South African Legion of Military Veterans

J C Smuts and General Sir H T Lukin - founded the British Empire Service League (BESL) at an inaugural meeting held in the City Hall, Cape Town on 21 February 1921.

Zuma that 21 February every year be observed and commemorated as Armed Forces Day (AFD), where honour is paid to those that lost their lives in the fateful 1917 sinking of the SS Mendi.

[7] The headquarters of the Legion were originally in Bloemfontein in the centre of the country, but moved to Johannesburg in 1942, where it still is, housed in the South African National Museum of Military History.

[13] As a non-racial military veterans organisation, the SA Legion has long remembered the tragic loss of the SS Mendi[14] in which more than 600 Black South African soldiers died.

[16] The commemoration is held in Atteridgeville, Pretoria[17] and Soweto,[18] as well as in Port Elizabeth, which linked with British historians to find missing headstones, and other major centres including Cape Town.