by Al Venter
The truth is that while I’d never trained as a journalist, I was ‘telling it like it was’. Moreover, it was great fun, tweaking the system, as it were.
The Nigerian government prohibited journalists from entering the country and like it or not, I was the only scribe around. My first editor, Wilf Nussey – who headed up the Argus Africa News Service – was heard to comment that some of my dispatches read like letters home.
It took time to assimilate the elements of good journalism, but there were competent people out there helping me – professionals like Younghusband, the late, great, always irascible Johnny Johnson, as well as Jim Penrith and Henry Reuter, both men then working out of Nairobi. Also, I was getting good money for my efforts and it wasn’t long before I discovered that this was a great way to earn a living. It was certainly a good deal better than any office job.
I was even fortunate enough to go to Lambarene in faraway Gabon to meet Dr Albert Schweitzer. That was an assignment for United Press International (UPI) and came as a prelude to his 90th birthday. I still have the old man’s photo, affectionately inscribed and framed, which he gave to me the day I left his jungle hospital.
If a little dark at times, it was all adventure. To me, distant destinations, shadowy airports, raids in the small hours and so on became integral to a way of life that offered many opportunities.
Much of what I did in those distant days got me into trouble, especially in places like the Cazombo Panhandle in Angola, the mountains around Morozan in Central America, as well as Gaza and Damascus (which to the consternation of the Moukhamarat, the Syrian security police, I visited without an appropriate visa because I’d gone in unheralded, as a bona fide tourist).
Once I went down the Nile from Khartoum to Cairo by road, lake steamer across the great Aswan, and in the latter stages, by felucca sailing boat and finally by rail.
The author during one of his first sweeps through West Africa as an aspiring journalist: it was taken at the home of a Peace Corps volunteer in Conakry, Guinea, a few weeks before the death of Winston Churchill in 1965. (Author’s Collection)
Then came the Niger Delta, where I was rocketed by Biafran Minicon trainers that had been converted into fighter aircraft in 1969, which was followed by intermittent visits to the always-majestic Zambezi Valley in Mozambique. Beautiful it certainly is, but the valley is stiflingly unhealthy during the Southern Hemisphere summer. I contracted cerebral malaria while on an assignment to one of the abandoned Portuguese Air Force bases in Mozambique after Lisbon had capitulated in Africa. It got so bad that I collapsed while having lunch, in what was then still called Salisbury, with P. K. (Pieter) van der Bijl, the Rhodesian defence minister. That evening, my condition deteriorated and my family was called to my bedside in the Andrew Fleming Hospital. To some of the doctors who were treating me, it seemed like I wasn’t going to make it. Obviously I did, but I still go down with the shakes from time to time.
Nigeria originally shaped it all for me, when I was there a few years before the start of the civil war. It was the one country in Africa where reality was often filtered through the hazy lens of patriotism.
I arrived in Lagos in early 1966 with Tony Cusack, a friend from Liverpool, and afterwards he accompanied me overland down the west coast of Africa to Johannesburg. Along the way we were faced with another conflict that few people had heard of and even fewer remember today: the colonial struggle in Angola.
The Portuguese had been in Africa for five centuries and suddenly in 1960, their rule was being disputed by a group of revolutionaries in the bush. Imperial traditions that went way back suddenly began to crumble. There were plenty of people who wanted to know about that war too, so I obliged, which was where my first book was written. I rather wish it wasn’t, because it was so terribly bad!
It was in Angola, almost overnight, that I learnt to use a camera because I had to. I was suddenly in business as a photo-journalist with wars all over the place: in Mozambique, Arab–Israeli clashes, Rhodesia, the Sudan, Ethiopia, Biafra and elsewhere. Journalists were in demand in these Third World outposts, especially those who were prepared to take the occasional risk: the rest of the gang was doing something similar in Vietnam…
I met plenty of others involved in the same sort of thing. As might have been expected, I’d meanwhile added a few of strings to my bow, which included NBC Radio News in New York, the BBC, as well as Interavia in Geneva, a connection that eventually opened doors for me with Britain’s Jane’s Information Group.
There were many good friends made along the way, including Alan Pizzey, who later headed the CBS Rome office (we became mortar and machine-gun targets one quiet afternoon in Luanda) and my old pal Younghusband along with the equally intrepid John Monks of the Daily Express, to whom I owe a measure of thanks for handing me that Cape Town string. There was also Angus McDermid, the BBC World Service’s longest-serving Africa correspondent, at whose feet I sat, listened, learnt and took a few knocks when I didn’t do the job as I should have.
Then there was Frederick Forsyth, with whom I shared a few exploits in Biafra prior to his returning to London at the end of that dreadful internecine struggle to write his epic, Day of the Jackal.
Not very long afterwards, Chris Munnion appeared on the Southern African scene. He wrote the book Banana Sunday for the publishing house I subsequently founded. It was a curious title, but it had a legacy: journalists in those days would slug their copy both with the day on which it was written and where they were at. One of Chris’ reports was dispatched to London’s Daily Telegraph late on a Sunday afternoon from the Congolese port of Banana.
Chris’ book – soon to be updated and reissued under the title Deadline Africa – is arguably one of the best from those of us ‘Old Africa Hands’ who worked this difficult continent and covered so many of its foibles and little-understood idiosyncrasies. It’s way up there with David Lamb’s The Africans and Ed Behr’s classic Anyone Here Been Raped and Speaks English?
There were many others, including Newsweek’s Holger ‘Captain Wilderness’ Jensen who was probably the single ‘most wounded’ journalist in the South East Asian wars: his tally was something like 14 injuries and counting. I also worked for a while with Peter Hawthorne of Time magazine. That project involved a book that chronicled Dr Christian Barnard’s first human heart transplant at Cape Town’s Groote Schuur Hospital.
Of course, there was Mohammed Amin, who honed my journalistic skills, if only because this man – who routinely worked a 15-hour day, and often started at three in the morning – was committed to the profession like no other person I’ve ever met. Amin perfected his craft to the extent that before he was killed, he earned more in a year than most of us scribes took home in a decade.
He topped that by being awarded accolades from just about everywhere, accepting them from presidents, regents, princes, prime ministers, the famous and the celebrated. In his office he had framed portraits of himself with President Reagan, Henry Kissinger, Princess Di, Queen Elizabeth, Margaret Thatcher, Kofi Annan and even one with the Pope, which says a lot for this devout Muslim.
Amin was remarkably blessed. For a start, he was exceptionally ‘Africa-wise’, more than any other journalist I know. He was arrested many times, once by the Soviets in Zanzibar when that country teetered towards anarchy. He spent a while in jail and came out alive when there were others dying in their thousands. Above all, he understood the continent, especially its vagaries and its often-dangerous pitfalls.
He was also a master of survival, though at high personal cost. He limped most of his adult life because of shrapnel that he took in his leg from a Legionnaire’s grenade in Djibouti. Then there was the arm that he lost in Ethiopia, blown away in the explosion of an ammunition dump in Addis Ababa in 1992. That was the same blast that killed his sound man, who had been standing beside him. Amin had qualified fairly early on in life as a pilot, but he took so many chances that I flew with him only once.
He was flying when he was killed, th
is time onboard an Ethiopian Airlines passenger jet that had been hijacked by a group of Islamic zealots after it had taken off from Addis Ababa, which was more than a little ironic since my old pal was himself of Islamic persuasion. The hijackers ordered the captain to fly the plane to the Comoros Archipelago, off the east coast of Africa. Though he warned that they didn’t have enough fuel for that kind of distance, they stuck a gun to his head and asked him whether he wanted to die then or later.
The crash was captured on film, purely by chance, by a tourist on the beach alongside where the passenger plane came down. The footage became one of those real-life sequences you regularly see on The Discovery Channel. The Boeing came in low, its left wing clipped the water, after which it immediately broke up. That film is arguably the most complete real-life passenger jet disaster caught on camera.
Word had it that Amin went down fighting, and those of us who knew him accepted that he could be as cocky as he was sometimes brash, both fine qualities for a news-gatherer. Though handicapped with his artificial arm, Amin didn’t sit back in his seat and wait for the inevitable. After trying to reason with the hijackers, he ended up grappling with them when it became clear that if somebody didn’t do something, everybody would be doomed.
While a number of passengers survived, he didn’t.
In due course, doing my own thing as a newsman, I was also to learn something about Africa. I discovered how to become, if not familiar with, then comprehending of some of the continent’s convoluted conflicts and politics, were that ever possible.
When I was offered an irregular job as Africa and Middle East correspondent for International Defence Review, then a multi-language magazine published monthly in Geneva (it only became part of Jane’s Information Group some years later) it was a step up. To do the job properly, I needed to know and understand my subject. Also, I had to learn fast.
At a glance, I needed to be able to identify an RPD 7.62mm light machine-gun and not confuse it with the RPK (same calibre, later vintage). Much of this is esoteric and to those not involved with the military, more than a little confusing. Africa, and the Arab nations – as well as the rest of the Middle East – offered rich opportunities, and obviously the Cold War helped.
Being a freelance, I’ve always liked to work on my own. For a start, it was easier to get into a revolution, a political upheaval or even a war if one didn’t have a ‘label’. I wasn’t publicly linked either to Fleet Street or to the American media, though I did a lot of work for both. That included an extremely well-paid film project on the war in Afghanistan funded by a large government organization in Langley, Virginia.
This project involved a lot of young people who have since gone on to make worthwhile careers for themselves, including: Tim Lambon, today deputy news editor on BBC’s Channel 4; Paul Moorcraft who went on to write a string of his own war books; John Rubython who was murdered some years ago by an intruder in his Cape Town home (John covered Kandahar and its environs); the incorrigible New Zealander Mark Stucke, who today runs a major film company in London; Chris Everson, who made enough of a fortune as a cameraman for American networks while covering conflicts in Africa and the Middle East to buy himself a wine farm in South Africa; and then, the irrepressible Nicholas Della Casa.
How this all came about is an interesting tale. I was approached by a group of Americans – they called themselves an independent-minded group – to do a one-hour documentary that would commemorate the fifth anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan early in 1985. The war had been going on a while, and wasn’t all that well reported so, basically, the idea was sound. Things dragged on a bit after a couple of visits to the States and it stayed that way until I pointed out that if they wanted the film made in time, my guys would have to go in and return before one of Afghanistan’s horrific winters set in. That gave us a window of only several months.
By May 1985, I’d discovered the true identity of my backers and when I asked them why they didn’t use their own people for this kind of work, they replied that Congress prohibited the CIA from employing American working journalists for what was tantamount to intelligence work.
From there on I was fast-tracked through a rigorous vetting process, most of which had already been quietly achieved in loco: Langley knew everything about me, including where I lived, details about my home in Noordhoek in the Cape Peninsula, my family, my circle of friends and the fact that I liked to travel first class whenever I ventured abroad.
By then Washington had started to pick up the tabs and since I was commuting to the United States and back on an almost monthly basis, they were prepared to settle for Business Class, but I held out for more. That meant that since I always routed my journeys through London, a reasonable add-on allowed me to fly Concorde, courtesy of the American taxpayer.
Once the formalities had been completed, which included a lie detector test in a hotel room at Tyson’s Corner on the outskirts of the US capital, we were ready to move. I’d already been told that since I was a British citizen, Langley would, as a matter of course, advise the British establishment that it was hiring one of their citizens for a ‘project’, which meant that I probably had another file opened in my name at Vauxhall Cross.
At the end of all that, I sent three crews into Afghanistan to make the hour-long film. The same team went twice out of Peshawar, from where they travelled by truck across the Himalayas and then set out on foot in a circular route around Kabul, filming as they went. John Rubython took his team out of Qetta into an area around Kandahar. Paul Moorcraft captures some of the trip admirably in a book he subsequently wrote about those experiences, though it wasn’t until years later that he and the others discovered the identity of their actual paymaster.
A quarter of a million dollars for a three or four month job in the 1980s wasn’t bad going, especially as it was tax free…
Most of the time, when doing the customary journalistic work for which I quickly acquired a taste, I’d go in, do the necessary and get out fast.
There were places that I’d covered and couldn’t get back into again, often for a long time after my reports had appeared in print. I never returned to Zaire after I was jailed for espionage in Lubumbashi and I don’t much wish to either. In my mind the place had long ago been relegated to the status of anus mundi: I’m not alone among my colleagues for thinking so and since that experience is dealt with in Chapters 19 to 22, you can judge for yourself.
Sometimes we journalists found ourselves in situations that we’d rather had not happened. Simon Dring, whom I met on his first foreign assignment in Nigeria, was wounded by a landmine in Cyprus. Lord Richard Cecil, another old friend and a veteran of numerous exploits with the SAS in Northern Ireland, was shot and killed in the Rhodesian war, as was his fellow countryman, André Dennison. Like Chris Munnion, Richard Cecil been writing for the Telegraph.
Al Venter (second on the left) and some members of his team whom he sent into Afghanistan to make a documentary that covered the fifth anniversary of the Soviet invasion. To his right is cameraman Chris Everson and on the far right is British academic-turned-war-correspondent Dr Paul Moorcraft. None of them knew at the time that the CIA was picking up the tab. (Author’s collection)
There have been others, but the majority survived, though quite a few succumbed to that perennial disability among those who called themselves foreign correspondents and which we sometimes prefer not to recognize as cirrhosis of the liver. It’s an occupational disease among journalists everywhere.
Then there was the occasional broken nose from a bar-room brawl or an over-enthusiastic policier trying to establish whether some of us were secret agents. Most of the time we’d be dealing with officials whose very mién would suppurate malice, almost like some people like to project authority. This was a perennial issue in Third World Countries, Africa especially.
With the publication of documents from the KGB archives, after the old Soviet Union had been relegated to history, it now transpires that a few of my
former colleagues were doing a bit of moonlighting for some of these communist states. A very prominent British journalist was found to have been on the payroll of PIDE, the Portuguese secret police, for many years. We’d all been taught that journalists simply don’t do that kind of thing, but some did, and my own ties to the CIA don’t count because until the Berlin Wall came down, they were the ‘good guys’. A few of these spooks were flushed out in subsequent Eastern Bloc disclosures, their careers left in tatters.
Looking back, I reckon it was all rather a gas. I was mortared, rocketed, blown-up by mines, nearly killed in a trench line assault in Angola, robbed, beaten and arrested. I was shot at and, more than once – particularly in Lebanon – targeted by snipers.
Once, back home in Johannesburg, I was stabbed, breaking an arm in the process. As the attacker lunged, I hurled myself backwards to avoid becoming a statistic. It was close, because the woolen pullover I’d been wearing had a six-inch slit along the lower part of my chest. To cut through knitted-wear, the blade must have been razor sharp.
I realized soon enough that it was never difficult to get arrested, in Africa especially, and more recently in some parts of Asia and the Middle East. We tended to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, especially if we’d just arrived in somewhere that had declared war on the country which we’d just left. Things could be both confused and confusing.
Christopher Dickey, Paris bureau chief for Newsweek, phrased it best when he commented in a book review for The New York Times that correspondents were not oracles. But, he declared – and herein lies the rub – ‘they’re on the ground’.