by Don McCullin
What I hoped I had captured in my pictures was an enduring image that would imprint itself on the world’s memory. I was looking for a symbol—though I could not then have put it that way—that could stand for the whole story and would have the impact of ritual or religious imagery.
I soon knew that my first war pictures had some impact. By syndicating my early photographs successfully, the Observer was able to send me back to Cyprus twice more in the following weeks.
10. DELINQUENT PHOTOGRAPHER
I was too young and disrespectful for the Fleet Street old guard. They criticised everything, from my low standards in dress to the size of my cameras. They deplored my total lack of appreciation as to where and when it was proper to take photographs. I would take a shotgun in the boot of my car when going out of town, so that I would always be prepared for some good poaching, a habit which raised eyebrows and fed a mildly delinquent image.
Others, closer to my own age, looked upon me with some curiosity. They could see that I had a certain talent but wondered how I had derived it from such an ignorant and bigoted mind. They tried to educate me. ‘No, no, Don, you’ve got it all wrong! No, you mustn’t say that . . .’ Eventually I began listening to them and slowly became aware of the appalling things that would come out of my mouth. Some things I could never learn. I could not tolerate being called ‘my photographer’, as if I were the reporter’s very own personal possession. I was also allergic to all forms of regimentation, and this often led to trouble. I once found the photographers covering the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference at Marlborough House all lined up like greyhounds in the slips. Some of them with old-fashioned plate cameras sneered at my little 35mm job and instructed me to keep to my place and not run out in front and spoil their pictures. Why should I take orders from these people, or be ridiculed like a guttersnipe? When the pack of Prime Ministers arrived, I started to dart here, there and everywhere for close-ups. I broke all their rules and earned their opprobrium.
Yet I was to step out of line once too often, and nearly got the sack for it. I had been sent to photograph Harold Wilson soon after the Labour government came to power in 1964 and arrived at the House of Commons where Observer columnist Kenneth Harris was to interview the new Prime Minister on the verandah. I got the details of a prearranged plan from the PM’s Political Private Secretary, Marcia Falkender. While the two men talked, looking out over the River Thames, I was to station myself on Westminster Bridge and give a signal when I was ready to take photographs. As I got into position, a gust of wind blew the Prime Minister’s hair all over the place. Kenneth Harris took out his comb and deftly flicked Wilson’s hair back in place while I was snapping off pictures at a furious pace in some glee.
When I got back to the Observer office I handed in everything to the dark room for processing. The boys in the dark room grinned as they racked off some 20 × 16 prints of Kenneth Harris combing Harold Wilson’s hair. Far too large for any paper to use, the 20 × 16s would nevertheless make wonderfully outrageous posters. Unfortunately one of these huge prints found its way into the hands of the paper’s managing editor, Ken Obank, and I was summoned to his office for an explanation.
‘While I admire your timing,’ Obank said, ‘and your perception as a photographer, I deplore the fact that you have taken advantage of a situation given to the Observer in complete confidence. I’m therefore going to cut up the negatives in your presence. Really I should fire you. Had these pictures become public, the consequences would have fallen on this newspaper.’
I wasn’t blamed for actually taking the photographs, but they were angry about the large prints lying around where anyone could pick them up. If they had left the building it would have been undermining to the Wilson government and to the Observer’s reputation as a newspaper of trust. I was properly reprimanded, and the whole matter was quickly hushed up.
My scrapes were small when compared with those of my brother. While I was photographing Prime Ministers, he was getting into a spot of bother. Michael was seven years younger than me and grew up with a more internationally minded generation in Finsbury Park. After a brief forced exile in Wisbech, he found his way back into his old London gang which blazed the trail in Europe for the football hooligans of later years. One day he returned from the continent covered in bruises and one eye closed. The Belgian police had caught him and some of his mates turning over a deux chevaux outside a cafe in Ostend. Michael had run for it and dashed into the reinforcements round the corner as they were drawing their truncheons. He managed to escape but only after considerable damage had been inflicted on him.
Michael, early 1960s
I didn’t take seriously his flippant suggestion that he could always escape retribution, like a latter-day Beau Geste, by enlisting in the French Foreign Legion. People in deprived Finsbury Park were not accustomed to making gallant gestures of that sort. Yet that is precisely what he did. Not long afterwards, I received an official letter from the Foreign Office asking if I knew of my brother’s whereabouts. It appeared that the Belgian authorities were anxious to extradite him. I put the letter straight in the fire.
At least he kept a kind of liberty while many of my Finsbury Park mates were in jail. They would write to me for books—one at a time because that was all the authorities would allow. I could not shake off the feeling of being uneasily suspended between two worlds, and still not at ease in the self-consciously highbrow atmosphere of the Observer office. I was glad when a call came to send me again into what I was beginning to regard as my own territory—war. This time, in Africa.
Part Two
GOING TO THE WARS
11. WITH THE MERCENARIES
I flew into the Congo with a great deal of nervous apprehension. I had heard much that was sinister about this once cannibal area. Joseph Conrad called it the Heart of Darkness. Now, in November 1964, the story was that some rebel warriors of evil repute, supporters of the murdered President Lumumba, were committing atrocities on whites and holding missionaries hostage. White mercenaries were going to their rescue. All this was going on many hundreds of miles up-country and I was expected to get there somehow. The place had a name that was later to become notorious—Stanleyville.
I landed at the only place from which Stanleyville was accessible—a streaming hellhole then known as Leopoldville, the capital of the Congo. (It is now known as Kinshasa.) Almost a thousand miles of roadless, impenetrable jungle and crocodile-infested river, I discovered, still lay between me and my goal. Like other journalists I plugged into Leopoldville’s sleazy, steam-bath bars, wondering how on earth to get out, and whether this end-of-the-world situation wasn’t also the end of the road.
The bars alone told the whole dismal Congo story, for those lucky enough to be writers. Arms-dealers, dodgy minerals prospectors, experimenting pharmaceuticalists, Belgian plantation owners of the type who chopped off the arms of troublesome workers, drunken mercenaries, stranded air crews and some of the most devilish misfits of the world congregated here, occasionally approached by humble African ‘missionary boys’ telling them how well they knew their Bible and asking if they could have something to eat.
For photographers, who couldn’t use this telling material, the news was dire. Joseph Désiré Mobutu, the man who controlled the army and the security apparatus, and who was already developing an alarming reputation, had put a ban on any journalist leaving Leopoldville. One journalist, it was said, had already been killed.
In the meantime, matters up-country were becoming critical. Rumours abounded that the rebel tribesmen—Simbas, or lions—were eating the livers of public officials in the main square of Stanleyville. President Tshombe had ordered an army to the rescue—of Belgian paratroops, Mobutu’s men in the Congolese army, and mercenaries of a motley of nationalities. These were led by an Irishman, known as ‘Mad’ Mike Hoare. While this operation was in progress, all ordinary traffic of Stanleyville stopped. The only free movement o
ut of Leopoldville was of military traffic, and this gave me an idea.
White mercenary and Congolese family, Paulis, north of Stanleyville, Congo, 1966
My eye fell on one of the mercenaries who drank in the bar at my hotel. He was a stealthy-looking, muscular, short man with a sergeant’s stripes and strange eyes, eyes which said the person could be unfriendly, if rubbed the wrong way.
‘Are you English?’ I asked.
‘Yes, I’m from London.’
I told him I was from the Observer newspaper, which was not strictly true. I was actually on assignment for a German magazine called Quick, but I reckoned the name of the Observer would carry more clout with an Englishman in Africa. ‘What are my chances of going to Stan?’
‘None at all, as far as you’re concerned,’ replied the sergeant. He didn’t seem hostile, so I went on questioning him.
‘When do you go, and how?’ I asked.
‘We fly up in two days, by Hercules transports, American planes, with American pilots.’
‘Any chance of me getting some khaki?’
He looked at me and smiled. He had conceived, I think, a bit of a liking for this bloke with a mad idea. As mercenaries often turned out to be, he was a bit mad-brained himself.
‘Can you fill me in? Where do you sleep? How many are you? Can I get boots?’
I kept pumping him with questions, and before I knew it not only was my scheme shaping up but my sergeant friend—whose name was Alan Murphy—was giving me help.
At the appointed time, the night before departure, I sneaked into the mercenary barracks, a fleapit hotel on the other side of the Congo River where they had converted the dining room into a dormitory. I was clad in the clothes that Murphy had found me, jungle boots and khaki and the green beret of what they called the Fifth Commando. Silently I lay down beside a mass of snoring bodies, but didn’t sleep much. It was raining and thundering outside.
‘If this thing falls apart,’ Murphy had told me, ‘you’re on your own. I’ll help all I can, but if it comes unstuck, I don’t know you.’
This drifted through my head as I awoke from drowsing at 5 a.m. to a half-lit world of crashing rain, muffled voices and men scratching their heads and getting on their boots. The thought of going to Stanleyville suddenly seemed thoroughly undesirable.
Murphy approached, using his strange eyes to monitor me out, like a dog fox leaving a trail. He didn’t speak.
Outside there was a truck ticking over. One of the mercenaries who clambered aboard was wearing the German Iron Cross. We were driven briskly to the military airstrip, and as we dropped off the end of the truck I thought my legs wouldn’t bear me up.
A man with a short-sleeved shirt and a button-down collar called, ‘Line up, you guys, line up.’ He was short but had a very commanding manner. I felt sure I was looking at my first CIA man, taking part in America’s big clandestine involvement in the Congo.
He snapped out names, read out from a clipboard. The only one I recognised was Murphy. At each name, someone left the line and climbed into the plane—a giant Hercules transport. Soon there were only three men left, of whom I was the quaking one. I could feel myself shrinking while my little military bag (no bigger than a school satchel) holding my cameras seemed to be swelling to enormous size. This is it, the game’s over, I thought to myself. Gloomily I recalled the reputation of Mobutu’s security men, and wondered what you had to do to be sure you got deported.
‘What’s your name?’
Gruffly and militarily, I hoped, my name somehow came out of my mouth. He scanned down the list, and looked down it again. Any moment now, I thought, there’s going to be an explosion. He looked up and hard at me.
‘It’s not here.’
‘It should be,’ I barked.
‘Howdya spell it?’
Spelling it out must have given full force to this wild Irish/Scottish-sounding name, a trouble-making mercenary’s kind of name, because he said suddenly, ‘Okay, get in.’
My physical tension was such that for a moment I could barely stand or walk. Then I was almost too buoyant. As I climbed into the aircraft, I was ablaze inside, smothered by internal laughter. I had pulled a stroke not only against the Congo government, but against the CIA as well.
The mood didn’t survive the flight. As the engines changed down for the descent to Stanleyville, my mood changed gear with them and the apprehension started again. Then the big doors came down on the C130 and the first thing that struck me—the thing I knew the meaning of from Cyprus—was the pungent smell of death.
The Belgian paras had reached Stanleyville before us and had shot up a lot of human beings. Hideous bloated corpses lay in the sun, while men in white masks were still levering them from the long grass. Even before we had got off, the stench of death in Stanleyville was being sucked into that plane.
I knew now, emerging into the searing heat, that this was worse, far worse, than anything I had witnessed in Cyprus. I could hear a crackling noise, which was the sound of small arms fire, and an occasional heavy thump and crunch: mortar bombs going in. The battle was still in progress. The killing was still going on. In Africa it is difficult to stop it.
Free beer was dispensed in quantity at the Stanley Hotel where we detrucked. Dutch courage figured prominently in the mercenaries’ plans, and I needed a drink. As I downed my beer, a jeep arrived, and I could hear doors slamming, orders being shouted, to a background of gunfire. Men started hurrying out. Murphy was acting as if he didn’t know me.
‘What’s your outfit?’ an officer called to me as I hung back.
‘I’m from Katima,’ I improvised.
I sat in a jeep with a helmet that had been thrust at me along with a rifle that I wasn’t keen on touching. We were said to be heading for what they called mopping-up operations on the other side of the river. Mopping-up operations had been part of the explanation for the bloated corpses around the airport. I began to reflect on what I had got myself into—a most hideous large-scale set-up, with no rights or rules or immunities, with some of the most violent, cruel people in the world.
At the dock, mercenaries were grouping to cross the river near a large pile of logging timber waiting to float downstream. By this timber there were twenty young Africans, all sitting, all bleeding; some were as young as seventeen, some perhaps even younger. All of them had been beaten. Some of them looked as if they had been skinned alive. These I learned were what in Leopoldville they called the Simbas—lion men. Here they were just called the youth—the Jeunesse. I didn’t behave too professionally in a photographic way. I just went up and hurriedly started taking pictures, then quickly put my cameras away.
‘What’s this all about?’ I asked a mercenary.
‘Oh, they’re killing these guys. You’ll see them in a minute. There’s a really nasty black gendarmerie chief, a really evil bastard. He’s doing away with that lot. He’s been shooting them all morning. He takes them to the river bank and shoots them in the back of the head, then kicks them into the water for the crocs.’
I felt overwhelmingly moved by this little bunch of human misery, sitting there, waiting to be killed.
I realised too how vulnerable my own position was as an inconvenient witness. As the crackle of small arms intensified, I could see Africans streaming in haste off the ferry, faces drawn, eyes rolling, urgently making as much distance as possible from the other side. Mercenaries started to lumber on board in their place for the trip back, carrying heavy machine guns and Brownings. My eyes kept darting to the little group of Jeunesse, some tied, some not, waiting to be shot. I had learned an awful new fact about war and killing—that people build themselves up for atrocity. They suppress their humanity by humiliating, torturing, tormenting their victims first. And the victims wait to be killed.
While we were standing on the dockside, someone said, ‘The boss wants you lot on the other side of th
e river.’ And he asked me, ‘Have you got a gun?’ I said I had and got back into the jeep and sank low into it. I could see all the other mercenaries knocking back looted whisky to build up their courage and kill off their fear.
The English officer then asked me, ‘Where did you say you came from before you got to Leopoldville?’ Again I told him Katima.
‘No, you couldn’t have done.’
I thought then that I had better come clean, or as clean as possible. I told him I worked for the Observer newspaper.
He got on the radio to Mike Hoare. Then he turned back to me, very seriously, and said: ‘You’re in trouble, old son. We’re going to hand you over to the gendarmerie, to those black guys killing all these people.’
I felt panic. Though I had all the cockiness and fearlessness of the inexperienced war correspondent, behind it all there was a nasty shadow saying: ‘Hang about, if they can do this to those poor bastards, and nobody knows you’re here, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t disappear too.’
Half an hour later word came through that ‘the old man’ wanted me on the other side. I was shipped across the river on a pontoon ferry with the jeeps, the Browning machine guns and the mercenaries, but without the rifle. I was so concerned about the gendarmerie threat, I hardly noticed the river being raked with fire.
On the other bank there was total confusion. The mercenaries had rounded up hundreds of people. They were sorting out those they thought were Simba warriors. It didn’t look to me as if they were very particular in their choice.
I was taken to a clearing, which was part of a mission where, I learned, eight Belgian nuns had been murdered by the Simbas in the previous week. There were a lot of exhausted mercenaries, who had obviously been fighting, lying around. In a little hospital there I later found a doctor’s microscope with thousands of smashed glass testing sheets, suggesting a painstaking level of destruction.