MICHAEL SCHMIDT: On Women’s Month — I was born to fight

Shortly after half past six on a chilly morning at the gates of the Ratjimose Military Base, headquarters of the Royal Lesotho Defence Force in Maseru, a squadron of four SA National Defence Force  (SANDF) Ratel armoured personnel carriers came under withering automatic fire from mutineers hiding in civilian houses nearby.

It was September 22 1998, the morning’s second armed engagement in a joint SANDF-Botswana Defence Force intervention in the mountain kingdom, authorised by the Southern African Development Community (Sadc) to suppress a military mutiny — and the squadron’s commander was hit in the shoulder.

Medevac’d out, he was replaced by a lanky blonde 19-year-old woman with a passion for scuba-diving and parachuting, 2nd Lt Suretha Ikking. That day, she would go on to help co-ordinate the far more dangerous 1 Special Services Battalion assault on the Makoanyane Military Base to the west of Maseru with paratroopers who had been dropped under heavy fire by Oryx helicopter — thereby becoming SA’s first woman to hold an active combat command.

It was deadly as hell: armed with mortars, heavy machine-guns, and Swedish recoilless rocket-launchers, the mutineers put up unexpectedly stiff resistance from the base’s two-storey HQ building and from a mountain spur behind it. Two paratroopers had been killed in the initial landing, and the final death toll in three days of fighting was 11 SANDF soldiers killed in action and 17 wounded, for 134 mutineers killed.

It was the highest fatality rate SA had suffered in the democratic era until the ill-fated Battle of Bangui in the Central African Republic in March 2013, which left 13 SANDF troops dead and 27 wounded. That battle technically involved no women in fighting roles, but parachute-qualified combat medic Cpl Molatelo Nkoana of 7 Medical Battalion — a specialist unit supporting 44 Parachute Regiment and SA Special Forces Brigade — was awarded the Bronze Leopard for bravery in guiding a group of trapped and wounded paratroopers to safety under heavy enemy fire.

I had been in Lesotho covering the mutiny and interviewed Ikking two years after her firefight, then a full lieutenant commander of an impressive six-wheeled Rooikat armoured fighting vehicle  with a 76mm high-velocity main gun and twin 7.62mm machine-guns, on which she took me for a spine-wrenching yet exhilarating spin over a muddy obstacle course.

“If you do the work, you get the respect,” she said matter-of-factly, though she admitted that a female armoured fighting vehicle commander could make an arresting sight, recalling that “one day on patrol I had my helmet off so you could see my hair — and people just stopped in the middle of the road”.

I had set up the interview as I was intrigued by the fact that despite Ikking’s groundbreaking experience in Lesotho, and though over the previous four years, fully 8,913 women had made the grade into combat positions — as navy divers, army anti-aircraft gunners, and air force helicopter pilots. This female incursion into the “sharp end” of SA military operations had passed with almost zero media or public comment.

By contrast, in countries such as the US, women in combat was a sociopolitical hot potato, with the first women allowed to fly US fighter planes only in 1993, and with full gender equality of deployment across all branches of service only achieved in 2016 — by which time Ikking was a major. The 1997 movie G.I. Jane, in which actress Demi Moore passes the Navy Seal special forces selection course, was thus pure fiction.

The lack of debate in SA was as remarkable as ever since the SANDF’s predecessor, the Union Defence Force, was founded alongside the new country in 1910, and women had only performed in auxiliary, non-combat roles, such as nurses, admin and logistics staff, and so forth.

In a previous, universally condemned incursion into Lesotho, the December 1982 “Maseru Raid” against ANC/MK targets, which killed 42, including seven women and children, the highest-ranking woman involved was a navy commander, the equivalent of an army colonel, but she was in intelligence-gathering, not in combat.

When SA became a democracy in 1994, there was a lone female major-general, the middle of three generals’ ranks, in the new SANDF. Integration with the former liberation movement’s MK, Apla, and Azanla, however, enabled an influx of women fighters from those guerrilla forces. 

And 20 years after Ikking’s adventures in Lesotho, another woman SANDF commander made history when Lt-Col Tiisetso Sekgobela, a former B Com banking graduate from the village of Sedwaba in Limpopo, assumed command of 7 SA Infantry Battalion, one of three infantry units in the UN’s Force Intervention Brigade on peacekeeping operations in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The brigade is the only UN unit in the world authorised to undertake combat operations and Sekgobela had 102 women among her 850 soldiers; no-one was lost in a year of desultory skirmishes with rebels.

By the conclusion of her deployment, the SANDF had six female major-generals, and 47 brigadier-generals, the junior general rank, while in April last year, Maj-Gen Thalita Mxakato, a 1983 MK recruit who was trained in Angola then specialised in East Germany, became the first woman in SANDF Military Command when she assumed the post of chief of defence intelligence.

While our “Parabats” saw the first woman, Sgt Suzanne Johannes, then aged 27, gain her paratrooper wings as early as 2005, there have so far been no women who have qualified as Parabat Pathfinders — trained in clandestine behind-enemy-lines actions — or as operators in SA’s two über-tough, world-famous “Recce” units, the landward 5 Reconnaissance Commando at Phalaborwa, and the seaward 4 Reconnaissance Commando at Langebaan.

Military correspondent Erika Gibson tells Business Day, however, that 1 Tactical Intelligence Regiment in Potchefstroom — which was also involved in the Battle of Bangui and often works in the field alongside the Recces — “has had quite a lot of women for quite a while”.

With the Sadc response to the insurgency in Cabo Delgado province in northern Mozambique, yet another woman assumed combat command: Lt-Col Suraia Cambinda of 2 SA Infantry Battalion in Zeerust heads the 1,200-strong Combat Team Alpha, consisting mostly of infantry and paratroopers but also Recces, which was deployed to the inland town of Macomia in June this year.

Gibson says that Cambinda, “has a very interesting background as she comes from a 32 Battalion family” — referring to the famed apartheid-era light infantry raiders operational in Angola, and was selected for the Combat Team Alpha command “because she’s fluent in Portuguese, and quite a tough cookie — not one of those token ones. She was born with fighting blood in her veins.”

• Schmidt is a veteran journalist and author.