Border-Line Insanity

About the Book

Border-Line Insanity offers the reader an insight into the life of a conscripted soldier in the South African army during the dark days of apartheid.

In 1984 I was thrust into a scary world of strict order and discipline as a teenage school graduate, experiencing subtle brain washing as I became moulded into a white soldier for the mandatory two-year term.

The reader is taken through the training, character building and bonds of camaraderie, before being dispatched into a bush life ripe with fear on the border line of South-West Africa/Namibia and Angola. From one patrol to the next we experienced the insanities that came with the hardship as we survived with an iron will under intense heat and heavy rainfall upon a land we scorned. Having seen and smelled innocent death on one border, only to have three troops from my section captured on another, and held prisoner under deplorable conditions in Mozambique. Experiencing real life fears in 1988, as we massed up in a mechanized armoured brigade as Citizen Force soldiers on the South-West African/Angolan border, in wait for an attack against Cuban and Angolan forces, with our fate a living hell in itself.

With the army still breathing deeply in me, I left South Africa (after having served two and a half years) for a solo backpacking adventure across exotic parts of the world and behind the iron curtain, which lasted five years. In 2003 I returned to an independent Namibia to bury some tension, anxiety and hatred for a people, a land and a life where much of my ill feeling had been born only to fester silently for many years ahead. In so doing I had come full circle to closing a chapter never to be lived again and one certainly never to be forgotten.

About the Author

Timothy Ramsden was born in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1965 and was educated at Treverton College, a boarding school in Mooi River, Natal before doing his mandatory term of two years National Service. He worked as a manager in retail with the O.K. Bazaars before embarking on a five-year backpacking adventure through thirty-five countries. He now lives in Newmarket, Canada and continues to work in retail as a manager. He still holds a keen interest for travel, adventure and the magic of Africa, hoping one day that the love and passion for the land of his birth will rub off on to his son.