CHAPTER TEN

INTO THE CONGO’S CAULDRON

Neall Ellis was introduced to Pretoria businessman-cum-lawyer-cum-intelligence agent Harold Muller when Sakkie van Zyl, a former security policeman and Koevoet Special forces operator, contacted him at his home in the Cape in November, 1996.

It was the same old story as before: they wanted to see me, like yesterday. I was in my garden when Van Zyl called and asked whether I’d drop everything and fly to Johannesburg that same day. They had something interesting on offer, he confided, and it was all going on in the Congo of old, then calling itself the Republic of Zaire. Van Zyl added that this new development wasn’t only an interesting proposition, but it had enormous potential and could ultimately be worth a tidy fortune to them all.

Naturally, I acquiesced, got myself ready and rushed to the airport. Once on the ground at Jan Smuts, Van Zyl and Harold Muller were there to greet me. I met Mauritz Le Roux, the third member of the team, the following day and, frankly, I wasn’t impressed. He came across as a little naïve. However, as I discovered, he was anything but. He’d formerly served as an engineer with 32 Battalion and was a founder member of the South African mercenary group Executive Outcomes.

Once he started talking about the project, I realized there was more to him than I’d originally thought. He went on to brief me about how he had been approached by the Zaire Embassy to form a unit to assist Mobutu defeat the rebel advance.

Thus was Stability Control Agencies (Stabilco) formed, with Muller and Le Roux as the directors, and registered in the Isle of Man. The company did not survive the Congolese debacle and Le Roux eventually went on to create Safenet (later, OSSI-Safenet) one of the largest private security companies in Iraq. Before moving on to do similar work in Afghanistan, it had more than 4,000 people in its employ.

Once our little team had gathered in Pretoria, the party went into a huddle and everybody was briefed on what was going on in Central Africa. Basically, President Mobutu Sese Seko’s Zaire Republic was involved in a major civil war that had been festering for years. There was nothing new about this because, ever since independence in the 1960s, the country had been teetering on the verge of anarchy. There had been a continual spate of hostilities, if not amongst its own people then with its overly belligerent neighbours. As Chris Munnion of London’s Daily Telegraph once suggested: ‘somebody was always getting killed in the old Congo, sometimes by the hundreds and occasionally by the thousands, and nobody cared a whit.’

One wag described it as Africa’s first real ‘non-event’ even though two or three million Congolese war victims died of famine or disease or were slaughtered during this period. The problem in late 1996 was that Mobutu was about to be toppled and the country was in the process of fragmenting. Enter Muller and Le Roux, who were going to ‘save’ it. Nellis comments:

I knew a bit about Africa by then, and I couldn’t help voicing a little scepticism: I’d heard this ‘last gasp’ kind of thing before and in modern-day Africa, it has never really worked. In the end I wasn’t wrong, but there was money on the table and it was good, so I asked them to count me in.

I was asked to find another pilot and hire a couple of flight engineers: we would be flying choppers, they reckoned. I called my pal Ryan Hogan in Durban, who had served with me in the SAAF, and he immediately agreed. Between us, we settled on Grant Williams and Phil Scott as our engineers and, once approached, they threw their hats into the ring. Like me, they all had to get themselves to Johannesburg in a hurry.

So we came together the following morning, got ourselves kitted out with tropical gear, and a couple of extras we thought we would need, and headed out to Lanseria Airport where Le Roux had leased a Lear jet to take us north. There were problems about getting clearances to fly to Zaire, so we slept on the floor of the offices of the people from whom we had leased the plane.

After filing a flight plan to Kinshasa via Malawi, the six-man team quietly slipped away early the following morning. It was a pretty tight fit in the Lear with all their stuff, but somehow they managed. Van Zyl had work to do in South Africa, so he didn’t go along. Nellis carries on:

At Ndjili Airport, the country’s biggest international airport on the outskirts of the capital, we were met by the representatives of the ranking Zairean security minister, all senior people and very well dressed with polished ostrich skin leather shoes and expensive suits. I remember thinking that if the country was on the verge of revolt, these people certainly weren’t showing it.

Instead of leading us through normal immigration and customs channels, which at Ndjili can be quite severe, they took our passports, had them stamped and hustled us, and our baggage, past the guards to a pair of luxury four-wheel-drive vehicles. I thought it was all great until we were unceremoniously dumped at what was probably one of Kinshasa’s dingiest two-star hotels. It was inappropriately called the Christmas Hotel, which was a misnomer because there was nothing white or festive about the place. Instead, it was dark and dingy with sombre wooden panelling in the lobby which matched its dark linen bedding and its equally depressing restaurant. At least the concierge was happy to see us because most of his business was based on transients like us who had hopes of doing business with the government.

Even the menu was limited, although we did have several options. There was steak and chips (fries), chicken and chips, fish and chips, vegetables and chips and a meat that was as tough as leather and, being quite small, I felt might have once been something feline (that dish also came with chips). One of the group thought that it was not impossible that one of the embassies in Zaire was missing its cat. To add further insult to all the gore, all the dishes were covered in grease.

Meanwhile, Le Roux and Muller, with a considerable effort, were able to get to see General Kpama Baramoto, Mobutu’s security chief who was in command of the Civil Guard. One of the most feared men of the regime, he would be responsible for dealing with what we had to offer. The meeting over, they went on to meet a host of other government officials including General Nzimbi, who headed the Presidential Guard, and General Baruti, an exuberant man who was in charge of the Zairean Air Force. Finally, they were able to put forward something of a plan, which relied on Ryan, me and the engineers being able to make enough of the remaining Congolese Air Force aircraft airworthy to create a helicopter strike force.

We reasoned that the best tactic would be to approach Mobutu with the offer of a couple of squadrons of gunships, with our chaps in charge of course. With such a force, we could argue pretty persuasively that the revolutionary advance could be stopped. Also, we had history on our side because it had been done before, very recently in Angola and subsequently in Sierra Leone. Both times, EO was involved.

However, Stabilco’s founder still had to persuade the dictator’s henchmen that the proposals were realistic and attainable and could be implemented with a modicum of effort and outlay. That was the difficult part because, although there was a lot of money around, the people in government weren’t too eager to part with any of it, even though it was obvious that we offered them salvation. We needed to act quickly because the enemy was on the last stretch of road leading to Kinshasa, the final objective and, as we were to learn soon enough, Mobutu’s much-depleted army wasn’t doing much to stop them. One of the reasons for their inaction was that most of the soldiers hadn’t been paid for months—their officers had simply pocketed all the money.

What was more unsettling, thought Nellis at the time, was that some of Mobutu’s senior men, including a handful of generals, sensing the inevitable, had already defected to the revolutionaries. This hugely diverse bunch of Congolese, Rwandan and Burundi nationals were better known by their initials, AFDL, than by their proper name, Alliance des Forces Démocratiques pour la Libération du Congo-Zaïre.

Meanwhile, General Baramoto arranged for the South Africans to be taken to several air force bases around Kinshasa and they were perturbed at what they found. It didn’t take them long to appreciate that although Mobutu remained the Congo’s head of state, in reality a hopeless interregnum prevailed. Instability, and the uneasy lassitude that resulted, had pervaded the entire community in a country already stultified by corruption. However, even with all its problems, Zaire still seemed to attract just about every charlatan known to Interpol, as well as many others that weren’t.

Among those who arrived were some gritty, fast-talking arms dealers from both sides of what had once been the Iron Curtain, as well as numerous dubious characters from France, Israel, Yugoslavia, South Africa and elsewhere. Also poking about in the embers were all manner of ‘financiers’ and hopeful mercenary groups. It was truly a congregation of opportunists, each one of them believing that he could cut a deal. They had good reason for this belief. Despite the war, there was still a lot of good money about. The mines around Mbuji-Mayi in Kasai Province never stopped churning out diamonds, with more being smuggled into Zaire by UNITA’s rebels from Angola and, of course, there was widespread corruption. Often when there was a shortage of real money, gemstones would replace greenbacks. Two or three tiers down the economic ladder were a myriad of smaller operators, among them Neall Ellis and his group of freebooters.

A couple of days after they arrived, Le Roux and Muller were ushered into Baramoto’s Kinshasa residence. Le Roux’s initial presentation in Baramoto’s plush offices was both forceful and disarmingly simple. Apart from the heli-force, he told the general, he and his associates could muster about 500 ground troops within weeks. These would mostly be former EO veterans with experience in conventional as well as counter-insurgency operations. He stressed that many had been blooded in Angola.

Le Roux also told the general that he had any number of helicopter pilots on call, all professionals who were immediately available for deployment on the Zaire Air Force gunships that would be used to stunt the Kabila offensive. That done, he suggested that his people would set about training indigenous aviators so that the next time Zaire was faced with an emergency, foreigners wouldn’t have to be hired.

Having persuaded General Baramoto that Stabilco’s contribution might be the cure-all that he sought for the country’s ills, the South Africans were taken to the office of another close military associate of the president, Special Forces commander General Ngbale Nzimbi. After that it was the turn of the Minister of Defence, Admiral Mudima Mavua.¹

One of Nellis’ first jobs on arriving in Kinshasa was to try and assess the situation with regard to military aircraft assets. He needed to find out whether Mobutu actually had any aircraft that could fly and whether there was any kind of strike capability that could be used against Kabila’s rebels. It was a hard task as everything was cloaked in secrecy. However, despite this, it didn’t take Neall long to discover that there were almost no airworthy helicopters. The machines had been bought, but most of them were in the crates in which they’d arrived and hadn’t even been unpacked. Many critical elements, such as electronics or something applicable to rotor operation, would be missing. Often, they would have been sold so that the requisite rake-off could be passed on to the responsible minister or general after the order had been placed. Occasionally, one of the Mi-24s that could still lift-off would go out on a sortie, but ammunition and fuel were limited. In a tight spot, the Hinds could be used for ferrying troops, but that was only a stopgap measure.

As Neall recalls, they’d insisted on seeing all of the country’s aviation assets, and they were eventually taken to a local air force base where they found a C-130 transport plane, minus three of its engines. Otherwise, it was in excellent shape, having been refurbished by the Atlas Aircraft Corporation in Johannesburg the year before, at a cost of millions. It was only discovered years later that General Baruti, the man responsible for the planes, had sold the engines to a local trader, together with an export permit to get them out of the country.

Also at the base was a Canadian-built Caribou showing serious signs of wear and the lack of adequate service. There were also 20 Sia-Marchetti 260s, the majority in reasonable shape but not flyable. Although these prop-driven trainers were light, they could be fitted with machine guns and under-wing rocket-pods (very much as the Pilatus PC-7s had been fielded against UNITA forces in Angola). These planes could then be deployed against Kabila’s rebel force as ground-attack aircraft and with good tactical direction, could cause a lot of damage.

Nellis commented about the obvious lack of care and attention given to all these aviation assets. He told the generals that in Zaire’s tropical climate, more sophisticated equipment had to be looked after or it would deteriorate very quickly, and that included aircraft. Many of the trainers had been abandoned in the rain, their cockpit hatches left open. There was a Puma helicopter, also inoperable because it had been stripped of some of its parts, which had been sold.

‘In fact,’ Neall recalls, ‘there was an enormous amount of stuff, but nothing that would actually work properly, never mind that we might be able to use it if we were to go to war… .’ It was Baruti’s view, he recalls, that if they could get somebody to repair these aircraft and somehow buy weapons for the Sia-Marchettis, all would be well.

Others must have thought along similar lines before, probably several times, I told myself … so why hadn’t anybody done something about it? More to the point, these generals were not short of the money needed to do the necessary as there wasn’t one among them who was not a multi-millionaire.

I came up with something of a solution and said that we could fit 20mm cannons onto the three Gazelle SA-342 choppers (which the Zaireans had originally stolen from Rwanda when that country imploded). The next day I walked into the armoury attached to the base and spotted five 20mm MG-151 cannons, the same guns the South African Air Force fitted to their Alouette gunships. All were ex-factory stock from Lyttleton Engineering outside Pretoria. Although a couple were badly rusted and beyond repair—they’d probably also been left in the rain—three were still in their original grease and had never been used. They were literally ‘out of the box’.

I scratched around a bit more and even found some of their ammunition, but none of it looked reliable. They said they had some newer stuff, and I left it at that.

A few days later, Nellis and the rest of the group were flown in a Zaire Air Force turbo-prop Cessna to Kindu, a large town to the east of Kinshasa. It was regarded locally as a minor hop, but it still took four or five hours to get there, which was when Neall said he realised how big Zaire really was:

What amazed me was the extent of the forests that we flew over: they literally stretched from one horizon to another, almost without a break. For hours there was no evidence of habitation.

We landed at a fairly big airport at Kindu and were told that the rebels weren’t far away. We were taken to the three choppers that were parked, untended and unguarded, looking pretty forlorn, in a field not far away. Our flight engineers looked the Gazelles over, found them in good nick and, under the circumstances, quite well maintained considering that we were standing way out in the bush.

Satisfied that they were operable, the South African pilots took each of them up in turn and came back pleased. The rest of the time in Kindu was spent quite pleasantly, Neall remembers:

We ended up spending the night in Kindu, lavishly entertained by the general in charge of the region, French champagne and all. For all that, we couldn’t miss the poverty about us. The town itself was incredibly dilapidated—there were almost no private vehicles (nor any fuel for them, anyway) and certainly no electricity. Meanwhile, the military at the local base lived like proverbial regents of old. It was almost medieval.

While the South African mercenaries were all made very welcome by the officers and never felt any animosity, Nellis felt there was a distinct reluctance to provide any kind of information about the war, even though it was literally around the corner. They flew back to Kinshasa the next morning and reported that the Gazelles could be gunned up and sent into action almost immediately, and that Ryan and Nellis would fly them. ‘But to do that, I stressed, the three choppers had to be brought through to Kinshasa from Kindu without any delay’, said Neall. There was still a lot of work to do on the machines, including fitting firepower, he told air force General Baruti. However, the matter simply died a natural death, and Neall doubts whether those helicopters were ever flown again. They’re probably still in Kindu, what’s left of them.

In his personal dealings with the mercenaries, General Baramoto was both courteous and friendly. Socially, he was scrupulously correct. Nellis remembers him as a tall man with greyish hair and spectacles and, unlike many of his colleagues, not too heavy for his height. Also, he projected a confidence that reflected power. Whether in uniform, in traditional African dress or in a formal suit, he was always impeccably turned out. A nonsmoker, he liked a good whisky, especially a good single malt, but he didn’t overdo it, at least not in the presence of the South Africans.

Although he understood English, Baramoto confided to one of the South Africans that he felt he could express himself better in French. Consequently, there was usually an interpreter in attendance, although the man was more than a good linguist. He had large bulges under both arms and, judging from what the other generals used for protection, Nellis believed that they were possibly something from the Heckler and Koch range.

Baramoto’s house was a single-storied villa in Kinshasa surrounded by high walls and bougainvillea. It wasn’t as flamboyant as might have been expected, especially since Mauritz Le Roux, on first arriving there, had been shown a room piled almost to the ceiling with bundles of cash, mostly large-denomination U.S. dollar bills, although there were also piles of Sterling, French francs, Deutschmarks and Japanese yen. Some of the stacks of cash were metres tall.

Another distinctive feature, Nellis recalls, was a SAM-14 ground-to-air launcher, complete with a missile in the tube, propped up precariously against a wall in the entrance hall. It seemed to be a permanent fixture because nobody ever moved it and, as he mentioned to Le Roux, had it been accidentally detonated, it might have demolished the entire building. He recalls making a mental note that if there was one, it was likely that there would be more.

Furnishings at the Baramoto home were sumptuous and included several leather-covered lounge suites in the sitting room, set against some magnificent silk drapes. Although Nellis never met any of the general’s wives, the pilot was introduced to two of his daughters: ‘they were quite lovely girls … very well dressed in chic European clothing that seemed to be mostly designer’, he remembers.

Baramoto’s taste in cars was ‘orthodox oligarch’: the inevitable black Mercedes limo with tinted windows, of which there were several, together with a couple of top-of-the-range land cruisers.

There was always a crowd of soldiers and civilians hanging about the place including a contingent of guards who must have been as well kitted out and efficient as any in the country. Those troops were always present, resplendent in their smartly pressed camouflage uniforms. Most sported shiny AK-47s and there was always a clutch of RPGs nearby. There were also quite a few Toyota pick-ups, some with 12.7mm heavy machine guns mounted on the back, usually with somebody standing by in the driver’s seat.

Nellis could see that these troops knew what was expected of them, and they kept a wary eye on everything going on in the vicinity, which included monitoring passing traffic. Some of these soldiers were South African trained. A couple actually recognized one of the former Recce commando officers who arrived with Le Roux one morning and the ‘reunion’ ended up being quite emotional, with big smiles all round, Baramoto included. This minister’s ties with South Africa’s apartheid leaders were once referred to by an American diplomat as ‘all but intimate’.

Most meetings took place late, as if Baramoto and his generals were almost afraid of being seen in public with white people. At the same time, warned Nellis, while you were with the man, you couldn’t help sensing that under the brittle crust of his amicability lay a magma of paranoia.

Once Neall Ellis and co. became better acquainted with the generals, they spent a lot of time chewing the fat at the home of General Likunia, the Congolese Minister of Defence, or they would pop along to General Mahele’s place. It was similar to Baramoto’s but seriously needed to be painted. As Chief of the Armed Forces, Mahele preferred to do his entertaining in the garden, usually under an Oriental pagoda, left behind by some forgotten colonial functionary, which seemed to have weathered well in the tropics.

There would be endless talk about the best way to tackle Kabila and his ‘thugs’. Nellis would choose his moment and try to swing the conversation around to the subject of helicopters: after all, he would say, it was his reason for being there. He very much wanted to create a chopper gunship wing so that he could prove his worth. With time, the issue became more difficult to broach, if only because he had to keep going over the same imponderables: the war; the lack of resistance on the part of government forces; the inability of the air force to make headway and so on. There was a solution to it all, he would urge for the umpteenth time, ‘there was an immediate way of turning the war around!’

He would get everybody’s attention for about 40 seconds. Brows would furrow, the generals would stop what they were doing and, for a few moments, they’d listen. However, Neall admits that the degree of interest was usually directly proportionate to the amount of grog that had been drunk as one of them would usually make some inane comment and everybody would laugh. With that, the party would go on as before, more drinks would be called for and Kinshasa’s deceptive fog of war would envelop them all as they ignored the harsh reality of their situation.

The reality was that the military situation had become precarious in the month or so that Nellis and his group had been in the country. At that stage, already, Kinshasa was well within Kabila’s sights. What’s more, everybody in the city knew it.

One of Zaire’s key problems was the army’s pay hiatus, a situation which nobody, least of all the generals with whom the South Africans socialized, was prepared to remedy. They had money in abundance; in fact any one of the generals could have paid the army’s monthly salary bill a hundred times over, but none of them was prepared to part with any of it. Not that there was any great deal of cash involved. The average Forces Armées Zaïroises (FAZ) soldier’s basic wage was about $2 a month, in a country where a pack of local cigarettes cost half that. With government forces estimated at about 100,000 men, the sum required to keep them happy and loyal was modest compared to the millions that were being squandered by autocrats on the most absurd luxuries.

For instance, flowers for all of Mobutu’s residences, which numbered about a dozen, large and small, were still being flown in daily from Europe, as was fresh dairy produce and container-loads of milk-fed veal, some of it from Japan. This was all in a country where the majority of the population had almost nothing.

It seems illogical that all this money would be spent on such excesses when it could have been used to fight successfully against the insurrection. ‘Looking back, none of it makes sense’, Nellis says today. ‘The security, the longevity of all of these people was at risk, but nobody bothered to challenge the system, probably because they feared for their lives if they did so’. What seemed to matter most to the majority of the people in control was that their moveable assets had already been stashed abroad. At the time of his death, Mobutu was estimated to be worth somewhere between five and eight billion dollars.

A few days before Christmas, Le Roux suggested that everybody should head home for Christmas. Baramoto had gone silent and there were rumours that he had fallen out of favour with Mobutu. When they got back to Pretoria, Nellis and the others met a group of former Special Forces operators to plan the Zairean operation. Nellis comments:

What we didn’t know yet was that after we had put forward a figure of 500 troops and airmen needed for the rescue, it was first whittled down to 300 men and then to a miserable 30, which was crazy for a country four times the size of France. In the end, numbers didn’t seem to matter anymore.

Roelf van Heerden, an old friend from the SADF and EO in Sierra Leone, was put forward as the man who should command Stabilco’s ground forces. He had led a very successful campaign as a mercenary in Angola, his squad having cleared the area around the diamond city of Saurimo, in the east of the country.

A slender fellow with long, scraggy hair, a moustache and small rimmed glasses, he hardly looked the archetypal bush fighter but he seemed to fit the bill as far as Le Roux was concerned. Van Heerden and Nellis were offered directorships in Stabilco. A week later, on New Year’s Day 1997, they headed back to Kinshasa with Muller. The rest of the gang followed a few days later to assist with planning. Muller had several meetings with government officials and suddenly things looked good.

The figure that was put forward for the six-month contract plus the equipment required was U.S. $90 million. This included all vehicles, light and heavy weapons and both Mi-8 and Mi-24 helicopters. Included in the deal would be strike jet aircraft and food and salaries for the 500 men the directors believed would be necessary to make it all work.

The generals didn’t argue, but insisted that the South Africans sort out any equipment already in the country that might be of use. However, after a quick look and dismal report-back, it was clear that it would be quicker and easier to buy all the stuff new from overseas suppliers, but first they needed money to be able to do that.

Then Captain Atembina suddenly appeared on the scene. Although it was never clear what his job actually was, he eventually arranged a meeting with General Mahele, who immediately came across as a more professional soldier than the usual military opportunist the South Africans had dealt with so far. Mahele was surprisingly candid in admitting that his people were simply not up to the job and that he and his colleagues needed help. He was also concerned about Stabilco’s ability to put men on the ground as soon as possible, but stressed that he would not be able to provide assistance with equipment. Nellis comments:

This was clearly a problem. Our men, all 500 of them still waiting back home, were ready to roll but we needed the equipment to make things work. That, in turn, relied on the money that needed to be paid up front. We told him that buying military hardware wasn’t something that happened overnight. Some of the stuff was ‘on the shelf ’, but most of it was not. There were international laws and obligations in place to prevent the illegal sales of weapons to rogue nations which included the need for End User Certificates. Also necessary were authorisations for the aircraft ferrying the arms to Zaire to overfly the countries en route. Getting over these hurdles took time. The governments doing the selling had to satisfy themselves that the arms would not be passed on to another country. In a sense, it was bureaucracy gone mad, but these were things that had to be taken account of.

It was immediately clear to us all that things had become bogged down again. Moreover, it would take a massive effort to arrange it all, and that was before factoring in the extreme level of corruption that we would have to deal with. On top of that, Kabila and his rebel army were making significant progress in the east. Time, obviously, was of the essence.

General Mahele quickly tasked us to produce a plan, which he wanted to present to Mobutu a few days later. Meanwhile, we needed an office from which to work, so Captain Atembina introduced us to George Kiriakos, a Greek businessman in Kinshasa. George, the ultimate dealer, broker, entrepreneur and outrageous speculator, was one of those charming quasi-colonial characters you find all over Africa, even today. He allowed us access to his office where, he said, we could put the plan together. Obviously, nothing was free and he and Atembina wanted their cut from any deal that was ultimately brokered: 30 per cent of it, and that on top of the original figure! It was an enormous add-on, he agreed, but as he said, who cared, as long as the government was prepared to pay and Le Roux and the rest of us got our share. We couldn’t argue with that kind of logic, so we let it roll.

George appeared to have financial interests in many corners of Africa. After dealing with him, we became aware that he was involved in the war in Angola. He had actually been dealing with the Angolan rebel movement UNITA, buying and selling coffee and timber from the eastern part of that country. Diamonds were clearly a part of it, but he couldn’t be drawn on that issue. We decided soon enough that George Kiriakos was playing both sides and that we had to be circumspect about how much we told him. It was entirely possible that he had links with Kabila and his henchmen.

Because of the impasse that gradually took shape—the government was seriously dragging its feet—Harold and the rest of the group returned to South Africa, leaving me and Roelf to hang in there and hope that something would develop. We ran short of cash and, to cut a long story short, we went through difficult weeks when we sometimes didn’t even have enough money to eat, never mind buy beer.

The food issue gradually developed into a major problem. Roelf and I eventually had to resort to buying a loaf of bread and a tin of pilchards each day simply to keep us alive. Because there was no money left over for transport, we walked wherever we needed to go, which wasn’t easy because Kinshasa is a pretty big place. One day, while walking alone down one of the avenues, I was surrounded by a group of young thugs who demanded money. They pointed to my watch and it was clear they meant business.

I tried to reason with them, telling them that I was as broke as they were and that there was no way I was going to give them anything. They suddenly turned aggressive and started the usual strong-arm stuff, pushing and manhandling me. That was when I decided that the only way out was to show them that I wasn’t the usual passive tourist, and I hauled out my only means of protection.

Normally, in these primitive countries I like to carry a knife, so out came my Spyderco, a pretty mean-looking blade shaped like the claw of an eagle. It was actually quite vicious. Frustrated as hell, I lunged at the leader and it was clear to everybody that I had serious intent. Obviously, I might have ended up in one of Zaire’s notorious prisons had I actually stabbed the man, but all I could think then was ‘fuck the consequences’. With that, this brave bunch of muggers fled. Nobody was robbed or stabbed that day, but I certainly felt a lot better for it afterwards. At least I’d managed to work off some of my frustrations.

Then, from nowhere, Captain Atembina pitched up at the dreaded Christmas Hotel and told us to get our things together. He loaded us into his vehicle and took us across town to the Intercontinental Hotel, where, with a flourish that you might have expected from somebody who is spending a lot of his own money, he checked us in at the government’s expense. Night had suddenly become day.

The hotel was remarkable, the best in Central Africa. Moreover, we could eat and drink as much as we liked and didn’t need to pay: we could sign for all of it. Our hotel room even had its own fridge, which was kept well stocked, and we had CNN on TV.

Roelf and I tended to keep a low profile, in part because the Belgian woman running the hotel with her Jordanian husband mentioned that there were Kabila supporters in residence. She wouldn’t say who they were, except that there were quite a few of them. There were also three Frenchmen staying there, and they liked to make a nuisance of themselves by routinely getting drunk at the bar.

A man calling himself JJ Fuentes, or simply ‘JJ’ for short, claimed to be a French Air Force fighter pilot. He also said he had Special Forces training, which sounded bogus. Another man in his little francophone coterie was a rather big fellow who had served in the French Foreign Legion, or so he said, and the third, the quiet one, maintained that he had history with the French Army. In fact, it didn’t take us very long to work out that this was another group of hopefuls trying to secure a contract for French mercenaries, probably under the auspices of the legendary Bob Denard.

We sent word back to Pretoria and told them that things were looking up, especially since we were now happily ensconced in five-star luxury and all the trappings that went with it. All the while, we were waiting for Captain Atembina to take us to visit General Mahele because, from what we gathered, it seemed that the elusive money was finally to be made available for a smaller contract for just over 300 men instead of the original 500. This was a bit of a blow because even 3,000 men wouldn’t have been nearly adequate in a country of this size.

Towards the end of March the situation in the country became critical. The rebels had taken Kisangani and the Serb mercenary group, which was supposed to be holding the city, retreated to Gbadolite in the north. There were also political demonstrations in Kinshasa which turned violent.

Suddenly, it wasn’t even safe to walk in the streets around the hotel, so accepting good advice, Nellis stopped heading out for his early morning jogs.

The demonstrations could be quite violent and were dealt with severely by the police, with the army also getting involved from time to time. Just about every day guns could be heard being fired, especially if there were demonstrators involved. The authorities were ruthless. They would fire live rounds and people who stood their ground and shouted abuse were shot dead. Nellis remembers:

Sometimes these demonstrations would take place within sight of the Intercontinental and Roelf and I would take up grandstand positions on our balcony and watch running battles and, more often than not, see some of the demonstrators being felled. The rounds fired by the cops would sometimes pass quite close to where we were perched and we’d be reminded of the old ‘tikking’ sound as bullets flashed past. It was certainly a diversion from watching CNN.

Overall, the two men couldn’t miss the fact that conditions in Kinshasa had become quite nasty. The government was crumbling and, as the saying goes, the rats were jumping ship, furiously so.

Many local people and expatriates had already left the country for Brazzaville across the Congo River and Nellis and Roelf would keep a check on the hotel guest list at reception as the numbers dwindled. They were aware too that it was almost impossible to get a seat on a plane leaving Kinshasa’s Ndjili Airport. Nellis has distinct memories of that time:

And then, when even the journalists started to leave and only the die-hard hacks remained, we had to accept that the end was not far off. On 1st June, we were told that rebel forces were only 200km from Kinshasa and, obviously, that late in the day the government wasn’t going to be forthcoming with a contract that would end up costing more than $100 million. Roelf and I talked endlessly about it and there was no escaping the fact that it was almost time for us to leave as well.

We’d just started lunch at the hotel when Captain Atembina called the next day and told me to get ready. The acting president of Zaire wanted to see me in person, he disclosed. The Congo Army captain was actually quite excited and he said that the portents looked good. I’d met General Likunya previously, while having discussions with the other generals on the prospect for the contract, and he seemed to be a reasonable man who had certainly shown himself in favour of hiring mercenaries to save his country.

When I eventually got to his office, he asked me to sit down and said that the government had decided to award us the contract immediately. Trying to maintain as dignified a pose as possible, I was elated. He didn’t waste time with words, but immediately set about describing a situation that was not only bad but, in his own words, could be equated with ‘a state of emergency’.

Could we help? His brow was pinched when he asked.

Of course we could, I replied. We now had a contract and we would immediately set to work.