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Abstract

This article provides a series of insights into the structures and scaffolding of militarising White South African adolescents during the 1980s, including the processes of militarisation from childhood up until induction into the former South African Defence Force. Although this article traces the process and presents personal accounts of militarised childhoods, it ultimately questions how these indeterminate memories attempt to navigate a contested present, namely, a post-apartheid space.

Keywords

Apartheid conscription counter-memory masculinities memory militarisation nostalgia South African Defence Force Whiteness

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‘Casting Shadows’: Militarised boyhoods in apartheid South Africa during the 1980s

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