Many of the choppers in service with the SAPS Air Wing were originally acquired with subsidies from the UN Drug Agency, as well as with cash outlays from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which for quite a few years has been involved in training South African drug eradication teams.

Current anti-drug operations south of the Limpopo – which sometimes also include operations in the neighbouring states of Swaziland and Lesotho – have come a long way from efforts at eradication even a decade ago. Rural operations in those days often involved both the SAAF and the Police Air Wing.

In one programme, a few years ago, Pretoria set aside R3 million for an eight-day operation in northern KwaZulu/Natal. It included scores of police and military vehicles as well as Oryx (the upgraded, locally produced Super-Puma variant) and police helicopters. However, because finance was critical, nothing was scheduled for eradicating the numerous dagga plantations in the area.

‘There simply wasn’t the money to do any more’, said a senior security officer. ‘In any event,’ he added, ‘you have to recognize that there are those in authority who are not happy that a sector of the community might be deprived of a traditional means of earning a living… it’s often their rural relatives growing it…’

We found dagga in abundance throughout the region, but almost all of those plantations were ignored. In a raid near the convergence of the KwaZulu, Swazi and Mpumalanga borders in the vicinity of Pongola, a single BO-105 detected four major dagga plantations with the combined value of the crops estimated to be excess of $3m on the European market. At the ruling exchange rates of the day, that was almost six times more than the cost of that particular law enforcement operation. Of the five or six major growth points uncovered (two were more than three-acres in extent) only one patch was ripped out and burnt.

Then – and today – uncovering such harvests can be dangerous work. Most of these plantations are huge and secreted in inaccessible hilly country. Their owners, aware that the authorities are on the lookout, go to a lot of effort to camouflage their approach paths.

One plantation was uncovered by chance when a mounted SAPS anti-stock-theft unit ventured into a heavily foliated krantz in search of stolen cattle. Having discovered several fields of verdant six- or eightfoot high crops that were on the verge of being harvested, the four-man patrol came under fire. The SAAF was called to the rescue and the patrol was extricated, but only after one of the men was wounded.

What has become clear – following recent security incursions into the region – is the emergence of a powerful anti-establishment mindset that underlies sentiment throughout the region. Local residents simply don’t appreciate having their principal source of wealth ‘eliminated’. In recent years, there have been firefights involving dagga growers and the police, as well as with some military units.

In another attack on a squad in the process of destroying a marijuana plantation near Mkuze, the police came under Kalashnikov fire for more than an hour. The matter wasn’t resolved and an SAAF Oryx with a back-up force was brought in, again to extricate the group. None of this activity ever made the news.

In a bid to disguise large-scale illicit activities, there are many KwaZulu villages – even as far south as the outskirts of Durban and parts of the South Coast – that grow their own patches of the drug. Some are quite extensive, as any private pilot who regularly traverses the area will confirm.

These little plots – usually between 50ft and 100ft square – can often be clearly seen, the dagga usually planted between regular crops. Though the majority of these mini-marijuana plantations are in full view of circling helicopters or small aircraft, the inadequately manned police force most times ignores them if it is clear that it is for ‘own use’. Obviously, even a modest crop grown on 5,000 square feet will deliver a sizeable amount of the drug: so, one must ask, who’s kidding whom?

While cultivating the plant, officially, is a crime, a member of SAPS media relations in Durban told me that ‘we don’t exactly turn a blind eye, but if we aren’t circumspect, we’d have to arrest just about every other Zulu farmer in the province. Examine it for yourselves – just about every other plot in the interior has its dagga plants.’ It was a tradition that went back centuries, he stated. Also, he conceded that it was impossible to stem the flow, adding that smaller patches of the drug offered poor returns compared to some of the more expansive, wellirrigated and cultivated stands in remoter parts. Some are said to be financed from abroad, but he wasn’t prepared to elaborate on that point.

Another type of operation involving the Police Air Wing in KwaZulu/Natal is the ongoing search for stolen cattle. Some of these operations extend over areas of about 10,000 square miles. The one hunt on which I accompanied police units started near the town of Vryheid in the north of the province and steadily spread out northwards towards the Mozambique frontier. As it matured, its focus shifted towards the border of the neighboring country of Swaziland.

Most search activity took place in remote areas where the bush and undergrowth were dense. Being a semi-tropical region didn’t help either. Also, the region was remote in places. Aircraft had gone down there in the past and it had sometimes taken weeks to recover them. A fourseater which crashed in bush terrain more than a decade ago was never found.

We left the Police Air Wing base adjacent to Durban’s international airport before dawn on a clear Monday morning and headed directly north. For much of the journey we covered good agricultural lands straddled by the occasional surfaced highway.

However, then the infrastructure started to deteriorate. Good thoroughfares north of Ngoma gradually gave way to dusty side roads in the bush. Finally, we were left with a succession of obscure tracks that snaked through the hills.

Most of the Zulu villages that came into view were modest and consisted of a few grass huts and a kraal for cattle. This is still a part of Africa where a man’s wealth is dictated by the number of cows he owns. That and the number of wives he can afford to maintain. Both are traditional touchstones of status within this largely tribal society.

The region between Zululand’s great Tugela River and the Pongola seems to have always been beset with security problems in the past. In places such as Tugela Ferry, strangers – and people in uniform, especially – are at risk if they go in there at night.

These are communities that are subdivided into more clans, fiefdoms and dynasties than anybody has bothered to list. It is also a society that has an unusually long memory: an innocuous, off-hand insult made long ago might, for the moment, be put aside, but it is never forgotten. As a consequence, inter-tribal factional killings are commonplace.

The Task Force plan was for SAPS elements – operational in Northern Natal with the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) for the duration – to link up with a combined force of about 250 army, police, air force and civil defence ‘volunteers’, some of whom were deployed adjacent to the Swazi border. Also involved was the Swaziland Police Force who, for the first time, was operational on South African soil; from past experience, some of the cattle likely to be recovered had been stolen in Swaziland. It was to be a ten-day operation against what were termed ‘lawless elements’ from both countries.

While the job of the main section was to recover livestock, security elements used the opportunity to search for criminals as well as gangs, escaped prisoners, illegal weapons, firearms ‘factories’ and, finally, gunrunners. The region remains a conduit for weapons smuggled into South Africa from neighbouring territories.

If time allowed, we were told, the force would destroy whatever marijuana plantations were spotted from the air. However, it was suggested that this was low on the priority list.

Apart from our own 105s, a single air force Oryx was dispatched as back-up from Waterkloof Air Force base near Pretoria. The main ground force was transported by the Air Wing, together with an assortment of about a dozen army vehicles, including Buffel troop carriers which, interestingly, are making a comeback on some Natal estates. Farmers are buying this surplus military equipment privately, largely for home protection, as well as for use against stock theft gangs.

In order to stay within budget, most of the men – air crews included – brought their own food. The total cost of the ten-day entire operation to the security forces was roughly R3m, or about US$300,000 at the 2010 rates of exchange.

By comparison, a similar-sized operation in Europe or America would easily have cost that per day, never mind the cost of additional logistical components.

Law is enforced a little differently in Africa, to which former Colonel Craig Mackrory can testify. Mackrory was a veteran of a succession of South Africa’s battles in Namibia and cross-border raids into Angola, and thereafter, the SAPS Air Wing. Since superseded by Senior Superintend René Colon, he is no longer with the Air Wing, having moved on to the more tranquil waters of one of the Indian Ocean islands.

A few years ago, flying a police helicopter around the Tugela Ferry area, he spotted a number of burning huts below. That was hardly unusual since there is often somebody burning somebody else’s home somewhere in the region. On going closer, he was suddenly greeted by the spectacle of a heavily armed Zulu Impi or battalion, of about 600 men. Mackrory had been working the area long enough to recognize them as members of the Sijozeni Zulu clan, one of the most bellicose in the Kingdom

You don’t often see a traditional Zulu regiment in South Africa any more. Impis are a legacy of centuries past and the great Zulu king Chaka and others before and after him. However, violence in the ‘New’ South Africa has tended to harden and to coalesce in tribal sentiments. The fact that this great African tribe has been reverting to its old ways, says much for the kind of brutality which has almost become a South African way of life.

This Impi, Mackrory noted – with their distinctive mottled brown and black shields and assegais glinting in the morning sun – were inter spersed by some warriors carrying firearms. The group moved across a low knoll at the double, clearly expecting trouble.

As his chopper’s glide path took him over the next hill, another Impi came into view. In-between there was all that was left of about a dozen burning huts. Bodies lay where they had been struck down. All of this destruction, he was to learn later, belonged to a second Zulu faction, the equally belligerent Ngcengeni clan.

There was nothing new about any of this, Mackrory suggested afterwards. Intelligence reports had been circulating back in Durban all week that the clans were itching for war. It seems that there were differences that needed to ‘sorted out’, which meant there would be killings.

As he pointed out, these might have included something as mundane as not honouring a lobola – the requisite bride price paid when a man takes a woman – or it could have been revenge killings for deeds that might have been committed half a century ago. ‘Zulus have phenomenal memories’, the colonel stated.

In South Africa’s brief history of conflict it has always been an unwritten law that when the Zulus are on the march, they are best left alone. It is in the interests of the authorities to look elsewhere when Impis clash. Ignore that fundamental precept and it might be your brains that end up splattered across the countryside.

Tugela Ferry enjoys another special notoriety, because many of the criminals operating out of there are sometimes armed with automatic weapons. Many are Soviet AK-47s, smuggled across the border from Mozambique. Others might be regular South African Army carbines stolen during armed robberies in the country’s big cities.

These weapons slot in well as crime continues to escalate in presentday South Africa. The age of the knobkerrie has been superseded – as any crook in Zululand will tell you, it’s easier to shoot someone than beat him to death. Also, life is cheap, especially in a region where the daily wage is often as low as $5 a day, and sometimes half that, and that’s if the labourer involved can get work.

Consequently, there are a lot of desperate men in this remote area a couple of hundred miles north-east of Durban.

So it was that Mackrory was suddenly faced with a potential crisis, involving almost a thousand Zulu warriors, who had already left a number of tribesmen dead. Also, he was very much aware that the two groups had deadly intent and if something wasn’t done, there could be a lot more of them killed, women and children, too. His job, as a police officer, was to try to put a stop to it.

He flew low over the next hill. Moments later he banked and headed back towards the two Zulu regiments. First some of the Ngcengeni scattered. Then a few of the Sijozeni militants gave way. By the time he had gained enough height to try to make an assessment, both groups had started to regroup. Because the local police station was only a few minutes away by vehicle, Mackrory made a last pass over the Impis. Meanwhile, he radioed base. Time was short, he stressed and while this wasn’t exactly war, it was close.

The South African Police Services BO-105 helicopter, while ideal for police ‘search and spot’ work, was never intended to be employed as a trooper. Normally this chopper carries a crew of two, heat and height permitting.

‘So I had to act pretty smartly,’ Mackrory recalls. ‘By now, I’d been speaking to the ground commander. We decided even before I’d landed that we needed to get some of our guys between the two groups. Obviously that was a tricky option but it was worth a try’, he reckoned.

As soon as I touched down, two of our guys were waiting to board. Each was armed with R4 rifles, standard SADF issue in .223 caliber. That was all very well, but we were aware that the two groups probably had quite a few AKs of their own. The more immediate problem, once these first two men had been dropped, was that they’d be isolated in the middle of two groups of fighting men. Worse, the majority were tanked up and the rest high as kites on pot.

It was clear that they’d been partying all night in anticipation of the battle. It was imminent, he radioed base.

‘While there was a slim chance that nothing would happen until I was able to bring in more troops, we faced the prospect of the two groups moving in on them,’ Mackrory explained.

Finally, after he flown 20 more police across from the station, it was all over bar the shouting. Observing small squads of well-equipped paramilitary police being dropped along several high points that surrounded the potential killing grounds caused the warriors to think twice. That was when the two groups started to disperse.

The colonel believes that his initially buzzing the two groups possibly helped to disorientate them. ‘Also, many Zulus had served in the army in Angola… they probably weren’t certain whether the BO-105 was armed like a helicopter gunship. Of course we weren’t. But it helped to have a few gun-barrels protruding out of the open door while we circled…’

South African security services have been fighting a low-intensity struggle in the lush farmlands of KwaZulu/Natal for quite a few years. As in Northern Ireland, issues are intense enough to sometimes involve the army and the South African Air Force. Arriving at the scene of some of the battles afterwards, the authorities might find eight dead in one village, 20 in another. Then, a week or six months later, another attack: payback time.

Those not hacked to death in these vendettas are shot with a variety of firearms, many of them homemade. Some are so basic that any firearms specialist might regard them as hazardous to fire. However, since these guns can be made in any backyard and are being used in domestic crimes, personal attacks and robberies, it’s important to take a close look at them.

As one ballistics specialist declared: all are lethal. Many are adaptations of the ubiquitous American ‘Saturday Night Special’.² Others are cheeky adaptations of 12-bore shotguns, which have been the most popular weapon of choice in less-developed regions because of the spread of fire. Used at close range they are almost always deadly as, in close quarters, it is difficult to miss whether you are high or not. More significant to the perpetrators, the rationale among those using shotshell is that there are few tell-tale ballistic ‘fingerprints’ for the police to work on afterwards. About half the weapons brought in while I worked with the police were shotguns. Ammunition was plentiful: just about every farmhouse has a box or two of shells.

Quite a few members of the police with whom I was associated during several tours of operation in South Africa had taken fire from improvised weapons. One police officer had a Remington 870, 12-bore shotgun fired at his chest at a range of a few feet. Even though he was wearing body armour, it knocked him out cold. Apart from a bruise the size of a plate that stayed with him for months, he wasn’t badly hurt. A foot higher, he reckoned, and he would have taken it in the face.

There is no question that, despite an increased security presence in KwaZulu/Natal, dissident groups are active in the territory and as long as the SAPS hunt them, they are obliged to turn to their own resources to acquire more weapons, which has resulted in many remarkable adaptations.

Technical expertise, while basic, is largely Heath-Robinson. It rarely involves machines. In the mountains, where most of the workshops are situated, there is often no electricity and tools can be as basic as a hammer, a hacksaw and a file, together with an umfaan to provide the muscle to drive a set of cowhide bellows over a primitive charcoal fire.

One starting pistol I was allowed to handle had been made into an effective single-shot weapon. It was .22 long-rifle calibre and had been used in a political assassination that was big news at the time. A prominent member of the largely Zulu Inkatha political establishment had been shot behind the ear from point blank range. The man died instantly.

Using some of the weapons was nothing short of perilous. One or two had fairly large gaps between the receiver and the barrel. In some, the cartridges were so loose-fitting that the gun emitted a sheet of flame from the breech.

‘Often, if the piping is too big for the cartridge, a short length of wire is wound around the base of the brass to keep it in position’ my source, Mike P., a veteran police ballistic expert, stated. This was often the case with 9mm Parabellum pistols.

The most basic system employed by these improvisers was to have two lengths of piping, one that fitted neatly into the other. A small, sharp piece of metal – the firing pin – would be soldered to one end and with the cartridge in place, you literally banged one end against the other. Obviously, you needed to be sure where the barrel was pointing just then.

‘Tricky, but it works, though not always if you’ve been drinking, which is often the case’, said Mike P. Also, you had to know how to hold it. Fingers had been severed in the past by not paying enough attention at that critical moment.

A new development, he said, had been to take toy pistols or revolvers, drill out the barrels to make them look authentic and use them in bank hold-ups, for which South Africa is now the acknowledged world leader. If, for instance, an AK is not available, the 9mm Para is still the preferred calibre. Another armourer reckoned that such basic devices would work for five or six rounds, after which the barrel tended to split.

The best homemade weapons, it was generally accepted in Natal were made by a fugitive known to the police as ‘Dum-Dum’ Dumisane. He was appropriately named. Having eluded the police for years, he taught his associates how to nip off the tip of a bullet to create more serious wounds.

Dumisane was also a shotgun boffin. One of his creations was recovered while I was still around. It was 12-guage and was fired as a handgun. Those who have tried it have said that you needed strong wrists!

Curiously, there are an astonishing number of military carbines about – AKs, South African Army R4s in 5.56mm calibre (the South African hybrid of the Israeli Galil), an occasional FN 7.62mm, often leftover from Rhodesia’s guerrilla war, or a former Portuguese Army G3 – also in 7.62mm calibre – that might have been brought across the border from Mozambique. As army-backed police operations start to take effect, this illegal arsenal is thinning, but as long as supply doesn’t keep pace with demand, more guns will arrive from somewhere.

Most of the people living in South Africa’s embattled zones agree. Barely a week goes by when farmers and, increasingly, their families, aren’t killed or wounded in road ambushes or attacks on isolated homesteads. Many of those involved maintain that as the attacks increase – with scores of rural people killed each year – it’s little more than a concerted effort to drive them off their properties. They point to the fact that along the foothills of the Drakensberg Mountains, Mpumalanga (formerly Eastern Transvaal), Limpopo to the north and elsewhere, some farms have already been abandoned by their former owners, especially those with young families.

What is certain is that the hyperbole associated with the killings has been heightened by the death toll. It’s difficult to police a situation barely a step removed from anarchy.

Over the years the SAPS Air Wing has had many experiences involving shoot-outs with criminals, such as the time, shortly before the Tugela Ferry incident, when the Air Wing was called upon to react to a fire-fight on the coastal road north of Durban. Because it was election time, political tempers were frazzled.

Then, while trying to arrest the occupants of a stolen car, a police unit in the Umzinto area, to the south of Durban came under sustained AK-47 fire. Barely 30 minutes before that, an armed gang had robbed a store, which is why the alert had gone out in the first place.

Shortly afterwards, explained one of the officers:

we were told that the group had originally been linked to Inkonto we Zizwe – the military wing of the African National Congress – a grouping not always favourably regarded by people of Zulu extraction. If that were the case, one of the offices confided, these people were dangerous. They would possibly have received military training abroad.

About 20 minutes later, a police helicopter arrived over the scene. The pilot spotted three men armed with AKs in a sugar-cane field below, almost surrounded by a squad of security personnel. Circling, he ventured lower. Suddenly the helicopter shuddered. Then it happened again, almost as if somebody were banging on the fuselage with a hammer. There was no mistaking the impact of bullets, some of which had struck his rotor.

‘The 105 started to vibrate and I knew that we’d been hit. But when a round struck my joy stick, I looked for a clearing to put down.’

The fire-fight ended after two of the robbers had been killed and the third wounded. There were seven guns between them, including three AKs together with almost a thousand rounds of ammunition. The police officer said he was lucky to be alive because of the volume of fire had been intense. Only later were they able to establish that the bullet that hit his joystick had exited the cockpit within a whisker’s-breadth of his face.

While flying police choppers in South Africa might not be everybody’s idea of fun, it has its moments.

In one of the several occasions that I was with the Police Air Wing operating out of Durban, we were involved in car chases. There was also a body search along a remote river valley off the Tugela River after a flash flood, where we found a cadaver and airlifted it out. That was followed by a couple of robberies that left criminals dead and, ultimately, the recovery of three men killed on a mountaintop. These were all black Eastern Cape farmers who had been gunned down in an ambush by soldiers of the Lesotho Armed Forces.

The three men were part of a 26-strong group of local ‘vigilantes’ who had been frustrated by government inaction following earlier stock raids out of the neighboring country and decided to do something about it themselves. They’d been following stock thieves who, with the stolen herd, had moved over the mountains into Lesotho.

Although the bodies lay across an international divide, it was left to one of the 105s to haul them out. That too was touch and go because Lesotho at the time was still smarting from a South African military invasion that had left 60 Basotho nationals and eight South African troops dead.

As for the future of the South African Police Air Wing, nobody is certain where it is heading. The respective squadrons are still up and kind of running in all the major urban centres, but African politics has played a significant hand in thinning the numbers of professional aviators.

Senior Police Superintendent René Coulon arrived back at the Air Wing to find that a former desk sergeant with no experience either in flying helicopters or in aviation generally had been appointed over his head. He queried the issue with Police Headquarters in Pretoria and was peremptorily told that the woman was effectively ‘running the show’. No explanation was given and nor did René ask for one. He submitted his resignation from the force the same day. Then, just before the 2010 World Cup, he was reinstated. Things seem to happen that way in Africa. Other officers to whom I spoke mentioned similar problems. The government wants more black pilots and whether they are professionally qualified or not, they will hire these individuals. Already there have been some serious accidents and as a consequence, lives have been lost.