Veterans of the liberation struggle, mostly Black men and women, also charge that their benefits are unequal to their white counterparts who formed part of the apartheid government’s army.
Lindiwe Zulu, South Africa’s minister of social development, who also fought the apartheid regime, said, “We need to scale up the support that government needs to give to people that gave up their lives for the struggle, to people who feel like they are neglected.”
In 2011, South Africa passed a law that recognized all former combatants of any military organization as veterans, and established the Department of Military Veterans, which among its other responsibilities, was supposed to address the plight of former freedom fighters. For many, it did little to address the vacuum left by the disbandment of their units at the end of apartheid.
“We took them to the camps and never taught them anything apart from an AK-47,” said Maj. Gen. Keith Mokoape, who was responsible for the training and recruitment of dozens of fighters.
Mr. Kgogo’s experience was typical. As a teenager, he walked much of the way to neighboring Botswana to join the armed resistance, sleeping in the bush and training in threadbare camps.
The African National Congress, known as the A.N.C., sent him and others to Cuba, the Soviet Union and North Korea, to learn the military expertise of its Cold War allies. Some sneaked back into South Africa and bombed police stations, railway lines, and, in 1979, a state-run oil refinery. They fought the all-white South African army in cross-border raids and proxy wars around southern Africa.
But Mr. Kgogo and others returned with little more than traumatic stories, which have been forgotten by a post-apartheid South Africa fighting new battles, like unemployment and corruption.
Source : Nytimes
