Review: Archie Henderson

Command – A soldier’s journey in the African battlespace, by Brigadier-General Peter Sereko, with Antonio Garcia (Tafelberg/Jonathan Ball Publishers)

Peter Sereko has had an extraordinary life as a soldier, and Antonio Garcia has helped guide him through that life – and the minefield of writing a biography.

It has helped that both men were soldiers, Sereko rising to the rank of general and Garcia a former combat engineer who left the base for academia.

Garcia is well established as a military historian and author, with books on South Africa’s peacekeeping roles on the continent, the Afrikaner rebellion of 1914/15 and Union Defence Force’s victory over Germany in the early years of World War 1.

Command is Sereko’s first book, one in which his 38-year military career provides a rich vein of material, especially for a young black man joining an apartheid army. But by 1986, when he signed up, it was an army aware of the failings of National Party policy and already beginning to re-think its role in what would become the new South Africa.

Sereko was identified as a potential leader and sent on a junior leader’s course at the Infantry School in Oudtshoorn where future officers were trained.

First there were old prejudices to overcome. As the only black man in the bungalow, he was assigned a cubicle, separate from his white colleagues. It was not the first time he would experience such treatment: on another occasion, a white NCO refused him entry to an army mess.

The two men would meet again, with roles reversed and Sereko now outranking the bigot. In a spirit of reconciliation that shines through in his story, Sereko and the NCO came to a mutual understanding that matters would not be as before.

Sereko downplays the humiliations of experiencing a dying apartheid regime; instead he tells the stories that inevitably come with a soldier rising through the ranks.

Every soldier has a story – and every officer of general rank has many more stories than the ordinary troep. The reason is that generals tend to accumulate a lot of them because of how their careers are built.

Reaching general officer rank usually takes 20 to 30 years. That means decades of postings, deployments, schools, and jobs – plenty of time to rack up experiences.

Officers on a path to general rank are also rotated deliberately through very different roles – combat units, staff jobs, joint commands, teaching posts – so they build broad experience. Each assignment is a new setting with new people and new problems: combat, crisis response, and major decisions all producing memorable stories.

Command also means dealing with soldiers, other officers, foreign counterparts and – God forbid – politicians journalists; a huge cast of characters, fertile ground for anecdotes, and also an appropriate title for a book.

Storytelling is part of the job. Military culture runs on oral tradition – mentoring junior officers, giving speeches, writing memoirs, giving orders. Generals are expected to reflect on and pass down what they’ve learned. They get a lot of practice turning experience into narrative.

With his book, Sereko has not only done the South African military a service, but also the reading public. He has told a story that in some ways is unique: many soldiers, from the liberation movements to the old SADF, have spoken or written about their experiences in South Africa’s transition to democracy, but those have usually been from the bottom up; Sereko’s is from the top down.

Of course it has elements of bottom up: a kid of Setswana heritage, from a Christian family in Galeshewe, Kimberley, into the army – against the wishes of his father, who had ambitions of his son becoming a teacher.

He went from rifleman to NCO, to the officer class – from frontline fighting on the Yati Strip in what is now Namibia against Swapo and the Cubans, to a different kind of combat against rival political groups ahead of democratic elections, to a peacekeeping-shooting war in the Democratic Republic of Congo (leading from front), to commanding the new Light Modern Brigade, to a challenge only an army can provide: combining military instruction with academic rigour – and an MA and a PhD, so achieving that teacher status his father had always hoped for his son.