I was a reluctant soldier, and a very bad one. I spent several months in 1979 in Oshakati, the Owambo capital, and one of the things I learnt there was that dagga did a lot to smooth the rough edges that came with the sandbagged drudgery of national service.
One Saturday morning, quite stoned, I left the base and strolled off to the post office. It was a risky thing to do. Firstly, the place was out of bounds to conscripts, something to do with the public phones. There was a great fear that, first chance we got, we'd be telling our parents and girlfriends all sorts of details about troop movements and the next moment the Cubans would be in Pretoria.
What got me into trouble, though, was the Hawaiian shirt. The hibiscus print had a little louche something and offset the faded brown fatigue trousers and open sandals rather well, I thought.
Anyway, leaving the post office, a toppie in a safari suit stopped to chat with me. He seemed a bit too friendly though, and I was a little worried when he followed me at a distance as I drifted back to the base. It turned out he wasn't some sort of sex pest, as I feared, but the battalion commander, which was much worse.
Later, during punishment drill -- dragging a gun carriage around the place for the afternoon -- it dawned on me that when I'd been asked, back at the post office, where I was from, the toppie meant which military unit -- and not, it seemed, my home town. Little wonder, then, that he didn't press me for details on the bright lights and splendid attractions of Randburg.
I mention all this because, unlike the regulars here at the Mahogany Ridge, I was not that outraged when the SA Air Force's Lieutenant-Colonel Ruth Ndayi was photographed shopping in a Pretoria mall earlier this year wearing her military uniform but with shocking pink slippers.
The picture quickly went viral, embarrassing the air force and provoking widespread condemnation from military types. It also generated a great deal of stoutist comment about Ndayi's size. This was problematic -- fat remains an unconquered prejudice and it is an uncaring society that would begrudge a person carrying such enormous baggage the simple pleasure of comfortable footwear.
This week the Defence Minister, Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula, revealed that Ndayi had now been reprimanded and the slippers found their way back into the news alongside the incident in which an SAAF pilot "borrowed" a military aircraft to nip across the border to Botswana without permission to visit a friend at Gaborone airport as further evidence that standards were slipping somewhat in the air force.
Perhaps Mapisa-Nqakula should rather address concerns that SANDF members are increasingly overweight. I have noticed this in recent months, and I wonder if it wasn't all a cunning plan to avoid active duty. Like in the eastern parts of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, let's say.
SANDF soldiers have been in the DRC since April 1999, making this one of our military's longest continuous deployments. However, matters there have now taken a turn for the worst, and it would appear our troops have ample reason to be classified as too fat for the frontline -- particularly as SANDF members have been wounded in the fighting between the M23 rebel group, which recently captured the town of Goma, and President Laurent Kabila's troops.
At a briefing in Pretoria on this week, Chief of Joint Operations, Lieutenant-General Derrick Mgwebi, revealed that SANDF engineers, working with UN's mission in the DRC, had been instructed to keep Goma's airport open to ensure that vital military and civilian supplies could be flown in. One priority need, said Mgwebi, was ammunition. Which sounds rather ominous, doesn't it?
The UN mission has 1 244 SANDF troops under its command. This includes an infantry battalion, the engineers, SAAF personnel with helicopters, specialist officers and military observers. Among their tasks are the protection of bases, guard and escort duties, reconnaissance and patrols -- in a region that is host to Africa's worst and most enduring conflict. Our troops are in other African hotspots as well, like Sudan where, according to Mgwebi, they are routinely ambushed.
Another high-ranking officer, Major-General Mbulelo Phako, told the briefing that it was in the interests of all South Africans to get involved in the "stabilising" of the continent and that, as Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma now headed up the African Union Commission, there was already pressure on the country to increase that involvement.
This is bad news for the average troopie, and I fear that dagga may not be of much help.
This article first appeared in The Weekend Argus.
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