Bearing Witness to Forgotten Service: The Afterlife of Racialised Military Service

This project seeks to reposition Coloured identity through the lens of racialised military service, situating military participation as a central, yet underexamined site in which racial classification, state power, and identity intersect. It argues that the continued uncritical use of Apartheid-era racial categories in military history and memory reproduces epistemic violence and deepens psychosocial wounds. At present, the category Coloured functions less as a descriptive marker of cultural life and more as a residue of racial ordering that continues to shape access to recognition, veteran status, and dignity within post-Apartheid South Africa. This project seeks to develop a more nuanced understanding of Coloured military participation, one that recognises agency and sacrifice without reproducing narratives of complicity. This would allow space for historical repair, enabling Coloured soldiers and their descendants to reclaim military narratives that have been marginalised and silenced. By foregrounding racialised military service, this project contributes to broader scholarly and societal debates on the afterlife of violence in South Africa. It examines how historical trauma persists through institutional memory, how racial categories continue to mediate recognition and belonging, and how communities historically mobilised for military service under oppressive regimes can be reinserted into national histories with dignity and complexity.