The South African Army is the army of South Africa, first formed after the Union of South Africa was created in 1910. The current commander of the South African Army is Lt. General Solly Shoke.
The South African military evolved within the tradition of frontier warfare fought by commando forces, reinforced by the Afrikaners' historical distrust of large standing armies. It then fought as part of the wider British effort in World War II, but afterwards was cut off from its long-standing Commonwealth ties with the introduction of apartheid in South Africa after 1948. The apartheid policy led to friction with neighbouring states that helped to spark the border wars in South West Africa, now Namibia, from 1966. The role of the Army was fundamentally changed by the upheavals of the early 1990s and after 1994 the Army became part of the new South African National Defence Force. It is now becoming increasingly involved in peacekeeping efforts in southern Africa, often as part of wider African Union operations.
Read more about South African Army: History, Personnel, Plans
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Famous quotes containing the words army, south and/or african:
“Twenty or thirty years ago, in the army, we had a lot of obscure adventures, and years later we tell them at parties, and suddenly we realize that those two very difficult years of our lives have become lumped together into a few episodes that have lodged in our memory in a standardized form, and are always told in a standardized way, in the same words. But in fact that lump of memories has nothing whatsoever to do with our experience of those two years in the army and what it has made of us.”
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And Sheridan twenty miles away.”
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“The white man regards the universe as a gigantic machine hurtling through time and space to its final destruction: individuals in it are but tiny organisms with private lives that lead to private deaths: personal power, success and fame are the absolute measures of values, the things to live for. This outlook on life divides the universe into a host of individual little entities which cannot help being in constant conflict thereby hastening the approach of the hour of their final destruction.”
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