So in my meandering journey across the internet, I came across the works of A.A. Pessimal. He's an anomaly in the fanfic world, being an older man who has ostensibly spent time in the British Army and Northern Ireland, and who has a great interest in South Africa. Some of his Discworld fics hold a mirror up to South Africa during the Apartheid period, giving it the Discworld treatment (and in one case raising the issue of Igors, who don't do race - leading to the interesting question of how to categorise a white man who, after surgical intervention by an Igor, came to have organs from a black donor).

In one story, Pessimal observes in a footnote: "One of many pressures on apartheid came from men who had done front-line service in the South African Defence Forces and realised it's hard to hate or despise the black soldier who's fighting as you do and taking the same risks you take. "no apartheid in the front line" was something of a truism. The modern South African Army is multi-racial and integrated; in the old days South African black soldiers were, officially at least, segregated as "auxiliaries". But this distinction soon broke down in combat."

How much truth is there in this observation? How did race really work out in the shooty-shooty? What sort of view might the South African version of Tommy Atkins have of the black trooper in the foxhole next to him?