Barrel of a Gun

by Al Venter

  McKay was flying for the President at the time, a period when there were very few who ever saw or heard of any anti-Zairean protests in the civilized world. Fearful for his own life, McKay sought other work soon afterwards.

  Other nations, the United States and Europe included, simply ignored the country which in its first decade of independence had become, as one European newspaper described it, ‘Africa’s first ring of the Ninth Circle of Hell’. Zaire was blessed with boundless commodities that the West needed, including gold, cobalt, copper and more diamonds that anyone had thought possible to exploit adequately. It was said that prior to Mobuto fleeing to France with his entourage, with billions of dollars, Deutschmarks, British pounds, French Francs and Japanese Yen – as well as hundreds of pounds of diamonds – in the hold, there was a room in his palace that was hip-high in these raw precious stones.

  Meantime, it has been estimated that in the years since Belgium so abruptly stepped out of the picture in Central Africa in 1960, between four and five million Congolese have died. The majority perished in wars, civil disturbances, rebellions, or of starvation and disease, but most of all, they died as a result of man’s inhumanity towards man.

  Mobutu’s excesses were the cause of most of it and while he ruled, he was feared. However, that didn’t bother him. Always the budding intellectual, he’d sometimes surprise his guests with astonishing little vignettes that he’d probably cleverly prepared beforehand, such as when he told a French journalist, after being asked about the severity of his rule: ‘Let them hate as long as they fear.’

  The Romans used the expression oderint dum metuant and Mobutu applied it with a vigour that shocked us all.

  Zaire never really recovered from the evenements of the 1960s. Mobutu is long gone, replaced by another revolutionary called Kabila, who in his earlier days had played host to Ché Guevara on one of his rare visit to revolutionary Africa. He, in turn, was murdered by one of his own palace guards under the most mysterious of circumstances and another Kabila, his son, took over.

  The organization responsible for keeping the lid on dissent at the time of my visit was Mobutu’s original secret police, innocuously titled Centre National de Documentation or CND. It was truly a black Gestapo-type organization.

  The prospect of traversing this dangerous country to get back into Angola, though not pleasing, offered some stimulating possibilities. After all, Zaire was the passionately pro-American, anti-communist, Western ally in this complicated Central African cat’s cradle. And Mobutu was our friend.

  The last time I’d passed through Zaire on the way back to South Africa from Nigeria, my travelling partner Tony Cusack was robbed in broad daylight in the local equivalent of Kinshasa’s Fifth Avenue by a crowd of youngsters, who roughed us up before we knew what was happening. We should have been more cautious.

  Some of the wags in Lusaka expressed doubts about us going ahead. Others told terrible stories about people who had come out of Mobutu’s Zaire a short while before. The CND, we were warned, detained and put to death anybody suspected of anti-government or anti-Mobutu activity. They’d been at it for decades and, by now, were well ahead of the Angolans in taking innocent lives, were that possible.

  Still, it was agreed, the only other possible way into Angola was from the sea. However, how to achieve that was something else we couldn’t even contemplate. Anyway, we said, other journalists we knew had gone in and nothing untoward had happened to them. They’d made contact with the FNLA, which had its headquarters in Kinshasa, but what we hadn’t been told was that they’d arrived by air and on direct flights from Europe.

  What we in Lusaka did not know was that they – like the rest of us – were kicking their heels in idleness in Kinshasa waiting for something to happen. Nobody in authority in the former Congolese capital would take them anywhere, least of all the FNLA.

  The CIA would certainly make sure of that!

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Into the Congo’s Cauldron

  ‘The country is ruled by a man with the intellect of an army sergeant.’

  Former Newsweek and London Daily Mail correspondent Peter Younghusband after almost being put up against a wall and shot by Congolese soldiers

  IT WAS NOT DIFFICULT TO find someone to go into Zaire with me. I had already struck up an acquaintance with Gilles Hertzog, a young French journalist freelancing for Le Monde and today, very much a part of the French literary establishment (he’s the author of Le Séjour des Dieux). The grandson of Marcel Cachin, co-founder of the French Communist Party, and related to the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy (with whom he subsequently co-authored), Gilles had been in Angola at about the same time as I was. That, unfortunately, was his first trip to Africa and mistakenly, he believed that I knew what lay ahead. That said, he was French, which was essential for our exploit because almost nobody speaks English in Zaire and my own knowledge of the language was derisory.

  When I suggested the prospect of going in, he accepted straight away. I was only to discover too late that the man was about as radical as they come on the Left Bank. In his bags he carried several tracts of Marxist propaganda, some of it from Cuba. There was certainly enough of it to get us tortured and executed.

  It was a stupid move because Zaire at the time was probably the most anti-communist country on the African continent. Anybody espousing a radical creed was given short shrift by Mobutu’s secret police. South Africa under the old apartheid regime was similarly minded, but at least your fate didn’t rest on the whims of some obscure functionary with a pistol tucked into his belt.

  However, all that still lay ahead. Meanwhile, bubbly with enthusiasm, we reported to the local UNITA headquarters in Lusaka the next morning certain that a remarkable African adventure lay ahead. We wanted to accompany UNITA forces into the field in their war against the Luanda regime, we told a small man dressed in a tight-collared Chinese tunic, which had become accepted as a kind of formal uniform within the movement. It was probably the least practical dress for the tropics, but Savimbi favoured it, which meant that everybody else had to as well.

  ‘Impossible’, the little fellow stated in flawless English and totally without malice. ‘If you enter Angola without the authority of the Allied Supreme Military Command and you are picked either by UNITA or the FNLA, you will be treated as a spy… you will be suspected of working for the MPLA. Worse, you will be executed. The same will happen if you try to enter through Zaire’, he warned.

  Gilles suggested to the man that he must be joking. He wasn’t, he assured us. ‘If you want to die, try going into Angola without our blessing.’

  He added that neither he nor his superiors had much control over combatants in the field in day-to-day affairs during the hostilities then going on. Since black soldiers were mostly ‘ignorant’ – his words, not ours – they were hardly likely to respect any press card that we might bandy about. He threw in a rather convincing rider about most of them being illiterate anyway.

  ‘Your media accreditation would mean about as much to the average UNITA soldier as a press release… very few have heard of or seen either’, which was when he smiled…

  Then he said something that worried us: ‘The same applies to the enemy… anyone associated with Western nations will, if they get their hands on you, be treated by the opposition, the people in Luanda and the MPLA as a hostile agent.’

  His closing words were forthright: ‘Be well aware of the risks my friends… Angola is now in a state of total war and as we all know, in wartime, solutions tend to be final.’ It sounded like an edict out of the Nazi era.

  In view of this, he suggested, why not just be sensible and go home? Forget the whole thing? What was it to us, he asked, that there was war in Angola?

  Some foreign correspondents took his advice. After a week or two with too much time on their hands, far too much hooch and too many black girls, the majority went back to Europe, America or South Africa. Others routed their return tickets through Nairobi and Kinshasa.
Gilles and I thought about it over a few beers and then headed north by road, later the same day. We’d made up our minds and decided to go in overland.

  In spite of warnings, we thought the risks had been exaggerated. In any event, we’d taken the precaution of asking the Zairean Embassy in Lusaka for transit visas and had been told that there would be no problem whatever. ‘Just roll up and everything will be fixed up on the border’, the official told us enthusiastically.

  He was actually quite keen that we should go. I already had an FNLA press card, which meant that politically I was ‘acceptable to the cause’. I should simply ask at the point of entry to be taken to the local FNLA commander and all would be arranged, he suggested.

  The border between Zambia and Zaire at Kasumbalesa in the extreme north of what, not very long before, had been Northern Rhodesia, was not one of the most impressive of Africa’s gateways. Apart from the mines, the region never readily accepted progress.

  Outside the copper-producing towns, it was as thickly forested and primeval as it had been when the first white interlopers arrived in the 19th century. What struck us immediately about the area adjacent to the Zairean frontier in which we travelled was the number of roadblocks and troops among a mainly listless civilian community, the majority it seemed, out of work. The place exuded a profound melancholy begotten by an economy in total disarray.

  Zambia by the mid 1970s had been independent barely a dozen years, yet the rot caused by Kenneth Kaunda’s hare-brained socialist schemes had taken effect. Even so, as we were soon to discover, it was not as bad as Zaire, not remotely so.

  The twin border posts – one on either side of the frontier, a few hundred yards apart – were a series of small ramshackle buildings reminiscent of an earlier era. Like the adjacent town of Kasumbalesa, this was a peculiar sort of place in the middle of the bush. The imperial powers a hundred years before had decided exactly how the borders should be drawn on the map of Africa, regardless of whether they cut across tribal or traditional land. On the face of it, someone had walked into the forest at Kasumbalesa and decided that that was where the border post would be.

  Thousands of Zaireans and Zambians crossed there every month. Because of shortages of most essentials in Zaire, the traffic – both legal and contraband – was significant. Controls were strict, but you could soon detect that it needed more than just documents to hurry a consignment through. American dollars in the right hands made things work in double quick time. In Zairois, the local lingua franca, such a gift was, and still is, called matabish.

  Gilles and I arrived at Kasumbalesa on foot, after taking a taxi from the bus station. We walked to the border post carrying our luggage but were beaten to it by a busload of Zaireans going the other way. The immigration official on the Zairean side ordered us to the back of the line. In Africa, when a functionary in uniform with a rifle singles you out for attention, you never argue. In fact, it is often good policy to smile and thank him for abusing you. At a roadblock a corporal suddenly becomes a colonel, or possibly even a general, if it suits the purpose.

  When, at last, we finally got to this officious little shit and gave him our story, he shook his head, slammed his fist down on the desk and said: ‘Pas possible’. We asked, still smiling, to see Monsieur le directeur. That was a mistake! We were proposing to go over his head.

  The directeur was not there, he declared firmly. He’d gone to lunch, even though it was only ten in the morning. He would not be back before six that evening. It would be better if we came back next week; or preferably, next month. We said we would wait, to which he replied, so graciously that it surprised us both and in English, ‘Welcome to the Republic of Zaire’.

  Towards dusk the directeur himself appeared. He listened courteously to our story and his questions were concise. He later told us that he had spent two years at Louvain University in Belgium. The man was friendly and not consumed by a need to prove anything.

  No, he said, with a friendly pat on Gilles’ back, there would be no problem. However, we must understand that Zaire was on a war footing. He simply couldn’t let anybody through without a visa because that was the law. A visa could be obtained only in Lubumbashi. War dogs of an older generation will remember the town as Elizabethville. From there, he suggested, we would be able to cross the border into Angola at Teixeira de Sousa. There might, of course, be a little delay. ‘The war’, he smiled grandly, nodding his head.

  Gilles and I looked at each other. What was all this rubbish about Zaire being unfriendly? This guy had just disproved all those notions. We were pleased because it all seemed to be coming together…

  However, he said, still smiling, there was one little problem. We smiled back inquiringly. He declared in his friendliest mién that he simply could not let us go on to Lubumbashi on our own: somebody would have to accompany us, and it would be his personal responsibility. The problem, he added, was that he’d only come off duty at about nine that evening, in about three hours.

  In a country as hard-pressed for foreign exchange as Zaire – even though it produces so much wealth in copper, uranium, cobalt, gold and diamonds – it came as a surprise when, promptly at nine, a brand-new French station-wagon arrived to take us to our destination. It was driven by the big man’s chauffeur. We’d be accompanied by another member of his staff, an athletic-looking soldier who introduced himself as André.

  We had seen André around during the afternoon. The man was clearly military in appearance, and a toughie. Then he had hardly spared us a glance, far less a greeting: no twinkling sense of fun with this guy. André appeared to have no particular function, but he obviously had direct access to the director’s office, which indicated rank.

  So we set off. I travelled in front with the driver. André and Gilles were in the back. About a mile down the road, André told the driver to stop at a roadside bar: the only one on the two-hour drive to Lubumbashi.

  It was a typically African bush joint. A speaker blared out loud local pop music and the only lights were a row of paraffin lamps. Two black whores came over, but André told them to fuck off. They didn’t argue, but retreated to a safe distance.

  The beers arrived with a selection of dirty tin mugs and our escort promptly ordered two more; for the road, he said. He indicated that we should pay. André moved aside to talk to someone he knew.

  I was about to say something about the noise when another man came to our table. He spoke to me in English, his voice hardly audible above the din. ‘Listen, my friend,’ he said leaning across. ‘I am sympathetic towards you because I am Zairean. I was educated in Zambia and I have an English friend… a good friend.’ He looked around furtively to see what André was doing.

  ‘I am a member of the police here on the border and I saw you at Kasumbalesa today. I must tell you that you are both in very deep trouble. You think you are going to the FNLA, but in fact you have been arrested. Do you understand me?’

  Even in that bad light, the colour must have drained from my face for Gilles could see that something was wrong. He tried to interrupt but I raised a hand to let the policeman continue. He obviously knew what he was talking about; how else would he have been privy to our connection with the FNLA?

  Gesturing over his shoulder towards André, the man said that we were being taken to a military barracks in Lubumbashi. ‘It’s the worst in the country. They are taking you to the place of killing. They think you are agents of the MPLA.’ André returned at this point and we talked of other things. Our informant’s manner warned us not to mention a word. In any event, more beer had arrived and we were again expected to pay. André told us to drink up. I hastily told Gilles to stall him.

  Gilles explained that since we had been on the road all day, we were very thirsty. Could he order another round? I produced another tendollar bill and the Zairean’s eyes lit up. Each round so far had cost ten dollars, three or four times the usual price, our escort pocketing the change each time. When André went off to fetch the drinks, I quickly told Gill
es what the policeman had said. I then asked the border guard: ‘What the hell can we do?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Don’t try to escape or you will be shot.’ André and the driver were armed, he warned. They were professionals. We were in Shit Street, he suggested, big time…

  On my own, I knew, I could probably have made it to Zambia. I was aware that the road followed the border for some distance before turning inland. I calculated it to lie about a mile south of us, perhaps two. In any event, I was fit and could outrun most others my age. However, Gilles was an innocent in a hostile world and I could hardly leave him.

  It was an immediate decision and there was no other way. We were in this together, and anyway, the Frenchman from Paris knew almost nothing about Africa. If I had gone off, he would almost certainly have been killed.

  Our options, just then, were limited. Somehow though, I thought, there was hope. There was a Japanese mine nearby – we could see the lights from where we sat. Possibly we might be able to ask permission to stop the car for a piss in the bush and disappear into the heavy forest that hung over the road in clusters. When I mentioned my thoughts to Gilles, I suddenly realized that neither of us knew the area. Worse, for the little we could see of the jungle, it was obvious that much of it was impenetrable. Also, there might be rivers to cross. Besides, Gilles had already told me, he was terrified of snakes.

  Then, even if we were to get away, André still had our passports. Lusaka and our embassies were hundreds of miles to the south. If the Zaireans raised the alarm, the Zambians would also be after us once we’d crossed the frontier.

  Anyway, we were not yet under close arrest, I said, taking a loftier approach. Then we noticed our driver sitting on the other side of the bar watching our every move. He hadn’t touched a drink. Moments later André waved us towards the car.