Licence for shooting: South African literature, the media, and the cold war

The war in Angola represented one of the hot spots of the Cold War. Despite the length of the conflict and the number of warring parties involved, relatively little attention has been paid to the ways in which South African literature represented this conflict. This article focuses on the relationship between text and image, between literature and photojournalism. For Etienne van Heerden ("My Cuban" and "My Afrikaner") and Mark Behr (The smell of apples), literature is capable of exposing ideological regimentation, the role of state apparatuses in creating a captive audience, and the mechanisms that perpetuated apartheid mentality and endorsed South African foreign policies. These literary works, and their relationship to war photography, are also indicative of the relatively marginal yet revealing position South African cultural texts hold in global mediascapes focused on the Cold War.