The border war is resurfacing everywhere. In so many ways, Blake said, “it’s all resurfacing now”. It became a runaway bestseller.Īnd Troepie was just the beginning. Blake took their recollections and compiled them into Troepie: From Call-ups to Camps, a book of first-hand accounts of the day-to-day drama and drudgery of fighting for apartheid South Africa. But others “would come back day after day”, Blake said. He began asking white male browsers in the shop who looked the right age: “Did you do your national service?” If they said yes, he would pull out a tape recorder and invite them to speak.Ī few were reluctant. Like the other middle-aged white men stumbling into the Africa Star to find their lost Pro Patrias, Blake had also recently begun to feel a growing desire to revisit his soldier days. It’s only now that my national service has come back to me.” So Blake, an artist by training, spent a few months drawing official portraits of officers and then “it was over”, he said. The nation that had drafted him obviously would not be around much longer. Three years earlier, in 1989, the South African government had withdrawn from Namibia and Angola. (David Harrison, M&G)īut he soon found himself feeling like a dupe. Surrounded by memories: Cameron Blake, owner of Africa Star in Cape Town, says his service in the South African Defence Force has only now come back to him. He had done his national service, too, and had also long deleted it from his memory.īlake is a ringer for a younger Johnny Clegg, his full cheeks and mirthful eyes belying his 42 years, and he must have looked that much more like a fledgling when he reported to his military intake base for duty in 1992. These stories struck a chord with him, Blake told me one afternoon in his merrily cluttered shop as he fingered a Pro Patria he had taken out of a cardboard box. But now, suddenly, 20 years later, he was starting to feel that he wanted his Pro Patria back. He supported the new South Africa he wanted to move on. It had not seemed appropriate to hold on to a token reminding him of the years he had devoted to a cause that had then so ignominiously collapsed. But he had thrown away his own Pro Patria during the time of South Africa’s democratic transition in 1994. He was a veteran, such a customer would explain. He would approach Blake standing behind the display counter and ask for one thing: a Pro Patria, the blue-and-gold medal every South African soldier received in exchange for doing his mandatory national service during the border war in Namibia and Angola that the government pursued to bulwark apartheid in the 1970s and 1980s. He would be in his 40s or 50s, white and clearly not a collector. But soon, in the mid-2000s, a new and intriguing kind of customer began to arrive.
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