ABSTRACT
As white troops were demobilized from late 1943, they faced a world very different from the one they had left several years earlier. The socio-economic background of white volunteers provides a useful pointer to understanding not only their reasons for enlisting, but also their hopes for the peace. As anthropologists Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff have argued, ideals of family and respectability carried considerable symbolic value in colonial society. Such ideals contained the elemental relations of gender, class and generation upon which racial distance between whites on the one hand, and 'Africans and the image of African barbarity' on the other, were premised. White volunteers carried prevailing expectations about work and domestic life with them from the moment they enlisted. However, upon demobilization, the workplace, the city and housing became sites of bitter disappointment for white servicemen, and symbols of the state's failure to provide for them as returned white heroes.
