Can we talk about South African mercenaries...

Can we talk about South African mercenaries? I just read about how 50 and 60 year old Afrikaan mercs BTFO of Boko Haram in Nigeria back in 2015 and I want all the info on them. Books or articles or docs, whatever.

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aparently many south africans moved to Israel and enjoy that army. I don't know too much on South Africa and the Afrikaans but i love their language and culture desu

thx for the doc btw looking it up

that pic is a comic based on an actual PMC called Executive Outcomes which was established by a south african former colonel I believe. To be honest, this all started when I read a review of Neil Blomkamps movies and it made a remark about how south africans are only good at two things. Bureaucracy and Mercenaries.

oh haha i looked it up and got a lot of docs that i'm watching live, well gonna look up the comic too then!

I am reading a book about mercs that covers quite a bit of what the South Africans and others did in Africa in the 20th and into the 21st century. It's called War Dogs. Was written by a correspondent that spent a lot of time in the area. A lot of it is devoted to a South African helicopter pilot who has been involved all over the area. I would recommend it.

whos the author? theres a bajillion different books called war dogs and I cant find the specific one

I found an article on the subject but the fucking writers cant stop going on about how "da evil white man is racis!!"
its fucking tiring and completely unrelated to what the article is even about.

South African here. I have a friend who's almost 30 in the special forces and pretty highly trained, with combat experience in Congo with the SANDF under the UN, and he's been offered what amount to mercenary contracts a few times, usually in training roles, but occasionally more active stuff. He's never taken them, but others in his unit have, so it's not just the ouballies from the Bush War.
The modern South African military is a joke, but it still probably has a good decade or so of producing top-tier recon and anti-guerrilla soldiers, and that is internationally recognised among people looking for security personnel.
I just hope that the old guys, the ones with the real experience, get a chance to pass that on to the new guys before they're gone. Executive Outcomes was probably one of South Africa's best exports ever, and it's a damn shame that it and its kind are being stamped out.

Which is curious, by the way. I honestly don't know why South Africa in particularly has taken such a hard stance against mercs. Properly regulated and taxed, the establishment of a mercenary industry could have been a significantly productive part of the economy, particularly considering the sheer amount of in-demand specialist knowledge and training floating around outside of the army after 1994. If history shows us one thing about modern war, it's that barely anyone knows how to deal with guerillas.

Speaking of, the friend I mentioned is of the opinion that the UN is not just inept but actively takes measures to ensure that its presence continues to be required. He compared it to putting a muzzle on an attack dog: his squad will be in the field and receive fire. They locate the source and begin returning fire, but then the attackers cease fire. Under the UN's rules of engagement they are no longer allowed to fire on their assailants. They are also not allowed to deviate from their original route to locate and destroy the source of the threat.

Eeben Barlow, the founder of executive outcomes, has said the same thing about the UN and western powers and their treatment of Africa. EO was also the one who first suggested South Africa institute laws of regulations on PMCs in the early 90s to.

But I think this goes back to apartheid which is really SA shooting themselves in the foot. Like it or not, South Africa had arguably the best military in Africa at the time, and to just cut that off clean and start from scratch, which is basically what the government is doing, over political reasons is fucking retarded, no matter how much you might hate the previous government. Not only that, but they seem to be doing everything possible to piss them off. So South Africa has pretty much lost its role as big swinging dick of the continent forever I think. Nigeria is on track now to become top dog, and thats in part because they hired these 60 year old bush war veteran mercs to help them fight boko haram instead of trying to arrest them for showing some rural farmer how to fight off terrorist that totally arent supplied by the west at all.

I can't remember the exact figure but in Sierra Leone, the best example of EO being incredibly efficient and professional and bringing stability to a country, they were paid something like $16m total, which is a tiny fraction of what the government has to shell out to keep the UN forces there doing next to nothing. Plus that friend of mine claimed that there was almost-barefaced correspondence between several of the higher-up UN officers he was under and the generals of the forces he was fighting.

The UN is some shady shit, in other words.

As to South Africa shooting itself in the foot, yeah that seems to be a prominent feature of ANC rule to be honest. If it looks good, do it. Consequences are a colonial construct. But it is a damn shame that "mercenary" is a dirty word when there is nothing inherently evil about the profession, particularly when mercs of the nature that SA exports tend to bring professionalism and stability.

I can't picture Nigeria as the top dog though. Boer culture is geared around bushcraft and defense of the land, and I firmly believe South African spec ops and mercs will still be the best available in Africa for decades to come, whereas Nigeria vs Boko Haram solidly demonstrates Nigeria's comparability with Iraq in that it's military culture is without foundation or conviction.