In a bright February morning in the crumbling desert town of Pomfret, South Africa, a small group of Angolan septuagenarians with rheumy eyes sat listlessly in the shade of a guava tree, passing around a plastic jug of opaque traditional beer made from maize husks.

I’d only been in town a day or so, but it was already apparent that there wasn’t much else to do. Originally built as an asbestos-mining camp in the 1960s, then repurposed as a remote military outpost in the late ’80s, the government began a protracted bid to shut Pomfret down almost twenty years ago. The army was relocated to the town of Zeerust, about three hundred kilometers east. In its wake, public services including the police station, clinic, and post office were soon discontinued. Much of the town’s infrastructure had since been ravaged by looters or razed during intermittent, lackluster demolition efforts. The power was cut off in 2014; the taps ran dry shortly thereafter, forcing residents to make regular pilgrimages to fill buckets of water from rain tanks or the few public boreholes scattered across town.

One of the more sober men in the group, Celestino Fonseca, wore a black cap that seemed to capture the local mood: “No car, no house, no job, no money, no girlfriend or shit,” it read across his forehead in chaotic, multicolored scrawl. “I was in the army for twenty-one years, but I have nothing to show for it,” Fonseca said to me in Portuguese, the dominant language in Pomfret. “That’s why I bought this hat,” he added with a wry smile.

Late last year, the South African government announced its intention to finally tear down what was left of Pomfret. Authorities cited alleged asbestos contamination from the old mine as their motivation, and said they would disperse all remaining residents to bland state-subsidized housing in surrounding towns. No one in town had been given any clear indication of timing, but there were widespread rumors that it could happen as soon as the end of this year.

“Before, we were like trees with strong roots and bearing fruit,” said Freta Kenga, another army veteran with piercing eyes and elfish features who’d stopped by to greet his former comrades. “Now, we are like the wind—rootless. We don’t know where we will go.”

Through an Odyssean episode of Cold War history, Fonseca and Kenga were among about six thousand black Angolans—soldiers and their families—who’d ended up here on the parched fringes of the Kalahari Desert in South Africa’s rural North West Province in 1989. Today, less than half that number remained. The population included about a hundred veterans who, having fled civil war in their home country in the mid-Seventies, had served South Africa’s white-supremacist apartheid government, fighting black guerrilla insurgencies in Namibia and their homeland for more than a decade.

When the majority-black African National Congress (A.N.C.) came to power in South Africa in 1994, Pomfret’s veterans were relegated to the position of pariahs, widely perceived as traitors in the struggle for black liberation. Yet most of them had never returned to their native Angola, lacking either the will or the means to do so. Many more had succumbed to illnesses and injuries picked up during their long years soldiering. The handful of white South African military families who’d once resided in Pomfret alongside the Angolans (albeit in a leafier, more affluent part of town) had long since departed. “The rest of us are stranded here,” Fonseca told me.

Nevertheless, through adversity, the residents of Pomfret had forged a distinct diasporic community, their exclusion from the rest of South African society providing fertile ground for cultural homogenization and the creation of a strong shared identity—one founded on the belief that the veterans were South Africa’s forgotten war heroes, unfairly denied the recognition and remuneration they deserved (save for a paltry state pension), rather than apartheid’s antiblack enforcers.

The truth was that they were neither. Or perhaps both. Whichever it was, the outside world increasingly threatened to expose the cracks in the town’s fragile revisionist history and unravel its unique social fabric.

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said my goodbyes to Fonseca and his drinking companions, politely declining a parting swig of their home brew, and continued my slow drive through Pomfret. My tiny rental car was ill-equipped to manage the cavernous potholes of the main thoroughfare.

“I have so many good memories of this place, but it’s no place to live now,” said my interpreter, thirty-year-old Marcela Viemba, as the car jostled. It was easy to see that Pomfret had once had a certain charm. The streets were lined with tall oaks and pines and jacarandas that blossomed with vivid violet flowers in spring. Capacious whitewashed bungalows with green corrugated iron roofs were fronted by neat gardens. Three public pools dotted across town, now empty and bleached by the sun, had provided some respite from the unforgiving climate. There was an expansive sports club where, amongst the debris, it was still possible to make out the remnants of squash and tennis courts, a restaurant, and a grand concert hall. In a sunny, open-air shopping plaza, someone had graffitied “Pomfret is our home” on the wall of the derelict post office.

We drove past the town’s only functioning school and saw small boys in shabby uniforms using a tattered spring mattress to perform perfect somersaults into the soft sand that had reclaimed most of the town. “This is where I first became famous,” Viemba said, sweeping a long braid off her face and pouting in mock teenage fashion. In eighth grade, she and a group of classmates had formed a hip-hop dance troupe. “If I could go back in time, that’s where I would go,” she told me.

Viemba’s father, a veteran whom she described as an unfailingly kind man, had moved his family to Pomfret when Viemba was just three months old. He’d died of tuberculosis at the age of fifty-four; the disease claims nearly one hundred thousand lives in South Africa annually. In early 2008, when the town was on a steady downward trajectory, Viemba’s mother moved the family to Mahikeng, the capital of the North West Province. But Viemba still made the four-hour drive to Pomfret once a year or so to visit relatives, or to attend their funerals. Given the ever-deteriorating standard of living and the lack of health facilities, bereavement was part of the fabric of contemporary Pomfret. A niece, a close cousin and the father of Viemba’s first child were among those now buried alongside her father in the town’s increasingly overgrown and forlorn cemetery.

Despite her years away, Viemba still had bonds with almost everyone left in Pomfret. She regularly asked me to stop the car so she could exchange effusive, lengthy greetings with passersby, many of whom seemed to assume, much to Viemba’s howling amusement, that I was her wealthy white husband. But each time we resumed our meandering tour through town, her fleeting animation would quickly turn to melancholia. “Dehydrated” was the word she kept landing on to describe Pomfret’s feeling. It was a peculiar choice—perhaps, I thought, a quirk of direct Portuguese-to-English translation. But it aptly conveyed the sense of something withering, being drained of life.

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y the time Viemba’s father and the other veterans had arrived in Pomfret, most of them had known little but war and displacement. The men had been recruited in the late 1960s—some as child soldiers—into an anti-imperial Angolan militant group called the National Liberation Front of Angola (F.N.L.A.). In 1975, on the cusp of independence from nearly five hundred years of Portuguese colonial rule, Angola descended into a twenty-seven-year civil war that would claim as many as five hundred thousand lives. The conflict was fueled by long-simmering ethnic tensions: Angola was an arbitrary colonial construction that encompassed divergent ethnic groups, which meant that the scramble for control of the country and its abundant natural resources involved international and internal powers.

By 1976, the F.N.L.A. had been significantly weakened by a failed attempt to overthrow the Cuban- and Soviet-backed People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (M.P.L.A.), which had declared itself the new ruling party of independent Angola. Meanwhile, the more right-wing National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) emerged as the most viable opposition to the M.P.L.A., incorporating elements of the F.N.L.A. In doing so, it claimed the lion’s share of support from the socialism-averse United States and South Africa.

The F.N.L.A.’s soldiers, largely made up of poor villagers from the minority Bakongo ethnic group, were gradually driven south with their families and alleged sympathizers from rural strongholds in the north of Angola. When the caravan reached the Angola–Namibia border, it came into contact with South African forces. With mouths to feed and scant alternatives, the destitute Angolan men were quickly incorporated into 32 Battalion, which would develop a reputation as the apartheid government’s most ruthless and feared counterinsurgency unit. The battle-hardened Angolans were pitted against another of the region’s burgeoning revolutionary groups, the anti-apartheid South West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO), which had ties to the U.S.S.R. and sought to wrest its country from South African colonial rule.

By the late 1980s, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War imminent, initial U.S. military support for the apartheid government’s wars had long since been curtailed, though it continued to intermittently back UNITA in its escalating conflict with the M.P.L.A. South Africa’s economy had also been crippled by sanctions, as international opposition to its violently racist policies mounted. Even in the country’s privileged white strongholds, many people had grown weary of a convoluted war that seemed ever harder to legitimize in a shifting geopolitical landscape; there was also a growing realization that something had to give if white South Africans were going to have a stake in the impending reimagining of their country. As the South African government began to pave the way for the country’s transition to black majority rule, the soldiers of 32 Battalion and their families were moved from their long-standing base in a sultry, soon-to-be-independent Namibian border town to arid Pomfret, more than a thousand kilometers due south.

Today, it was difficult to get a sense of how the veterans had felt about the move, or how conscious they’d been of the seismic changes South Africa was undergoing around them. Most of the people I interviewed seemed puzzled by my questions concerning the experience. They were just following orders, they said, that’s all there was to it. For their family members, too, the move to Pomfret was merely the latest in a series of forced migrations. “When I heard we were moving here, I knew I had no choice,” said Raina Khaku, whose husband, a veteran, died in his sleep in their Pomfret home in 2012. Now, Khaku said she often prayed to God to rescue her from this forsaken place.

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