The life stories of a group of white war veterans

This research explores the effects that storytelling and participation in rituals and ceremonies have on the ‘narratives of war’ of a group of white South African ‘border war’ veterans returning to the site of encounter in Angola.

Methodology for the research is an ‘interdisciplinary’ qualitative social constructionism method as a scaffold for a pastoral narrative approach. The gathering of personal stories helped explore the influence of master narratives, the effects of the border war; the intricacy of political and religious ideology on Afrikaans speaking South Africans; the effects of living with the current narrative of illegitimacy of the border war and the role of storytelling, rituals and ceremonies in re-authoring post-war narratives and migrations of identity.