Barrel of a Gun

by Al Venter

  Moving through Mozambique in the late 1960s and early 1970s was always an experience. The region was remote and, because of the isolation, there were few independent observers either willing or able to chance their luck in this unforgiving corner of Africa. Communications were invariably a consideration, especially in the interior: most of the time they simply did not exist. There were phones, but they didn’t always work. Faxes and cell phones were not yet on the market. You considered yourself lucky to get a call through to Europe or America once you’d left the comfort of Mozambique’s big cities of Beira or Lourenco Marques, though a fat bribe helped if you were prepared to use military equipment.

  Getting about was always problematic. You either travelled in convoy or you didn’t go anywhere. Between the towns of the central regions and the north, convoys happened about twice a week. Even then, if the guerrillas had been active, delays were commonplace, sometimes as long as a week. Much depended on the competence of the local garrison commander.

  Our road to Tete, overland from South Africa, was circuitous. After crossing the Limpopo River, Knipe and I spent a week in Rhodesia – then also at war. The intention was that he would return to Johannesburg from Mozambique while I would keep on going north. I would travel the length of the Tete Panhandle – first to Malawi and then on to Lusaka in Zambia (then another black African country technically at war with the ‘White South’), my final destination being Mobutu Sese Seko’s Zaire, which had formerly been called the Congo.

  However, like others on the road, we had to wait for the next convoy and for three or four days, Tete became home. It was a distasteful sojourn in the town’s only hotel, the Zambezi, where the plumbing didn’t work and meals, such as they were, were an unappetizing and often unsanitary affair.

  There was little to do in a heat that was both soporific and enervating and if you hadn’t packed a reasonable supply of books, you were left staring at the walls of your hotel room. There was no air conditioning either. A film or two might have helped, but the only movie house had been shuttered and even if it hadn’t been, whatever might have been on offer would have been in Portuguese, without subtitles.

  Most of the time when we did hit the town – always after dark when a light breeze came off the river – we were left to make our way past a succession of people who seemed to do little more than drink cheap wine, or thugs who would offer us a local girl for the price of a cocktail. The Portuguese military presence was everywhere, the majority in their battledress, and they made the best of their off-hours in the torpid, dustchoked streets. Army trucks trailed endless little sandstorms in their wakes as they trundled through town and that didn’t help either.

  Wrapped around a dirty crossroads on the banks of the third biggest river on the African continent, Tete could easily have passed for a film set depicting the early years of the great American trek to the west. The only difference was an occasional, modern-looking building and a communications aerial on the tallest hill that overlooked the town. There was nothing to remind us that the settlement was one of the first inland trading posts established by Portuguese mariners who first sailed up this great waterway in their shallow-hulled galliots in the 15th century.

  While fighting against the Portuguese, the Mozambique liberation movement, Frelimo, received a lot of assistance from radical groups abroad. One of their regular publications was this one, produced in Scandinavia, which shows a guerrilla patrol moving through an abandoned village.

  Much of what happened in Tete centred on the couple of thousand men of the 17th Battalion, as well as the three or four helicopters and ground support squadrons that made up the bulk of the town’s defences. Essentially, it was a captive market, for the troops had nowhere else to spend what little they earned. The colonial gloss and glitter of Lourenco Marques – Maputo today – lay more than 600 miles to the south.

  For those who took that extended overland leg southwards, there were still more military convoys for the first leg of the journey, at least until you reached Beira – Mozambique’s second city – as I was able to do on my way back home more than a month later.

  There were big plans afoot for Tete, we were told in the first in-house briefing with Tete’s military commanders. One of the biggest hydroelectric dams in Africa was being built across a gorge on the Zambezi River, more than 100 miles upstream. That construction, we were assured, promised long-term dividends, but as we now know, it was only completed after the war ended. By then the majority of the Portuguese had decamped back to the metrópole.

  At that stage, getting the dam finished on schedule had become a formidable task, especially since it was to be the biggest man-made body of water in Africa, second only to Egypt’s Aswan. For their part, the insurgents hurled everything they could muster at both Portuguese civilian and military interests in efforts to halt construction. Along the way, many lives were lost.

  Twice each day, starting at dawn, lurching open trucks that carried two platoons left Tete to guard the shipments of supplies, men and equipment heading towards the gorge. This was the easy part, because the road was tarred and the threat of mines was minimal. However, that did not stop the ambushes, which seemed to keep an intermittent pace with the convoys and would take an almost inevitable daily toll.

  Tete’s Barracks Square was where all military activities were coordinated. Writing about the place, British writer James McManus recalled that it looked ‘absurdly Beau Geste’. From there, too, patrols around town would set out before dawn each day and check routes leading in and out for booby traps and mines which, we were to discover, were sometimes responsible for the first casualties of the day.

  Security in and around Tete was tight and strangers were invariably regarded with suspicion. We fell into this category and it came as no surprise that journalists like Knipe, James McManus and me, though tacitly accepted because we’d made the long haul north, were not made overly welcome. In any conflict, we were already aware, the Fourth Estate is routinely regarded with suspicion and the Portuguese military establishment was no exception.

  In my case, I was fortunate because I’d previously covered the war in Angola. Also, I’d been given an informal letter of introduction to the local commander and that opened some doors. Having experienced combat on the west coast, and then transferred my allegiance temporarily to Mozambique, it didn’t take long for me to be accepted as ‘one of them’. The trouble was that it invariably happened after the metal cap of the first bottle of aguardiente had landed in the bin.

  In spite of the booze and bonhomie, talk about the guerrilla role in the conflict remained guarded, especially in the presence of us scribes. Reports of actions and casualties were a given, but there was never any serious talk about the adversary: it was almost as if the guerrillas didn’t exist. Casualty figures were always ‘secret’ and when there was an ‘incident’, discussions in the officers’ mess were usually conducted in whispers.

  The general approach to the war was different from that which you’d find in other conflicts, such as in the Congo, Algeria or neighbouring Rhodesia. One got the idea that many Portuguese officers liked to think – and some actually believed – that it was all a rather temporary affair, a bit of trouble with local savages that would soon be over, we were told often enough. I found this to be a patronizing attitude that was annoying. We’d all done time at the sharp end and this conflict, and Mozambique, were very different from what I – and others – had already seen in Angola and Portuguese Guinea. There, at least, the Portuguese Army didn’t ignore the threat. Rather, they got to grips with it.

  My convoy left Tete at dawn. In a straggling line astern, the trucks rumbled across the river and were halted briefly at what passed for a tollgate at the far end of the bridge. There were machine-gun emplacements at several points along the structure, some illuminated by a string of searchlights that continually swept across the water below during the dark hours.

  One by one, the sleepy-eyed drivers paid the fee and moved the last 10 or 20
miles of metalled road to Moatize. There, under military supervision, we would assemble for the remainder of the trek to the Malawi boarder, more than 100 miles to the north.

  Some of the trucks in our column were bound for Blantyre, the commercial capital of Malawi, a tiny country that straddles the northwestern border with Mozambique. Others were heading further north, where they would again cross into Mozambique territory and where hostilities were at their most intense.

  The majority of vehicles travelling with us were ten- or 12-wheelers, including a number of low-loaders from Johannesburg factories which hauled freight bound for the Zambian Copperbelt. The drivers were a motley bunch, mostly professional haulers, some white, the majority African.

  There were few among them who were indifferent to what lay ahead. Their guffaws and uneasy, conscious swaggering as they gathered in groups prior to our setting out were typical of travelling groups under strain. They’d all survive, they confidently told each other and they’d smile and nod their heads. What a way to earn a living, one of them chuckled.

  There were many opinions about what lay ahead, as might have been expected in an area where there were landmines buried in the soft, gravel-topped laterite shoulders along the route and where Portuguese and insurgent forces had been making almost daily contact for almost a decade of war. The enemy was out there, waiting, the drivers would tell each other. Then the banter would start again: who would drive behind whom, which drivers were considered lucky or had experienced this kind of thing before and had come out unscathed. Anybody who had done six or eight trips across this narrow strip of no-man’s land without being hurt automatically earned great respect from his colleagues; he was the man to watch, they’d say quietly among themselves.

  Somebody pulled out a bottle of South African brandy and everybody took a swig. A few Portuguese soldiers nearby barely noticed, and if they did, they said nothing. There would be no policing on this stretch of road.

  There were many views about what lay ahead. Quite a few of the drivers had been shot at or mortared and just about everybody knew somebody who’d been hurt. Not too many killed, it seemed.

  ‘One man he die last week… Mulatto… his truck he go… boom… very big mine!’

  That came from a swarthy trucker from Madeira. His observation was lost on many because of his poor English and nobody made any comment. Most of the drivers continued doing what they’d been busy with or looked deep into their cups or tin mugs. Other drivers kept drinking, even though the sun had barely clipped the thorn and baobab trees clustered to the east beyond the railway station and coal dump at Moatize.

  The man who spoke had a lot to say during the three-day convoy run. He’d done the trip often enough he told us, and made the point that he preferred to travel somewhere towards the rear of the column.

  ‘Better others hit the minas’, he’d quietly comment, going colloquial when nobody else was listening. All we knew about him was that he was bound for a settlement in the interior which had been attacked often in the past. His cargo was his own business and he said so; that security thing again.

  Apart from two buses packed with Africans on their way home from South African gold mines, there were about 35 trucks assembled at Moatize. Some were taking cargoes through to Zaire and sported Rhodesian plates. These would be replaced by Zambian tags for the final leg of the journey.

  Landmines were always a problem while hostilities continued in all three of Lisbon’s African outposts – Angola, Mozambique and Portuguese Guinea (today GuinéBissau). Here Portuguese soldiers are handling two versions of anti-personnel mines. (Author’s collection)

  There were two private vehicles on the road with them; our Land Rover, which had Dutch registration, and a medium-sized English car on its way to Zambia. The driver, a youngster from York, was under contract to one of the copper mines and had returned from a long leave in Britain with his vehicle. He’d been forced to head east and cross at Tete after waiting for six days at the Kasangula Ferry in Botswana; he said he’d risk landmines and ambushes 600 miles to the east rather than take his chances with President Kaunda’s undisciplined Zambian Army in an unstable hinterland where South African forces regularly intruded.

  He’d made that choice after reports had come across the river of drunken soldiers having fired on another civilian car which had tried to cross southwards. A female passenger had been wounded…

  Portuguese bureaucracy and a tendentiously aggressive enemy eroded our schedules from the start. We were told the journey would take eight hours. It lasted three days. On that first morning, we were all left standing in the sapping heat of the Zambezi Valley for four hours before we eventually pulled out.

  An hour before leaving, a group of civilian officials – they were in khaki and displayed rank – approached the convoy. The bureaucracy that followed quickly became tiresome. Names were checked against lists, vehicles against registration plates, passports perused, cargoes vetted, instructions issued and questions asked. Weapons, tape recorders or radio equipment? ‘Anybody with binoculars?’ somebody queried. There was no reaction, even though one of the drivers sported a 400mm tele-lens for his Nikon camera.

  Finally, the civilians were required to sign a document, in triplicate, which exonerated the Lisbon government against claims in the event of any kind of military action. The final paragraph, in good English, indemnified Lisbon against losses that might be inflicted on us by the Portuguese Army and Air Force.

  We signed, anything to avoid delay.

  At this stage Erico Chagas, a young Portuguese army lieutenant introduced himself. He’d been watching us from a distance and only then did we understand why. He needed to get to Munacama, he told us. He would travel with us, admitting that the Land Rover offered the most comfort. There was no question of his asking permission: it was already a fait accompli.

  Young Chagas was to join his unit, about 30 minutes by road from Zobue, one of our destinations in the north. Born in the Mozambique capital and educated in South Africa, he spoke good English. We gathered that he’d been fighting for two years and, on the face of it, was clearly professional in his approach to all things military; the young man was tough and seasoned both by Africa and by conflict. As we were to discover later, Chagas liked to say that he’d seen and done it all.

  We were happy to have him on board; with a Portuguese Army lieutenant in our vehicle, we’d be spared further inspection.

  The young officer was casual about most things, including the prospect of combat. It helped that he was as familiar with the bush as his native trackers. As to being ambushed while travelling in convoy, he was dismissive. Of course we’ll be ambushed, he declared impassively, ‘but the bastards never come very close… much of it is just noise’.

  ‘Mines, yes! But ambushes… ha!’

  His comments were derisory, and sometimes contentious. The terroristas, as he called them, rarely caused any real damage, he said. ‘They don’t aim, so the shots are almost always high. And anyway,’ he suggested, ‘it is old law. Unless someone is firing specifically at you, chances are that somebody else will be hit…’

  He was explicit that we travel towards the rear of the column. He pointed at the truck belonging to the Maderian. ‘We stay behind him. He knows the tricks.’ The man from Maderia had already spaced himself well down the line. It was his contention, we learned, that the more wheels that passed over the track before us, the better. ‘Let others take chances’, he reckoned.

  More instructions were issued by our escorts, who had called us all together. Chagas translated. We were to stay between 50 and 100 metres behind the next vehicle. If the truck ahead of you was hit, the explosion shouldn’t affect the truck immediately behind, though sometimes a rear and not front wheel detonated a mine, which often enough caused casualties among those in the cab behind. The military spokesman stressed that each vehicle should follow exactly in the tracks directly ahead; as he said, slowly and distinctly, ‘not to the right of it and not to the left, but on
the tracks of those who have gone before’.

  Because of the dust, this might sometimes be difficult, one of the other officers conceded.

  Should one of the vehicles be blown up, it then became the responsibility of the troops escorting the column to search for more landmines, because they were rarely laid singly. When that happened, he declared, nobody was to exit his vehicle and move about.

  ‘There are landmines for trucks,’ the officer declared, with Chagas keeping pace with a good translation, ‘and there are landmines for people. Consequently when the terrorists lay a bomb for a vehicle, they hope that some inquisitive person might get out and walk about to find out what was causing the hold-up.’ That had happened often enough before and there had been casualties, he disclosed.

  By now some of the Rhodesian drivers had edged closer to better hear Chagas’ translation: few had more than a basic understanding of the language.

  The officer continued: ‘Remember all of you, and this is important. With landmines, all casualties are serious.’ He added that a wounded man often meant calling for a helicopter to evacuate the victim, ‘but there are times when there are no helicopters available… so the man can die.’

  He told us that while there would be several officers travelling as passengers to re-join their units up-country, the convoy would be in the charge of a sergeant, a wiry, intense little man whom he brought forward and introduced to the gathering.

  His name is Viera. Officially it is Sergeant Viera and he knows this business very well. When he tells you to do something, you listen. You do not argue, even if you think he might be wrong. Follow his instructions carefully and without delay because there are sometimes very good reasons for doing things in a hurry. This is a war, people, not a tourist jaunt and this man will lead you all through to the other side… Boa sorte!