Comrades and child soldiers in South Africa, 1984-1994

Abstract

Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s the horror of child soldiers captured the attention of NGOs and university-based scholars. Literature about African child soldiers proliferated. It became clear that children between 10 and 18 years old were systematically recruited or forced into armies in numerous civil conflicts. Children and early adolescents were victims and perpetrators of appalling atrocities directed at civilians. There were many other examples in Africa, but Sierra Leone, Liberia, Angola, Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan and Uganda were usually singled out as the largest scale and most egregious cases. South Africa was rarely, if ever, included in these discussions. Yet an argument can be made to view the South African comrade movement from the mid-1980s until 1994, though distinctive in many ways, through the lens of the African child soldier literature. While the child soldier pattern is perhaps most applicable to the extremely violent transition phase from 1990 until 1994, it is worth reviewing the comrade movement from its origins in about 1984. This paper attempts to bring literature on child soldiers in Africa into the conversation with South African research (from the disciplines of history, anthropology and social psychology on the comrade movement. I begin with an overview of some of the key features of the child soldier phenomenon. I follow this by examining the South African comrade movement in relation to these features. I ask whether the comrades were distinctive and whether it is useful to view them as part of the broader trend of child soldiering in Africa in the 1980s and 1990s.