[schrijver]

You’re reading too much into it… that there were many South African mercenaries is a historical fact, they’re not stereotyping any population in that sentence.

For what it’s worth, in the popular consciousness outside of SA, the white South African as a bogeyman probably peaked a long time ago, I would say around 1989 — when Lethal Weapon 2 was released with South Africans as the bad guys.

[hedgehog]

There's some basis. Executive Outcomes was in its day one of the premier private military contractors and formed largely out of outgoing military who served the regime. Any time a big organization gets downsized those people need to find jobs, at the same time there's a robust market for arms-length labor to take on dangerous and politically risky work. The US has probably been #1 for the last 20 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Outcomes

[panzagl]

I guess you could nitpick as to how many of them were from Rhodesia instead of South Africa proper. But South Africans have certainly made a cottage industry out of bush war memoirs, so it's hard to be too nitpicky.