Good morning, my fellow people.

I would like to start this speech off with a few questions for you, the audience, and see how many of you know about today’s topic. First question, how many of you know about the Apartheid? (insert comment dependent of response). Well for those of you who don’t know what the Apartheid was, I’ll tell you. It was the institutionalisation of racial segregation between the South African population along with the removal of rights for the non-white population. Question two, how many of you have heard of the South African Border War or the Bush War? As I suspected. Not a lot of people have heard of it. To summerise, the war was fought between South Africa, Angola, Cuba and an insurgency known as SWAPO, but this is not important. The important part of the war was some of the South African white populations’ response to the war.

Today I want to talk about the men who hated the war, who hated the Apartheid regime. They were, and in some cases, are the men that are the unsung heroes of the Anti-Apartheid movement. They are the conscientious objectors. How many men do you think refused to serve their conscription? Thousands of men refused. The worst part about it is that the Union’s government made it so that these men would become criminals because of their beliefs and moral codes.

Imagine being a young man who has just finished school and has his whole life ahead of him, but you’re forced into the army to fight a war that you don’t even know what it’s about. How would you feel about that? Would you go with it? Would you fight against it?

My mother once told me a story about a couple of friends she used to have back when she was in university. How she went out with herself, two friends from uni and two guys who were on rotation. She would always say to me how on that night the two guys didn’t seem sane. They kept on running red lights, speeding and stopping on the green lights. The odd part is that they were enjoying it. The two guys acted as though this was the most fun in years. My mother always said the war had changed them and from what I’ve heard about the stories of what actually happened on missions or the battlefield.

In conclusion, many people were against conscription as a whole, but most importantly, were against the Apartheid.