Barrel of a Gun

by Al Venter

  Our ‘cell’, we were to discover soon enough, was an old brothel, which formed part of a military barracks near the offices of Union Miniere, then listed as Geocomin in the Wall Street Journal and currently operating under some other nomenclature. It was surrounded by a wall, 12 feet high, and guarded at all corners by soldiers in tall towers. We speculated about why they should bring us here since there were plenty of ‘proper’ jails in Lubumbashi. When we were served with half a chicken between us and more beer it dawned: another step in first separating us from our assets, at $10 a throw with l’Assassin as our banker.

  Each time we handed over money, André would go out and pay in local currency. He’d pocket the difference and as far as he was concerned, we’d never know. But we did: it was something we’d discussed with the others back in Lusaka. We knew he’d sell our dollars on the black market at many times face value. With a hearty appetite himself, we ended up parting with $50 in less than an hour. André was throwing our cash about like a drunken sailor.

  Eventually, at something after four in the morning (they had taken our watches), I said we were tired and needed sleep. A guard led us to our quarters and we were locked up for the night. Before putting our heads down, we spent a while carefully examining the room, which was a bit bigger than I’d expected. It had a small barred window up high, a steel door, concrete walls and a cement floor with no covering.

  Gilles said it was strange that no one had searched our bags, which was true: always the unexpected…

  There was obviously no way that we could escape from Mobutu’s hotel. Although there were whores about – we had seen their dark shapes in the shadows as we were escorted in – this was a military establishment, unmistakeably so, even if it didn’t rank with your average army barracks.

  The beds were filthy, the single mattress caked with dried semen, which was when it dawned: we were being held in the local military bordello, which should have raised our spirits but didn’t, in part because cockroaches and bugs crawled all over the wall. Swarms of mosquitoes appeared from nowhere as soon as the guard doused the lights. Gilles, a rather fastidious Parisian, was distinctly distraught.

  There was very little sleep that night. We were awake again before dawn trying to work out a scheme that would release us from this hopeless mess. Throughout, I was worried about the Guevara tomes, so at first light I tore a small hole in the mattress and stuffed them in. We could but hope.

  Daylight brought a change of guard outside our door as well as l’Assassin’s face. He was never happy in the morning, when he would peep through a small hole in the door and order us to get ready. This time he gave a direct order, in French: ‘Lay out all your possessions on the bed.’ This routine was repeated for several more days, except that on the second morning, surprise! We were taken to a little restaurant in town for breakfast.

  White people in African custody sometimes get this privilege, I learnt later, especially if they hadn’t yet been charged. The reason is simple: food. Europeans, André explained when we asked him what this was all about, ate differently from black people. We also understood that there was a fee attached to such favours. More dollars, more matabish, because André insisted that he pay the bill with our dollar bills.

  Then, for the first time, later that morning, we were taken into the headquarters of the CND.

  The main security building in Lubumbashi seems small. However, it is multi-layered, with two floors below ground level. The expansive exterior hides a labyrinth of offices that include a reception area, radio rooms, a sleeping area for the guards, dungeons below, torture chambers (we were told) and a number of sparsely furnished cells on the first floor which were used for interrogation.

  Radio masts straddled the roof of the building as well as several houses nearby. There were also a number of cells at the back holding black prisoners, all awaiting trial or interrogation. The entire complex was guarded by soldiers armed with American M16s.

  Over the course of the following week – without breaks for Saturdays or Sundays – we spent many hours at the CND headquarters in Lubumbashi. Impressions of those events remain vivid.

  The first thing I saw when I walked into the room where they initially interrogated us was a large wire wastepaper basket full of discarded rubber stamps. There were hundreds of them. From where had they come? What were they originally intended for? We dared not look too closely, never mind ask: in this building everyone minded his own business.

  I also remember clearly the crisp rattle of transmissions in morse, alternating at almost regular intervals with the cries of prisoners in the cells below. In this day and age one might have thought that the morse code had long ago been superseded by short-wave radio. It probably has by now, but not in the Zaire of the 1970s.

  It didn’t take us long to discover that there were more white prisoners in the complex, including five Portuguese. We weren’t allowed to communicate with them, although a glance exchanged is often as effective as a handshake and they seemed to have something of a military bearing. Deserters? We could only speculate. Anybody who is crazy enough to seek sanctuary in Zaire must be mad anyway.

  The Portuguese were still there when we left, two of them bloodied, dishevelled and showing signs of having been thrashed. One had a filthy bandage around his head, the other looked away each time we caught his eye. That they were beaten often was obvious and it worried us. Was it to be our turn next?

  One morning when we arrived they’d been joined by three other Europeans, one an elderly, white-haired man who spoke only French. The other two might have been Rhodesian or South African, mercenaries perhaps? We never found out what ultimately happened to them.

  Another prisoner who had been released two weeks before our arrival was Reinoud von Muhlen, a Dutchman and the regional director for Philips in Zaire’s southern Shaba Province. In a search of his offices a month before, soldiers had discovered a radio transmitter which the troops would probably have interpreted in much the same way as having found a code book full of mysterious ciphers in Cyrillic script.

  In spite of explanations that the set was about to be installed in the CND offices at Kolwezi – a mining town to the north (and the scene of savage massacres of whites by black soldiers not long afterwards) – von Muhlen was arrested and charged with espionage. This happened even though the CND used Philips equipment throughout the region and von Muhlen was the boss of the local European subsidiary of that massive conglomerate.

  From what we could gather, von Muhlen had been badly beaten. While local whites rallied and brought food to his cell, he saw very little of it. The Dutch government managed to get him released, but it took a while.

  Moving about Lubumbashi, between our cell and the CND offices, we found it a dirty, depressing town, ineffably so. Garbage was piled up everywhere and never removed. A pall of smoke hung over some districts as people tried to burn their trash, which was difficult because it rained a lot and everything was damp. The people we saw in the streets as we were taken from one place to another looked disconsolate. They walked about as if they had heavy weights around their necks and you rarely saw a smile.

  There was little doubt that we were spotted by some of Lubumbushi’s white residents, but they turned the other way if we approached in their direction. This was one place where you didn’t crap on your own doorstep: von Muhlen’s experiences with Mobutu’s security goons had been salutary.

  One afternoon, while lingering at the main gate of the CND headquarters waiting for transport back to the barracks, some troops brought in a suspect with his arms bound behind him. His head and face were covered in blood, poor devil. His eyes, dull and sunken, said it all. It was obvious that he already knew his fate. Death and its more brutal preliminaries were inevitable. He looked at me, or rather through me. Part of him was already lifeless. He knew as well as I did that he would never walk out of that place again.

  The most striking – and possibly the most frightening – person we encountered in Lubumbashi was kno
wn to us only as Zaki. This was a man whose reputation extended far beyond the borders of Zaire and who liked to present a world of silent menace. With good reason. It was heard in the bars of the Copperbelt in Zambia – and in Angola – that Zaki was the original security ogre. He would kill on a whim, though it was rumoured that he had a peculiar predilection for tackling people of Portuguese extraction.

  The little bastard was short, stocky and had slits for eyes. He was the sort of man who can turn a pacifist into a potential murderer and from the start we were aware that he took particular interest in our plight. It was his job to find out for whom we were spying. Every day, for hours at a stretch, he would interrogate us, first together, then singly. Having been in Angola only a short while before, I seemed to enjoy his particular attention. There were times when I had to sit upright in a hard-backed chair with my hands on my legs. Zaki always positioned himself behind a large desk while two of his henchmen loomed over me.

  Any lapse of discipline on my part would result in a clip on the ear, nothing too brutal, but it hurt. Then, when he discovered that I was living in South Africa, he became the consummate racist: it was payback time. South Africa is a nation of racist thugs, he would shout. My Angolan FNLA connections also puzzled him, though I never admitted to having actually fought for Chipa Esquadrão, Daniel Chipenda’s guerrilla group, while still in Angola.

  The hours spent with Zaki alternated between moderately intelligent conversation and a disconcerting awareness that I was not dealing with anybody rational. Zaki just knew that we were spies. He told us so. On dozens of occasions during the days that followed, he repeated the same questions, sometimes latching on to some random fact, such as that my father’s first names were the same as mine, and he would worry away at it, like a terrier: he simply couldn’t understand the logic. It was hardly a Zairean custom, so, he deduced, I was lying.

  Not long afterwards we were led before three FNLA officers who’d been passing through Lubumbashi on their way to Zambia. My FNLA card was produced, which was followed by an interrogation of a totally different sort.

  Where had I got the card? By whom was it issued?

  The next phase caught me short. Granted, it was just possible that the FNLA card might be genuine, one of the men said. Possibly I had been in Nova Lisboa during the battle for that city, as I had said I was. But on whose authority had I left the front? I was asked. The implications were clear: I was being viewed as a deserter from the Angolan FNLA and that was immediately problematical: in some African countries I could be viewed as having betrayed the cause.

  I tried to explain that when I was there, conditions in and about Nova Lisboa were chaotic. In any event, I was a journalist, not a combatant, even if I did have my own FN-FAL rifle. Having got my story and my pictures, I told them, I’d left the country by heading south, departing with a column of refugees, some of whom had been farming in the area not long before. It was all perfectly above-board, I insisted.

  To my interrogators, my actions meant one thing: I’d fled in the face of the enemy. I had abandoned my ‘brave colleagues’ in their moment of crisis. There was only one answer for such crimes the Angolans suggested. The fact that the card that I had been carrying identified me as a non-combatant journalist was irrelevant. Either I was for the FNLA or I was against it. Anything circumstantial counted for nothing. Such is the nature of many of these conflicts, then and now. However, my arguments must have been convincing as the matter was not taken any further, much to my relief, as what they might do to a ‘deserter’ was too horrible to contemplate.

  Another man now entered our lives; Citoyen Yambo. In his attempt to break free from the trappings of the former Belgian colonial power, Mobutu had replaced the appellations Monsieur, Madame and so on with the words Citoyen and Citoyenne of the French Revolution. Like the word ‘comrade’ in other societies, this custom permeated all levels, CND cells included. Since nobody disregarded a presidential edict, I became Citoyen Venter.

  So it was Citoyen Yambo, the head of the CND, who almost studiously wore an expression of bored benevolence, actually rescued two scribes from a fate that was starting to look uncertain,

  During the course of one grilling session, I’d produced a number of articles that I’d written for an American magazine on the Angolan war highlighting the danger of a de facto Cuban takeover of the Luanda government. Yambo was impressed and showed it with a broad smile right across his face. Journalist or not, I was obviously anti-Angolan and after that initial session, he seemed to take me at my word.

  Zaki was overruled when it was suggested that I ought to be tortured to find out the real truth. Poor Gilles: he was on the point of collapse. The Frenchman reacted in curious ways to some of these obstacles. To Gilles Hertzog, our black jailers could do no wrong. He was steadfast in this view no matter what they did, or how many knocks we took. Once we got back to our cell, he would intimate that we, as whites, deserved all that we got. After all, he remonstrated, Africa had been subjected to European domination for centuries. I didn’t know until much later that the Hertzog family background was staunchly communist and totally opposed to all that France (or Britain) stood for in colonial Africa.

  In one sense, I suppose he was right. In another – with me the butt of vituperation to which I wouldn’t subject the guy I liked least – I resented his views of a situation that could possibly cost us our lives. He was consistently naïve and the fact that he’d taken the Ché stuff into Zaire was unconscionable. I said as much, which didn’t do a lot for personal relations between the four narrow walls where we were incarcerated. It wasn’t cabin fever yet, but it was getting there fast.

  I often wondered in later years whether the Guevara books had been found. It could have meant certain death to whoever was being held in the cell at that time, but then the Frenchman never considered that probability. It also mattered little to him, lying there in a dark cell being devoured by mosquitoes, that what was happening to us was simply not right. Our bona fides as journalists were clear. These people, with no evidence to the contrary, had judged us as they would the enemy. Gilles had a ringside view of some of the barbarism taking place around us. Like me, he could hear the screams. However, he remained silent on such issues.

  It did not take me many hours to discover that Gilles Hertzog had another habit that was not only unendearing but morbidly stultifying. During the night he’d get up and wash his foreskin in the only basin that we both used, and do so sometimes three or four times in a row. There was a latrine bucket in a corner, which I had to slop out every morning, but that wasn’t good enough for this Frenchman. He wouldn’t touch it for the purpose of cleaning his dick.

  Then, when he awoke, he’d go to the basin, let the water run and pull back his foreskin – right there before me – and do his thing once more. He would do it again after we’d been returned to our cell following the daily ‘discussion session’ as Citoyen Yambo liked to call it.

  For a while, at least, I accepted that it was all commendably hygienic, especially under the circumstances of our imprisonment, but not when two people are forced to live together in such close confines. What made it worse was that until I took a real stand on the issue, he simply ignored my protests. I was eventually to wish him a happy bris before we parted. I said it would make the life of any woman he married a lot easier if he actually got rid of the damn thing.

  André’s actions continued to rankle. Barely a day would go without him making some stupid joke about seeing us through, ‘right until the very end’. Then he’d laugh and slap one of us on the back, stupid bastard that he was. For all that, we didn’t dare insult him because he obviously had enough clout to make things even more wretched. Though it cost us, we were still eating Western food.

  Within a short while, as happens to people held in custody without good reason, both Gilles and I began, if not to crack, then to show serious strain. The mind starts to play tricks: rooms become smaller, walls thicker, the underlying rationale, if any, of those
with whom you come into contact, becomes ominous. It was the first hint of an all-enveloping paranoia and it worried me,

  Under the difficult conditions in which we were being held, our oppressors began to represent everything that was evil. L’Assassin was the ultimate monstrosity, some sort of ingrate, and I felt at the time that he should ultimately have to answer for what he was doing. Also, there was his role as a hit man, something he boasted about and which made him even more fearsome. I could only speculate how many ‘enemies of the state’ he’d iced.

  It seemed inconceivable at the time that the Israelis had actually put this cretin through his paces, but then links between Jerusalem and Mobutu had always been excellent. In fact, they were very much in evidence years later when Neall Ellis was attempting to set up a mercenary flying wing for the dictator. It was undoubtedly Zaire’s natural resources that paved the way, diamonds probably, and who knows, perhaps the country’s huge uranium deposits.

  A photo taken by Gilles Hertzog outside our prison walls on the morning of our release and shortly before being driven to the Zambian border. Israeli-trained l’Assassin – otherwise known as André – is on the right: on the left is the ultimate Congolese eminence grise, ‘Zaki’. (Author’s collection)

  CHAPTER TWENTY - TWO

  Isolated in a Congolese Prison

  The experience of being incarcerated in an African prison was horrendous. Yet, looking back, Gilles and I were a lot more fortunate that most in similar predicaments. We were kept apart from the majority of the inmates who, we learnt afterwards, were a violent, dissolute bunch and rape was commonplace.

  FOR MOST OF OUR TIME in custody, we were in isolation, and allowed a few minor mercies, such as being able to exercise for an hour a day within the confines of the walled quadrangle.

  More important, while our money lasted, we were able to order our single daily meal from a local restaurant run by a Belgian expatriate. Special arrangements were made for our food to be brought to the barracks by the restaurateur himself. Then André’s magnanimity would prevail.