No abstract

Like most South African whites the soldiers and police officers who served under apartheid now admit that non‐racial democracy is a more legitimate system. How then can they account for their participation in the war or in the repression when they try to dissociate themselves from a regime described as unjust and that oppressed blacks? The former soldiers and police officers reject any personal responsibility in their work during apartheid. This distancing strategy, however, makes expressing a collective identity problematic. At the same time, they are not slow to show pride in their work. In order to preserve their self‐esteem they attempt to reconcile contradictory positions, pleading not guilty to the charges of supporting apartheid while claiming personal merit for having participated in the war undertaken by the regime. Their tour de force consists in assuming responsibility for the conflict in which they participated while dissociating themselves from its ideological implications. Their discourse is therefore profoundly ambivalent: it combines conservative or even reactionary analyses with an acceptation of the new system and adherence to the values conveyed by the new democracy, or even an appropriation of the South African miracle itself.

No abstract

This paper is intended to compare the subjective experiences of two sets of veterans, one having taken part in the ANC’s struggle against apartheid (1980–1990) and the other having joined the Fatah uprisings of 1987 against Israel. The apartheid system has been entirely dismantled and the ANC now governs South Africa. The Palestinians, by contrast, remain under Israeli control, and the Palestinian Liberation Organisation has failed to create an independent Palestinian state. And yet, surprisingly, ANC activists tend to see themselves as victims, while those of Fatah usually see themselves as heroes. I shall offer the hypothesis that the heroization or victimization of self is drawn from a collective political imagination and is related to the construction of self‐esteem.