TRC Final Report

Volume 4

Chapter 9

Subsection 5

White youth

40 White youth lived in an altogether different reality. According to Mr Pierre Reynolds of the Democratic Party (DP) Youth:

Classified white under the apartheid regime, I and my peers, enjoyed privileges because of the colour of our skin. We were born with and we were brought up with racist prejudices ... we enjoyed the benefits of apartheid.

41 Mr Reynolds attributed the lack of white youth resistance to the system of patriarchy, whereby the young were kept under control by their elders, their cultures, institutions and state systems.

42 Young white males were also conscripted into the defence forces.⁸ Through government control of the national media and strategies such as police visits to white schools, young white people were subjected to propaganda. Fear of the ‘other’ was implanted in children under the guise of an imminent ‘Communist’ plot, articulated through slogans such as ‘total onslaught’. All this contributed to a situation in which most white males concluded that it was their obligation to serve in the armed services.

43 White children were offered few alternatives to being part of the white elite. Group Areas and other legislation effectively segregated them from their less privileged peers. They had virtually no contact with black children and lived largely in the racially protected environments of school, family and church. Conflict and political volatility were seen as a threat to the deliberately narrow world order with which they were familiar. White conscripts were used to uphold the status quo, with violence if necessary.

44 The militarisation of young white boys began at an early age with systems like the cadets, through which they were taught basic military discipline and skills. Indoctrination, coupled with widespread racist state propaganda, was largely effective in preventing widespread resistance to enforced conscription. Again, according to Mr Reynolds:

In the 1980s, I and my contemporaries - my peers - were at the mercy of a system designed to socialise and condition us into the ranks of perpetrators of apartheid. We were told the army would turn us into men. It was the white man’s circumcision school.

45 Some white youth who fought in defence of a white South Africa were convinced by their military and political masters that both their own suffering and the acts of violence committed in the process were undertaken for a just cause. Others faced the dilemma of being conscripted to fight a war in which they did not necessarily believe. A minority became conscientious objectors, condemned as traitors to the nation and faced with the choice of leaving the country or being sentenced to six years’ imprisonment.

46 Some white youth joined the struggle against apartheid through membership of and participation in resistance organisations such as the End Conscription Campaign (ECC)⁹, student movements, such as the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS) or by joining political organisations. Like other activists, they became targets of state violence.