Barrel of a Gun

by Al Venter

  In a way, the scenario resembled an African version of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, because ultimately, that’s the way it transpired. The FNLA, for all America’s largesse, lost hands down to the Cubans and for the decades that followed, Angola became a strategic Soviet staging post. While that might all be history now, the bottom line was that both Washington and Pretoria shared a common interest in trying to prevent Angola’s Marxists from taking over the country’s legitimate government. Which was roughly when a second African insurgent group moved into the breach.

  Calling itself UNITA– an acronym, in Portuguese, for the Union for the Total Independence of Angola – the movement was run along Chinese communist lines by a big, bluff, Swiss-educated guerrilla who called himself Jonas Savimbi. Originally a member of the Ovimbundu tribe, he had acquired his degree in Lausanne and spouted Mao’s dictum at whomever was prepared to listen.

  Whatever other criticism might be levelled at the UNITA leader for keeping his irregular forces in the field for more than 30 years, Savimbi was also the last of the great insurgent strategists of the modern period. Before he was killed, he ended up controlling about nine-tenths of Angola. When it came to strategy, this African guerrilla leader made Che Guevara look like a greenhorn.

  Always the maverick, Savimbi’s single claim to fame was that he hated the Angolan government perhaps fractionally more than he despised Americans. Much of his succour, however – including Stinger SAMs, then also being handed out to the anti-Soviet Mujahedeen in Afghanistan – originally arrived at Washington’s behest.

  At the same time, he wasn’t alone in his quest to conquer Angola. He had the unqualified support of the British company Lonrho, a comparatively new contact that for more than a decade had been cultivating dubious interests throughout independent Africa. Lonrho’s chief executive, Tiny Rowland, made no secret of his intent to include the still youthful Savimbi among his protégés, to the extent that he even let him use his personal jet.

  Though educated by the Swiss, Savimbi was naïve enough at this early stage not to realize that though befriended by Lonrho, Rowland would always put European interests ahead of those of the black people whom the company befriended. London regarded his movement as little more than another player for some of the heftiest political and economic stakes on the continent. He had long been aware that Angola – its huge wealth of diamonds apart – would ultimately emerge as one of the world’s major oil producers. Clearly he had a commendably prescient vision about events to come in Africa, though the manner in which he implemented his multifarious ideas, rarely won him any friends.

  The final link in this complicated game was Big Brother himself who, at the head of the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola – or, more commonly the MPLA – had ensconced himself in Luanda. He was a Luanda-born, Portuguese-educated son of the Methodist pastor who called himself Agostinho Neto, another barrack-room politician who dutifully followed the Marxist line for most of his adult life. What’s more, in taking command of the MPLA – and as a consequence, taking over the entire country – he’d achieved power, like the Congo’s Mobutu, with a brutality that left most of us ‘Old Africa Hands’ flummoxed.

  If somebody stepped in his way, that poor soul would customarily be found a day or two later gagged, bound and moribund. Other critics of the MPLA were hurled out of military aircraft into the sea about 20 miles offshore. Neto and the pro-American Mobutu had a lot in common, though politically they might have lived on different continents.

  The immediate result of all these shenanigans was that Russians, Cubans, East Germans, Poles, Bulgarians, North Koreans and a host of others descended on Angola with a single-minded determination that astonished the West. The country would be theirs, by force if necessary, the objective encapsulated by the watchword: Angola é Nossa! (‘Angola is ours!’). Interestingly, the exact same battle cry that the Portuguese had espoused when they were still fighting the guerrillas in their 11-year guerrilla war.

  To finish the job properly, the Soviets brought with them a lot of trade-goods including weapons, fighter aircraft, helicopters, naval patrol boats and so on. Like Washington, Neto’s Soviet masters had no wish to advertise their largesse and, as I was discover for myself, they were arguably the most paranoid of the lot.

  As with Lonrho’s Tiny Rowland, there was never any question in the minds of the MPLA’s communist allies that Angola would not eventually have to pay for all this. Within a couple of years Luanda had hocked all its coffee, half its diamond production and just about its entire offshore fishing rights to Moscow. The same happened not long afterwards in Mozambique and Guiné-Bissau, two more countries that embraced Lenin’s credo after Lisbon had unceremoniously ditched Africa.

  A lot of fanfare was linked to these developments. Moscow proclaimed that Angola would soon be the ‘greatest socialist success story’ in all of Africa. At the same time, the Kremlin imposed the usual Eastern Bloc restraints that they had implemented at home: free speech was denied, so was free trade as well as the movement of citizens. In fact, without the right permit, Angolan people were forbidden to travel in their own country.

  Step out of line and you couldn’t find work either. Finally, journalists were given the kind of attention they’d been getting in Iron Curtain states: you wrote nothing for publication unless you were labelled by the commissar in charge of such matters as ‘politically correct’.

  There were a number of European left-wing apologists in those days who thought it was all for the good, journalists of the Commitment School, we would call them. These included the likes of Michael Wolfers and Jane Bergerol, as well as the Australian Marxist, Wilfred Burchett. Some were radical enough to be given positions within the Luanda government as propagandists.

  The British writer and socialist, Basil Davidson, was also a regular visitor. He even wrote a book on the guerrilla war then being fought against ‘reactionary and imperialist forces in Angola’ and warned of the antics of dangerous counter-revolutionaries: people like Al J. Venter…

  That comment stemmed from his reading my first and worst book ever. Titled The Terror Fighters, the work followed months spent on operations with the Portuguese Army in Angola.1 Curiously, while Davidson and I had always been always poles apart politically, I was flattered. In one of his reviews, he even warned his readers to be wary of my ‘convoluted political perceptions’. Otherwise, he ventured, it was very well done.

  I had recently spent a short time in Angola attached to a shadowy guerrilla group known then to only a few observers as Chipa Esquadrão or the Chipa Squadron. Originally part of the FNLA, it was run by a disillusioned former communist by the name of Daniel Chipenda, but we’ll leave those exploits – which also almost cost me dearly – for another day.

  Having made my way back to South Africa from this visit, part of the way overland, through UNITA lines where several of us were almost shot by some 12-year-olds with Kalashnikovs keen to make their mark, I was eager to get back into Angola, but not through the extremely volatile south. Operation Savannah was in full swing and there were some big stories breaking, including South African Army contingents moving up from the south under the command of Colonel Jan Breytenbach.

  Now I was back in South Africa, Angola was very much in the news and my editor was onto me. I had to go back to Angola again, he insisted. Easier said than done, I replied.

  My initial thoughts were that I’d try going in the same way I did the first time, by returning to Luanda. However, only a month before a group of MPLA spooks had watched me fly out of Angola into what had since become ‘enemy territory’ in Nova Lisboa (since renamed Huambo). I’d been warned by a friend working in military intelligence in Pretoria that it would not be a clever move because they might be waiting for me if I tried to return. He said that Cuban and Russian agents were already thick on the ground in the Angolan capital; in fact, I’d met some of them while still there, but at that stage they tended to maintain a rather low profile.

  Also, the fact that
I’d spent time, gun-in-hand, with Chipenda’s force – by now joined by a group of Portuguese mercenaries – hadn’t gone altogether unnoticed. For now, I decided, there would be no going back that way.

  The alternative option was to try to get in through Zambia. My objective was to try to achieve contact with some of the South African troops who, by now, had invaded the country in their thousands. It was a story literally waiting to break. Which was why I ended up with a group of like-minded scribes camped round the bar at the Ridgeway Hotel in Lusaka. Each one of us was intent on recording history.

  A number of issues predicated the next move, including the fact some of our less sedentary colleagues were making remarkable headway and they were doing so from inside Angola. Mike Nicholson of ITN had already achieved a breakthrough by reporting to London that he had spotted South African soldiers in South Angola. Others spoke of mercenaries attached to UNITA forces, but they had no proof. Mike had wandered into a forward South African position at Silva Porto, now Menongue.

  Not long afterwards, with Fred Bridgland – the Reuters man in Lusaka – Mike boarded the Lonrho jet on what was to have been a tour of ‘UNITAland’ – otherwise known as Savimbi country. One of their stops en route to Benguela on the coast was at Rundu, a South African military base and strongpoint near the northern border of South West Africa.

  Once the aircraft was stationary on the runway, the two journalists saw rows of Eland armoured cars, stacks of ammunition 20 or 30 feet high, artillery pieces and hundreds of khaki-clad South African soldiers. Parked on the adjacent apron, there were South African Air Force C-130 transport planes being loaded with this stuff and taking off and landing in relays. They didn’t need to be told that all this hardware was going into Angola at a heady pace to support the war effort.

  Rundu had effectively become the staging-post for the South African invasion of Angola. And there was I, stuck in Lusaka, with all the other inkslingers listening to reports of South African, Russian, American, rebel Portuguese and mercenary doings next door. Worse, I’d been covering the same ground as ITN only weeks before, so I had a pretty good idea of what was going on.

  Shortly before flying to Lusaka, I’d even chartered a small plane out of Windhoek, the capital of South West Africa. On arrival in Rundu our plane was directed away from where the activity was taking place.

  ‘If you go in there,’ a young officer on the runway warned me as we taxied up, ‘I’ll order one of my guns to open fire.’ He pointed at a heavy machine-gun on a tower overlooking the loading bays and it was clear that he wasn’t joking. So who were we to argue?

  After we’d been allowed to taxi to a designated area on the far side of the airport and had left the plane, we were told that our presence was illegal. The town was Headquarters, No. 1 Military Area, and the man in charge was Brigadier Dawid Schoeman, who regarded journalists as being a single link in the evolutionary chain above reptilia.

  In Rundu, separated as it is from Angola by the broad Kavango River – that was soon to have more bodies floating in it than either crocs or hippos – I was about as welcome as an outbreak of cholera.

  Yes, said the brigadier, the invasion was on. However, since I had entered a restricted military area without authority, I could be charged with violating national security were I to write anything about the ongoing operation. Furthermore, I’d be prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act. In South Africa in those days you didn’t disregard such threats: the old apartheid regime, it has since been demonstrated, killed for much less, and my wife and children were in Johannesburg.

  In my mind, the situation was absurd. Also, it was compounded by the fact that the South Africans were very much aware that my politics were hardly radical. I’d always opposed the Russian menace, I told Schoeman, but he didn’t believe me. Anyway, he said, he had his orders and journalists, in the Afrikaans terminology of the day, were kak.2 In some respects, I suppose, he might have been right.

  There was a delay of several days before the South African Army sent me back to Waterkloof Air Force Base in South Africa in a C-130 transport. On board were six bloodied South African soldiers: all had been caught in a Cuban ambush in the hills above Benguela, hundreds of miles to the west on the Angolan coast, and they were in shocking shape. A team of doctors, including two surgeons and four nurses – were on the hop throughout the three-hour flight back to Waterkloof, the main air force base outside Pretoria.

  One of the injured, a youngster of perhaps 18, was also a Venter and I still don’t know whether he made it. That was something I would have liked to follow up, but all subsequent enquiries at No. 1 Military Hospital in Pretoria in those rigidly monitored days were logged. You gave your name and your address, together with your telephone number, usually followed by the inevitable: ‘Why do you want to know?’ That would be preceded by the question: ‘Are you a member of the family?’ Since I wasn’t, end of the story.

  In any event, within a few days I was on my way again, this time heading to Zambia. By then it was clear that I would have to try something more radical.

  Once in Lusaka, I was told that it might just be feasible to go overland into Angola. However, that meant heading hundreds of miles in the direction of Barotse Province and being stopped at dozens of security checkpoints along the way, each with explicit orders to stop people like me. The Zambian government was very much aware what was going on along their western frontiers and like most African countries, they didn’t tolerate journalists.

  It seemed crazy, but some of my colleagues were lucky. A former SAS officer and British television cameraman, Nick Downie, afterwards got into Angola to make a film on UNITA as part of a television series I was producing. Then there was Leon Dash, a black correspondent for the Washington Post, who hiked more than 2,000 miles with Savimbi’s forces – sometimes walking naked through the swamps, clutching his clothes above his head, and sometimes living on insects, as well as frequently coming under fire. His dispaches became a model of reporting on an African bush war. Dash also survived crippling attacks of malaria.

  I knew well enough the difficulties linked to going in alone and on foot. In the early stages of the civil war, the notion of a solitary white man (I could not get anyone to accompany me) trudging through some of the most desolate, remote swamp and bush country on the African continent simply wasn’t on. In the end the venture was turned down by my editors because Lloyds of London refused insurance cover.

  Angola under conventional circumstances, possibly; or Zambia, at hugely inflated premiums, they told the company. On my own and on foot, there was no way. In any event, Republican Press, my employer at the time, was already baulking about money.

  Since there was no prospect of my getting into Angola through the Caprivi, because the South Africans had declared the entire Angolan border no-go, or from the east through Zambia, I had to try going north. That meant entering Angola through Zaire, an equally daunting prospect since the country was ruled by Mobuto Sese Seko, one of recent history’s tyrants.

  The Congo’s post-Uhuru period, from the 1960s on, remains one of the most confused and violent of any of the 50-odd African countries that achieved independence in the second half of the 20th century. The entire episode was marked by an unconscionable level of violence, coupled to slaughters on an almost apocalyptic scale. It was coincidental perhaps, but it also overlapped with the emergence of the first groups of white mercenaries in the modern period. This vast land of incredible wealth and mind-blowing potential was confronted with a level of avarice and brutality that made most of Zaire ungovernable, a situation, sadly, that still exists today.

  Though the Congolese Army had mutinied within days of Belgium granting the country its freedom in 1960, things seemed manageable; at least until a young African army officer took over the government in Leopoldville by force in 1965. One of his first gestures was to rename old Leopoldville – or ‘Leo’ as we media types called it – to Kinshasa. He went on to establish one of the most violent and oppressive regime
s in Africa.

  The man responsible was Lieutenant General Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, or as the international community was later to know him, Monsieur, le President, whose name ultimately became synonymous with a measure of kleptocracy that even for Africa was remarkable. While the Belgians still ruled, he had been a sergeant, yet among his first gestures to his people was to be become implicated in the murder of one of Africa’s great heroes, Patrice Lumumba.

  Six years later, Mobutu changed the name of the country to Zaire and his own to Mobutu Sese Seko Bhendu Wa Za Banga, which means ‘the all-powerful warrior who, because of his endurance and inflexible will to win, goes from conquest to conquest, leaving fire in his wake’, which just about says it all.

  His legions of sycophants called him ‘The Wise One’, or ‘Our Guide’, and sometimes, ‘The Redeemer’. To the amusement of those foreigners living in Zaire at the time, a sequence of this prodigy was shown before the national news each night. He would descend from the heavens in full dress military uniform with a halo perched precariously over his head. Because he was an African leader, no church leaders or diplomats ever protested at this travesty, not even the Pope.

  Being Africa, that kind of thing led to even crazier excesses, very much as Zimbabwe’s home-grown tyrant Robert Mugabe was tacitly allowed to do almost as he pleased while he ruled from the barrel of a gun. Mobutu killed with impunity during the 32 years that he ran the country. While wielding his baton, he recorded one of the worst human rights records on the planet, executing his opponents by the hundreds – as he did in 1995 when a Durban pilot, Jeff McKay, viewed some of this horror at first-hand.