of it was set in 1912 with the first Defence Act, and the designer of that, the chief designer was Lord Kitchenware the famous or infamous hero of the second Boer War.  And the idea at that point was that South Africa's military needs should serve imperial military needs, defence needs, and the imperial military needs was the fear of a fight, a land war with Germany, which meant that Britain wanted as much manpower from its colonies as it possibly could get.  It didn't want large standing armies in the colonies but it wanted a core structure that was very flexible, that could expand very quickly and contract very quickly.  The country, very interesting, that was very suspicious about that was in the first instance Canada, which knew what Britain might do with colonial manpower which was to use them as they used them eventually in the First World War.
 But the cadet system was to part of that core structure in the South African Colony or South African Dominion at the time to teach people rudimentary military skills that in a time of war could be upgraded within a six week period and then would be for overseas service.  So that remained remarkably similar in fact in South Africa right until the mid-'60's in fact.  And it's quite interesting that that old imperial framework has not been completely abandoned yet.

CHAIRPERSON: The question at the back, Mary Burton, at the back.  Mary Burton is one of the Commissioners in the Western Cape region and is a member of the Human Rights Violations Committee.  Welcome Mary, yes go ahead Mary.

MARY BURTON: ....it's another way in which young people were drawn into the system.  Those who were still at school, young men who were still at school at the age of 16 their names were registered at the school for handing in for eligibility for conscription, so it was at that stage already that young men and their parents had to face the fact that their names were going into the pool from which the conscripts would be drawn.

CHAIRPERSON: Thank you Mary.  Pamela Reynolds and the gentleman, if you could please say who you are, the proceedings are being recorded, if you don't mind, you don't have to but we would appreciate it if you can.  I would like the interpreters to Xhosa/English, English/Xhosa interpreters to please assist and people who would like to get the Xhosa interpretation can use the headphones.  Pamela Reynolds please.

MS REYNOLDS: My name has been said, Pamela Reynolds.  May I ask Annette please what influence those people in the small upstairs rooms gathered over the eighties for example, wonderful, very interesting facts about the larger groupings of people, but one presumes there are those powerful influences and how did they gather and towards what end was that gathering of resistance I suppose amongst conscripts happening?

CHAIRPERSON: Professor Seegers.