Academic Research

This research project focuses on the history of one military community that formed around the so-called 32 “Buffalo” Battalion of the apartheid-era South African Defence Force (SADF). Significantly, this community included not only white South African officers and black Angolan soldiers but also roughly 3,000 civilians, mostly Angolan women and children. Building on feminist research and drawing on written and oral sources, the research project contributes to current debates on refugee history, civil-military relations, the making of the colonial state, and the politics of gender in anti-colonial struggles.