The night Private Johan Botha died was actually meant to be his last on active service in Afghanistan’s turbulent Helmand province. His battalion, A (Grenadier) Company, was making its way out of the province on orders to push Taliban insurgent forces towards Pakistan. In the morning, another unit, the Grenadier Guards, would take over, allowing Botha and his company to head north to Camp Bastion, the main British base in Helmand, where they would catch the next flight home.
But a midnight ambush changed all that. It was like World War One; A Company was dug into a trench, and a few meters away, on the other side of no man’s land, was the Taliban.
In the darkness, machine gun fire shattered the silence as Taliban fighters launched their attack firing rocket-propelled grenades. The bursts of sand and smoke blinded and trapped the British. Seven men bore the brunt. Botha was one of them. He was wounded but no one could find him. His last words came across another soldier’s radio. He was shouting through the chaos in his heavy Afrikaans accent: “Boss, please don’t leave me.”
Botha was 25 and left a wife and young daughter.
Botha, of the Mercian Regiment (Worcestershire and Sherwood Foresters), was a South African, one of thousands of Africans fighting for the British. He enlisted in Pretoria, as a Commonwealth soldier, in 2005; his tour of duty in Helmand was his first and he carried it out while a South African citizen.
British soldiers from Africa are not new. Infantrymen like Botha have been fighting under the Union Flag for hundreds of years. The two World Wars saw British dominions, like South Africa and Canada, raising their own armies, under British command, fully integrated into the British fighting forces. In World War One, more than 74,000 South Africans fought for the Queen and someone else&#8217;s country.
They are fewer today; about 660 British soldiers are South African – among the African majority of 6,400 Commonwealth fighters, according to Ministry of Defence (MOD) figures. African soldiers from Swaziland to Kenya have taken the Queen’s shilling with large enlistments from Ghana, Gambia and Zimbabwe.
In July last year, the British government suspended direct recruitment from the Commonwealth as part of a bid to cut the Armed Forces by a fifth. That year, it axed more than 5,000 soldiers from the ranks.
Yet, this year, young African men are still knocking at the gates of the British Defence Attache in Pretoria. They are trying to follow in the footsteps of men like Kieran Burke, a South African who joined the colors in 2005 and served with Botha. He says it was a career move.
“I wanted to eventually, once I got military experience, join the UN.”
Burke insists most Africans join for more than a red passport.
“With young guys coming in from Africa, it was a means to an end.”
The men he served with, from the continent, just wanted to be professional soldiers, he says. The British Army was organized, well-equipped and moneyed.
“The South Africans, Ghanaians and Fijians were the cream of the crop [and] we [lose] these guys to a foreign army. In some ways, it’s misplaced,” he says.
Burke tried to join the South African army. He had a Humanities degree but the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) wouldn’t let him enlist.
“I was informed by my own army [that] I was too old, I was 24,” he says.
So, he enlisted with the Royal Gloucestershire, Berkshire and Wiltshire regiment instead and did six months of basic training. He excelled as a private and was in line to train as an officer at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst. But when he was asked to wait, in his rank, for two and half years he felt it was time to leave. He wanted to go into combat as a lieutenant, not a private.
After three months with a regiment, soldiers have to decide whether to leave or to stay. After this window, a four-year contract is signed and leaving the British Army is not an option.
“It was very difficult to get out,” remembers Burke.
But he talked his way out and is now a journalist in South Africa.
Despite his clean escape, Burke and other South Africans who have served, or are serving, in foreign armies may be skirting mercenary law back home. A piece of legislation known as the Regulation of Foreign Military Assistance Act (FMA), passed in 1998, prohibits any South African citizen from engaging in ‘mercenary activity’ both within and outside the Republic. This means South Africans offering services as direct combatants in an international conflict for pay are committing an offense.
There is a way around this. The law can be subverted by placing a request for exemption with the National Conventional Arms Control Committee (NCACC), based at the Department of Defence. But Burke says this was not considered by him or his countrymen who joined the British Army.
“There was no notion that you had to let the South African government know that you were in the British Army. If there was an issue, I was not aware of it,” he says.
Foreign fighters are a huge threat to South Africa’s international interests and obligations. Part of the reason the 1998 Act was drafted was because South Africa had been implicated in major, often scandalous, diplomatic embarrassments with its citizens aiding the overthrow of governments or selling arms to rebel groups across Africa.
The first FMA conviction was Richard Rouget – popularly known as Colonel Sanders – in 2005. He pled guilty to assisting the government of Ivory Coast suppress dissidents three years earlier. Rouget wasn’t born South African; he was a French military veteran who earned his citizenship through naturalization. He admitted to supplying the Ivorian government with military equipment, training and a contingent of South African pilots. The State proved that Rouget and his men were also active combatants during the Ivory Coast conflict. The men were paid €6,000 ($7,500) monthly. In addition, Rouget was paid €340,000 ($430,000) by the Ivorian authorities for military equipment.
Rouget was found guilty and slapped with a R100,000 ($9,000) fine and a suspended sentence of five years. He made an appeal for leniency and was granted a reprieve of R25,000 ($2,200) on his fine. The same year, Mark Thatcher was sentenced, under the same legislation, for his part in an attempted coup in Equatorial Guinea. He walked away with a R3 million ($270,000) fine and a four-year suspended sentence.
Since the FMA became law in South Africa, only a handful of cases have gone to trial. However, it does raise concerns of the legitimacy of soldiers like Botha and Burke doing battle for another nation and fighting wars as proxies.
In many ways, the story of the African foreign legion, stripped bare, is the story of the African migrant, with stars and stripes on.

Going To War For  Money And A Passport

Never judge a colonel by his cover. You wouldn’t blink when you see Mike Dent walking his dog in the shafts of early summer light in the green and sleepy village of Hartlebury, Worcestershire, deep in the English countryside. The village that last saw warriors on the march in 1646 when Oliver Cromwell’s roundheads laid siege to Hartlebury Castle, a few hundred meters from Dent’s back lawn, which  surrendered without a shot being fired by the 160 defenders. More than 368 years later, only heavy trucks driving down country lanes cause a stir and threaten the peace.
Dent fits the scene like a glove. He looks more like a retired country gentleman than a former military advisor to the president of Sierra Leone who travels the trouble spots of Africa.
Sixty-six-year-old Dent was a career soldier in the British Army. He joined the colors in 1979 and rose to the rank of colonel and a seat on the general staff commanding the army. It was this powerful job that took him to the violent chaos of Sierra Leone as the British government attempted to unravel the country’s tight knot of civil war.
“The streets were full of people, no water, nor fuel. The hospitals couldn’t cope. I have never seen so much poverty, anywhere. Then there was the horror of the amputations. It was an eye opener,” says Dent in his sitting room as birds twitter in the green hedgerows overlooking the castle.
In 2000, Dent went to Freetown as the military advisor to the then president, Ahmad Tejan Kabbah, the avuncular former United Nations (UN) civil servant and district commissioner who was the first Muslim to be head of state. President Kabbah was elected in 1996; deposed by a coup in 1997 and restored by ECOMOG troops from West Africa in 1998.
When the British arrived in Freetown, two years later, one of Dent’s unenviable tasks was the rebuilding the shambolic remnants of the army of Sierra Leone.
“We were told there were 16,000 soldiers on the payroll. We went round and verified only 12,200 people. The rest were ghost soldiers that the army was paying money for that other people were collecting. It was total chaos; the army didn’t know where their soldiers were nor who they were. We had to take pictures as proof of who they were. The whole place was riven by a civil war for 10 years, there was no payment system, no pension system nothing. It was the only failed state I had ever seen, everything had collapsed,” he says.
Dent and his brother officers also had to advise the UN on the tricky process of what it calls DDR – disarmament, demobilization and reintegration. Muddy waters, clouded further by the fact that two senior officers on the project, an Indian three-star general and a Nigerian two-star general, detested each other and didn’t talk.
This complicated matters amid the uneasy patchwork of armed groups. There was: the Sierra Leone Army (SLA); the Civil Defence Forces – a bundle of seven secret societies and tribes – the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC), led by the charismatic orator Johnny Paul Koroma, the man who staged the coup in 1997; deserters from the SLA and the Revolutionary United Front, led by Foday Sankoh.
Dent set up a bush camp in Freetown where 5,500 male and female fighters underwent selection and military training.
“It worked quite well, the majority wanted a job and did what they were asked. It was very sad that the people fighting in the war were only doing so for someone who had fed them or gave them money. People from the same family were fighting on different sides.”
In the midst of this difficult time in 2000, civil war reared its ugly head over Freetown.
“This guy threw the door open, came rushing in and said: ‘you have got to get the gunship up, there are thousands marching on Freetown’. The UN told me this. The UN troops had panicked, 14,000 packed up and moved towards Freetown. They were people equipped with armored cars and helicopters and weapons systems, the lot. They just put their hands up. One of the battalions allowed groups of rebels to bypass them, they took a whole battalion hostage, near Makeni, north of Freetown, that is when the British came in.”
“We tried to calm everything down. They flew the parachute regiment in and the joint task force deployed gradually over the next three weeks. There was a firefight at Lungi Airport. The parachute regiment stabilized the situation with foot patrols. We flew aircraft over Freetown to show we were there and that really was the beginning of the end for the rebel forces. They realized there was no way. It was done very cleverly with the media campaign. General Richards (the head of the general staff) explained we weren’t going to pull out.”
A decade later, Dent believes it was a sledgehammer to crack a nut – the kernel, a ragtag group of around 120 RUF and AFRC fighters.
President Kabbah, who died in March at the age of 82, declared an end to the civil war in 2002 and won a landslide election victory in the same year. In 2003, Dent left Sierra Leone with around 13,000 trained troops and the British Army. That year, the Queen awarded him with a CBE for his work in Freetown. He went into private business with his company, Security &amp; Risk Consultancy Services, and spent time in Tanzania looking after offshore drilling operations and the port of Mtwara.
“From a business perspective, East Africa is the place,” says Dent.
This year, Dent has been working as a risk and security consultant to the developers of the project at Jabi Lake in Abuja, Nigeria. He was in Abuja as the city recovered from a bomb that rocked a bus station on the cusp of the World Economic Forum in the Nigerian capital.
“I was there the week after the bombing. I was impressed by Abuja in that it had good security with lots of police and military. But any attack will be focused on a weak area that is difficult to secure.
“I think potentially the worst case scenario is a split. There is this religious issue and I think federalization has exacerbated it. The rich states in the south are where all the oil is. The perception in the north is why aren’t we getting our share?&#8230; I don’t think Boko Haram is going to go away. It is not just one group, this is disparate groups operating across Nigeria and if they get into the south there is real potential for a response. If the civilians in the areas start attacking Muslims you almost have a religious war. The people in the south who are Muslims are in the minority and are going to come off worst.”
Dent believes it’s easier doing business in Ghana, than in Nigeria. Further south, he sees more openings.
In his quiet English village, Dent is far from weak after a lifetime of soldiering and risk in Africa and relishes his next walk on the wild side.

Tag: British Army

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Going To War For Money And A Passport

Hostages, Rebels And Ghost Soldiers