Introduction

Since the end of the colonial period in Southern Africa, much has been written about the relationship between war veterans and governments, particularly those governments with liberation credentials. Veterans’ political engagement has been interesting to scholars because veterans have proved a volatile and important political force, both constraining and enabling different kinds of political agency by governing parties, and playing a central role in transforming statehood and practices of citizenship. Much of the literature on veterans in Southern Africa has therefore, and understandably, been about veterans’ relations with the state. Yet political engagement is not the only outcome of military service for veterans, and many veterans do not engage politically with the state. What I suggest in this chapter is that this disengagement is not simply the absence of engagement, but a socially meaningful practice in its own right, and one that can potentially teach us much about the multifaceted consequences of military service.

During the course of my fieldwork, many government war veterans I spoke to would tell me of their determination to avoid any sort of involvement in politics. This was often couched in terms similar to those in the quote above, juxtaposing political involvement directly with their Christian faith. This moral-religious outlook shaped much of their narration of their experience of military service, and their reaction to attempts to draw them into political engagement in its aftermath. It might be tempting to ignore such a disengagement, treating it as an uninteresting part of the ‘data’ that my research generated, or evidence of the lack of long-term impact of military service. However, as several anthropologists have recently emphasised, the apparent absence of explicit or even hidden resistance is usually not an absence at all, but often rewards closer attention. In particular, the boundaries of what is considered ‘political’ and how and why these are constructed and policed can be central to the understanding of how different forms of social agency are constructed and enabled.