The South African Border War, also known as the Namibian War of Independence, and sometimes denoted in South Africa as the Angolan Bush War, was a largely asymmetric conflict that occurred in Namibia (then South West Africa), Zambia, and Angola from 26 August 1966 to 21 March 1990. It was fought between the South African Defence Force (SADF) and the People's Liberation Army of Namibia (PLAN), an armed wing of the South West African People's Organisation (SWAPO). The South African Border War was closely intertwined with the Angolan Civil War.
Following several years of unsuccessful petitioning through the United Nations and the International Court of Justice for Namibian independence from South Africa, SWAPO formed the PLAN in 1962 with material assistance from the Soviet Union and sympathetic African states such as Tanzania, Ghana, and Algeria. Fighting broke out between PLAN and the South African security forces in August 1966. Between 1975 and 1988, the SADF staged massive conventional raids into Angola and Zambia to eliminate PLAN's forward operating bases. It also deployed specialist counter-insurgency units such as Koevoet and 32 Battalion, trained to carry out external reconnaissance and track guerrilla movements.
South African tactics became increasingly aggressive as the conflict progressed. The SADF's incursions produced Angolan casualties and occasionally resulted in severe collateral damage to economic installations regarded as vital to the Angolan economy. Ostensibly to stop these raids, but also to disrupt the growing alliance between the SADF and the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), which the former was arming with captured PLAN equipment, the Soviet Union backed the People's Armed Forces of Liberation of Angola (FAPLA) through a large contingent of military advisers, along with up to four billion dollars' worth of modern defence technology in the 1980s. Beginning in 1984, regular Angolan units under Soviet command were confident enough to confront the SADF. Their positions were also bolstered by thousands of Cuban troops. The state of war between South Africa and Angola briefly ended with the short-lived Lusaka Accords, but resumed in August 1985 as both PLAN and UNITA took advantage of the ceasefire to intensify their own guerrilla activity, leading to a renewed phase of FAPLA combat operations culminating in the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale. The South African Border War was virtually ended by the Tripartite Accord, mediated by the United States, which committed to a withdrawal of Cuban and South African military personnel from Angola and South West Africa, respectively. PLAN launched its final guerrilla campaign in April 1989. South West Africa received formal independence as the Republic of Namibia a year later, on 21 March 1990.
Despite being largely fought in neighbouring states, the South African Border War had a significant cultural and political impact on South African society. The country's apartheid government devoted considerable effort towards presenting the war as part of a containment programme against regional Soviet expansionism and used it to stoke public anti-communist sentiment. It remains an integral theme in contemporary South African literature at large and Afrikaans-language works in particular, having given rise to a unique genre known as grensliteratuur (directly translated "border literature").
Various names have been applied to the undeclared conflict waged by South Africa in Angola and Namibia (then South West Africa) from the mid 1960s to the late 1980s. The term "South African Border War" has typically denoted the military campaign launched by the People's Liberation Army of Namibia (PLAN), which took the form of sabotage and rural insurgency, as well as the external raids launched by South African troops on suspected PLAN bases inside Angola or Zambia. These occasionally provoked conventional engagements with the Zambian National Defence Force (ZNDF) and the People's Armed Forces of Liberation of Angola (FAPLA). The strategic situation was further complicated by the fact that South Africa occupied large swathes of Angola for extended periods in support of the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), making the "Border War" an increasingly inseparable conflict from the parallel Angolan Civil War.
"Border War" entered public discourse in South Africa during the late 1970s; the term was adopted thereafter by the country's ruling National Party. Due to the covert nature of most South African Defence Force (SADF) operations inside Angola, the term was favoured as a means of omitting any reference to engagements on foreign soil. Where tactical aspects of various engagements were discussed, some contemporary historians simply identified the conflict as the "bush war".
The so-called "border war" of the 1970s and 1980s was not actually a war at all by classic standards. At the same time it eludes exact definitions. The core of it was a protracted insurgency in South West Africa, later South-West Africa/Namibia and still later Namibia. At the same time it was characterised by the periodical involvement of the SADF in the long civil war taking place in neighbouring Angola, because the two conflicts could not be separated from one another.
The South West African People's Organisation (SWAPO) has described the South African Border War as the Namibian War of National Liberation and the Namibian Liberation Struggle. In the Namibian context, it is also commonly referred to as the Namibian War of Independence. However, these terms have been criticised for ignoring the wider regional implications of the war and the fact that most of the fighting took place in countries other than Namibia.
Namibia was governed as German South West Africa, a colony of the German Empire, until World War I, when it was invaded and occupied by Allied forces under General Louis Botha. Following the Armistice of 11 November 1918, a mandate system was imposed by the League of Nations to govern African and Asian territories held by Germany and the Ottoman Empire prior to the war. The mandate system was formed as a compromise between those who advocated an Allied annexation of former German and Turkish territories, and another proposal put forward by those who wished to grant the territories to an international trusteeship until they could govern themselves.
All former German and Turkish territories were classified into three types of mandates – Class "A" mandates, predominantly in the Middle East; Class "B" mandates, which encompassed central Africa; and Class "C" mandates, which were reserved for the most sparsely populated or least developed German colonies: South West Africa, German New Guinea, and the Pacific islands.
Owing to their small size, geographic remoteness, low population density, or physical contiguity to the mandatory power itself, Class "C" mandates could be administered as integral provinces of the countries to which they were entrusted. Nevertheless, the bestowal of a mandate by the League of Nations did not confer full sovereignty, only the responsibility of administering it. In principle, mandating countries were only supposed to hold these former colonies "in trust" for their inhabitants, until they were sufficiently prepared for their own self-determination. Under these terms, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand were granted the German Pacific islands, and the Union of South Africa received South West Africa.
It soon became apparent the South African government had interpreted the mandate as a veiled annexation. In September 1922, South African Prime Minister Jan Smuts testified before the League of Nations Mandate Commission that South West Africa was being fully incorporated into the Union and should be regarded, for all practical purposes, as a fifth province of South Africa. According to Smuts, this constituted "annexation in all but in name".
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the League of Nations complained that of all the mandatory powers South Africa was the most delinquent with regards to observing the terms of its mandate. The Mandate Commission vetoed a number of ambitious South African policy decisions, such as proposals to nationalise South West African railways or alter the preexisting borders. Sharp criticism was also leveled at South Africa's disproportionate spending on the local white population, which the former defended as obligatory since white South West Africans were taxed the heaviest. The League adopted the argument that no one segment of any mandate's population was entitled to favourable treatment over another, and the terms under which the mandate had been granted made no provision for special obligation towards whites. It pointed out that there was little evidence of progress being made towards political self-determination. Just prior to World War II, South Africa and the League remained at an impasse over this dispute.