Ordinary Springboks: White Servicemen and Social Justice in South Africa, 1939-1961

'Springbok' was a term used to describe the 200,000 white South African men who volunteered to serve during the Second World War. Volunteers developed bonds of comradeship, and rites of passage were expressed in the idiom of 'the front'. Without exception, volunteers nurtured hopes for some form of post-war 'social justice'. Neil Roos provides a fresh approach in considering comradeship and social justice ethnographically, as a way of focusing on ordinary Springboks' expectations and experiences during and after the war. As troops were demobilized, the contradictions of social justice in a colonial society were exposed. A small group of radical white veterans invoked their war experience and traditions of anti-fascism to challenge the very precepts of radicalized South African society. These veterans featured in the struggle against apartheid during the 1950s, and were especially prominent in the shift towards armed resistance to apartheid in 1961. (Routledge)