koevoet, noun

/ˈkʊfʊt//ˈkufut/
Origin:
AfrikaansShow more Afrikaans, crowbar.
‖1. rare. A crowbar.
1980 J.C. Skaife Informant, Grahamstown (now Makhanda, Eastern Cape)I have just demolished a built in cupboard to retrieve some photographs that had slipped down behind..Amazing what one can do with a hammer and koevoet.
1986 Rhodeo (Rhodes Univ.) May 8A ‘koevoet’ used to mean a crowbar but is now a word which is ‘hated and feared by the people of Namibia’.
2. With initial capital. A paramilitary counter-insurgency unit of the police force deployed in South West Africa (Namibia), officially from 1979 to 1989; occasionally (with plural koevoets), a member of this force. Also combination koevoet-style adjective, and attributive.
1982 E. Prov. Herald 4 Dec. 3The SWA Ministers’ Council has appealed to South African Minister of Law and Order, Mr Le Grange, to give his personal attention to the recent deaths in detention of two men held by the special task force of the police, called ‘Koevoet’.
1983 Frontline June 42Plans and Koevoets might give each other the evil eye, but apparently they’ll usually wait until they’re back on duty before shooting each other up.
1984 D. Pinnock Brotherhoods 82Nobody is recruited into the Riot Squads without first having seen service against guerillas...The cream of the local squads are then picked to serve in the Special Task Force, which is in turn the recruiting-ground for an even more élite unit known simply as Koevoet.
1985 Sunday Times 10 Mar. 7Koevoet, the crack police counter insurgency unit operating in the war zone...Koevoet (it means crowbar) was probably never an ideal name, in public relations terms, for a counter-insurgency unit.
1985 Vula Oct. 12Special Unit K of the SA Security forces — the men who call themselves Koevoet!
1989 P. Kenny in Sunday Times 26 Feb. 2The Koevoet unit was started 10 years ago with five people to counter the burgeoning bush war by Swapo. Some Swapo members..say police who were in Koevoet are politicising the people to vote anti-Swapo.
1989 M. Verbaan in Weekly Mail 20 Jan. 11Koevoet has consistently been accused of perpetrating atrocities in its self-proclaimed battle against guerrillas of the Swapo nationalist movement.
1989 Weekly Mail 17 Mar. 1Among the claims made in the court papers is that the the notorious Koevoet counterinsurgency unit is still in effective operation, despite widely-publicised claims that it had been disbanded.
1989 Reader’s Digest Illust. Hist. of S. Afr. 462SADF counter-insurgency operations inside Namibia continued to attract wide controversy..particularly the secret operations of a unit name Koevoet (Crowbar) officered by many former members of the Rhodesian military.
1989 Sunday Times 19 Nov. 6Nestling on the banks of the Hennops River, Vlakplaas serves as a base camp for South Africa’s own Koevoet-style unit.
1990 P. Van Niekerk in Weekly Mail 12 Oct. 5At the weekend African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela..angrily blamed the violence in the townships on the ‘Third Force’ whom he identified as the askaris, military intelligence, the National Intelligence Service and Koevoet.
1991 J. Pauw In Heart of Whore 113In Namibia, Koevoet was established in 1976 and concentrated on ‘offensive action on the tracking and eradication of terrorists’.
1992 Sowetan 17 Dec. 19The man in charge..appeared popular among the Koevoets.
A crowbar.
With initial capital.A paramilitary counter-insurgency unit of the police force deployed in South West Africa (Namibia), officially from 1979 to 1989; occasionally (with plural koevoets), a member of this force. Also combination koevoet-style adjective, and attributive.
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rare or nonce
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