What was evident the first morning of the battle was the volume of Soviet-supplied anti-aircraft firepower that the Angolans were able to hurl at circling South African Alouettes. With a number of Cuban regulars in their ranks, the Angolans fired salvoes that accounted for several lives, all lost during the ground attack on what was termed an ‘enemy’ military base.

Initially, the South Africans had hit a fairly large military concentration in some pretty ragged bush country near the Angolan hamlet of Cuamato. They were in search of insurgents, I was told. However, the intelligence boffins were wrong, and instead the heavily fortified encampment belonged to FAPLA, the Angolan Army. Its presence in this desolate open country that the Portuguese, centuries before, had dubbed Terras do fim Mundo – Land at the End of the Earth – was perfectly legitimate.

The battle lasted for two days. For my part, it included a series of infantry assaults through Angolan Army trench lines, with the rest of the time spent in helicopters looking for what some of the aviators like to call ‘targets of opportunity’.

One of the pilots with whom I flew was Heinz Katzke, an easygoing professional who seemed to enjoy any challenge while at the controls of a gunship. If he could manage it, I suggested, I’d like to get my hands on a bayonet, preferably for a Kalashnikov.

‘No problem’, was his reply. ‘Let’s see if we can find you one’, and off we went. A short time later, we spotted the body of an Angolan soldier lying kind of half-secreted under a tree, his AK at an odd angle across his knees. We were aware that these troops all carried bayonets, though in Africa they were rarely attached to the barrel. Most were tied to their webbing, prominently displayed, almost like a badge of courage.

‘Looks like he’s not going to need his AK any time soon’, said Heinz half jokingly as he lost altitude and went into the hover. ‘Or his bayonet’, the gunner behind us added with a chuckle.

We were still at about 300 feet when Heinz decided to bring the chopper down onto an open clearing in the bush a short distance from our man. Over the mike – to which all three of us on board were connected – he told the gunner that he would put down about 20 paces from the body. ‘I’m taking her down just south of that large tree to the south’, he said pointing.

‘Roger’ was the reply. By then the gunner was already unstrapping himself. There was no question of telling headquarters what we were doing because it was illegal. Instead, Heinz just went in: it was that kind of war.

Once on the ground, the helicopter’s gunner – a sergeant who was normally crouched across a 20mm cannon protruding from the portside hatch – undid his last safety belt, took off his helmet, grabbed his issue carbine and sprinted towards the ‘gook’.

He was perhaps two or three yards from the Angolan when the ‘dead man’ suddenly sat up, took hold of his AK and lowered the barrel, but he wasn’t quick enough. The gunner killed the combatant with a short burst of automatic fire. Wasting little time, he turned over the body, ran his hands over the now-dead man’s uniform and, having found the blade, sprinted back towards the helicopter. Perhaps 30 seconds later, we were back in the air. Nobody said a word while we soared back up to operational height and I was able to check my newfound trophy in its red-baked Bakelite sheath.

About then the gunner came through on the mike. ‘He wasn’t wounded, Captain… very far from dead, in fact’, he told Heinz Katzke.

‘How do you know?’

‘Patted him down, Sir… there were no other wounds on him. He was playing possum… probably would have made a run for it as soon as the sky was clear.’

A silence followed, none of us knowing what to say…

‘Well’ said the captain after a little while, motioning with his left hand in my direction, ‘at least you got your bayonet… and what’s another dead fucker between friends?’

‘But just don’t tell the colonel about it when we get back… ’

As Chris Munnion, the former Daily Telegraph correspondent in Africa, says in Banana Sunday, the effort was heroic.³ Some of the yarns that surfaced are legend, and so are a few of the hangovers! As Chris comments, in inimitable Munnion style, rarely was there a life lost. These scribes ‘rushed about from riot to revolt, from the back-andbeyond to the front, from palaces to prison cells to telegraph, telex, phone, pigeon post and the use of many other ingenious ways to get the unfolding story of Imperial Retreat back to their newspapers’. They seemed to do so with impunity.

The old order of those days – the 1960s and the 1970s – has long since gone. It’s been replaced by much distress and violence. Indeed, things are much worse now than during earlier decades. Then the international community wasn’t only genuinely interested in what was happening in Black Africa, but Europe and the Americas were directly engaged. They trusted the new black leaders of Africa, people like Nkrumah, Tubman, Hastings Banda, Jomo Kenyatta, Julius Nyerere the Tanzanian President, Sir Abubakar Tafewa Balewa and Modiba Keita of Mali, which in almost all cases was a bad mistake.

Now, well into the new millennium, the game has changed once more. The Cold War is over and there is no need to gratify the demands of some psychotic tyrant because if you didn’t help him the Soviets would (though that, too, could quickly change if Beijing becomes too pervasive). Few cared if deaths in Rwanda were measured in thousands or, in reality, in hundreds of thousands. It’s all old-hat, or in the minds of some, it should be, though recent events in Darfur have rekindled that nightmare.

Instead, today’s headlines are more concerned with shrinking budgets, the latest goings-on in the White House, chaos on the outskirts of Kandahar or possibly some obscure outbreak of violence south of the Urals or a Moscow suicide bombing. If Africa does get a mention, it’s usually because some company’s commercial or mining interests are at stake. Sadly, Africa has reverted to darkness and cold night.

However, from a sufficient distance, African troubles do have their comic side. It can sometimes be quite amusing as cultures clash and egos need to be nursed. The illustrious former Newsweek and London Daily Mail correspondent Peter Younghusband has captured much of what happened over three or four decades of reporting on the continent in a book recently published in Cape Town, titled, appropriately, Every Meal a Banquet, Every Night a Honeymoon.⁴

An uproarious read, it puts much of what happened in Africa yesterday thoroughly in context.

Some of the stories that emerged over the years had more sinister implications. This became apparent as the Congolese war spread eastwards towards the Ugandan and Rwandan borders and then south to Katanga (now Shaba Province). By then a mercenary army had been raised, commanded by the same Mike Hoare with whom George Clay went into battle before he was killed. Moise Tshombe, meanwhile, had declared Katanga independent and overnight Hoare, the ultimate mercenary, changed sides.

The UN intervened and another civil war followed. However, these were real wars and a lot of real people, innocent or otherwise, were being slaughtered.

Because of faulty or inadequate phone and telex links with the world outside, most of the hacks worked from the Edinburgh Hotel in Kitwe, a modest mining town in Zambia then listed on the map as Northern Rhodesia. It was part of the Central African Federation, a British political invention that, as might have been expected, failed after only a few years.

The border between Northern Rhodesia and the Congo at the time was patrolled by the Federal Army, a very professional, little military force that operated in a typically British fashion. All the African countries in the region except the Congo (Zaire) and Angola (which was Portuguese) were still British territories and Whitehall’s influence was manifest. Here an event, or rather a series of events, took place which will be remembered long after we are all gone.

Peter Younghusband and his Daily Express colleague John Monks were involved. Since I had commissioned Chris Munnion to write his book and sent him around the world in a bid to capture some of this history while I was still into publishing, I’ll repeat what he told me on his return.

Apparently, Younghusband and Monks were relaxing in Kitwe one evening, having just returned to file their copy to London from Elizabethville, the Katangese capital (Lubumbashi, today). They were approached by a mild-mannered American who introduced himself as Weldon Wallace of The Baltimore Sun. Wallace was that newspaper’s distinguished music critic and he had been covering the opera season in Milan when the Katanga crisis erupted.

‘My newspaper noticed that I was the man nearest the spot and asked me to pop down here to cover the story’, Wallace explained to Younghusband. ‘I have actually never been to Africa before so I wonder if I could possibly get a lift with you to Elizabethville?’ The two old hands pointed out the difficulties of getting through the roadblocks and explained that as he, Weldon Wallace, had an American passport, the Katangese might easily pick on him as his government was involved with the hated United Nations, then occupying parts of Katanga.

‘We felt a bit guilty about this, especially as he was such a nice guy’, Monks said afterwards, ‘but it really was becoming a hairy run and we knew that having a stranger with an American passport could easily put us all at risk’.

Wallace appreciated their point. Unbeknown to Monks and Younghusband, he’d earlier sought out two other newly arrived journalists, Arthur Bonner, a fellow American, of CBS as well as Lionel Fleming of the BBC, who travelled on an Irish passport. All three journalists agreed to drive to Katanga together the following day.

Weldon Wallace had heard mention that Africans across the border were starving and he’d thoughtfully loaded his hired car with cans of dried milk and sacks of flour. ‘I thought if I distributed food to refugees, it would generate a spirit of goodwill and enable us to pass through to Elizabethville’, he said at the time. He was soon to learn that there was precious little goodwill left in Central Africa.

The three men set off early, quickly negotiated the Northern Rhodesian border post and drove down the hill to the Katangese frontier a mile beyond. It was still early morning, but the Katangese troops lounging around the border post were drunk and high on pot. They could scarcely believe their eyes when three white men emerged from the car cheerfully waving their passports – two American and one Irish.

As the cry went up ‘Americans! Irish! UN spies… kill them… kill them!’ the three realized their error and tried to get back to the car. They were beaten and dragged at gunpoint to a fetid shack about 100 yards away while other troops cheerfully ransacked the car and began bayoneting the bags of flour in the trunk.

The shack to which the three scribes were shepherded had a floor of compacted cow dung and a tin roof.

Wallace: ‘It was hot and very smelly but that was the least of our problems. We were being slapped, beaten and jabbed with rifles. As the man who appeared to be the sergeant screamed threats and insults at us, hands reached out and grabbed our wallets and watches.’

Through a window, Wallace saw a large white man approaching. It was a guardian angel in the unlikely form of Peter Younghusband. ‘When he saw what was going on, an expression of astonishment crossed his face. He inclined his head in acknowledgement of our plight. My hopes rose.’

Monks and Younghusband had set out for the border shortly after Wallace and friends. At the Northern Rhodesian border post they had exchanged pleasantries with a Federal Army officer, a major whom Monks, then based in Rhodesia, had known for some time. They were told that two Americans and an Irishman had just gone through. With mounting concern the pair approached the Katangese border.

‘The first thing we noticed was this great cloud of flour hanging in the air. The troops were fighting over the spoils from our colleagues’ car’, Younghusband remembers. ‘It was an amazing sight. There were these crazed black men reeling around covered in white flour, their eyeballs rolling. We realized something pretty nasty was going on. A Katangese immigration official indicated that three white spies had been “taken for execution”.’ Monks and Younghusband made a swift decision. Younghusband would try to do what he could to calm the situation which by then was totally out of control, while Monks would dash back to the Northern Rhodesian border post to summon help from Federal troops.

‘Bigfoot’ Younghusband strolled as casually as he could towards the shack where he heard sounds of another commotion. He glimpsed the terrified face of Weldon Wallace through the window and made his way to the door.

‘I burst in and, trying to sound authoritative, I bellowed in French: ‘Stop this immediately! These men are famous journalists who have come to see President Tshombe.’ I was armed with nothing more useful than a Katangese press card which I brandished wildly. It didn’t work.’

The Katangese officer, his face contorted in fury, stepped towards the big guy, knocked the press card out his hand and hollered ‘Spies, spies… you are all spies.’ With that he slapped Younghusband across the face.

‘I was transformed from a liberal to an Afrikaner nationalist in 30 seconds flat’, Peter recalled with wry humor.

There was nothing funny about his situation at the time, however. He was pushed onto the floor with the other three. To his horror, one soldier dragged a Bren gun into the open door of the hut, spread-eagled himself behind it and pointed it at the hostages, for that was what they’d become. The others, meanwhile, kept ranting with a chant of ‘Kill them… kill them’. The Bren gunner suddenly rolled over onto his back and started to laugh.

‘I sensed they were waiting for somebody’, said Younghusband. ‘So I urged the others to try not to show their fear… if they see it or smell it, it makes them worse, which was much more easily said than done.’

The Katangese immigration officer suddenly appeared in the doorway and spoke to the soldier in charge. He pointed at Younghusband and said he knew him as a British journalist. Peter was ordered to his feet and told to get back to the other side of the border. Wallace, Bonner and Fleming were then dragged out of the shack and bundled into a vehicle that took them several miles down the road, where the car swung off into a clearing in the bush. Wallace took up the story.

‘The soldiers crowded around. They tore off our jackets and ordered us to remove the rest of our clothing. One of them said they did not want our clothes to show bullet holes… I was convinced this was the end. We were going to be executed there in the bush.’ The half-naked trio was then pushed into a line. Once again the soldiers cocked their rifles.

Back at the border post, Younghusband found John Monks with some Federal troops in armoured cars. The friendly major was talking urgently into a field radio. Monks had got through to his old friend, Sir Roy Welensky, the Federal Prime Minister, who ordered his troops to do everything possible to rescue the journalists. The troops then drove to the Katangese border post where the major was now trying to reach his opposite number in the Gendarmerie on the radio. He succeeded.

A senior Katangese officer raced to the scene just in time to prevent what would almost certainly have been the execution of the three men. They were given back their clothes, shoved back in the car and handed over at the border post. Bonner and Fleming were shaken but unhurt. Weldon Wallace also had no injuries but was white and shaking and clearly in shock.

Monks and Younghusband rushed him back to Kitwe and summoned a doctor from the nearby copper mine.

‘Weldon was put straight to bed and heavily sedated’, Monks said. ‘Just before he went under, he kept muttering that he had to write a story for his newspaper. He had to file, were his words. We told him not to worry, which was when he went into a deep sleep.’

The two men sat down at a typewriter and, under Wallace’s name, composed a dramatic first-person account of what had happened. ‘My American passport nearly cost me my life yesterday…’ it started, and went on in punchy Fleet Street style. They then cabled it to The Baltimore Sun which ran it prominently with Weldon’s by-line and his picture under the banner headline ‘A Captive of Wild Katangan Troops’.

By the time the newspaper’s music critic came to in Kitwe’s Edinburgh Hotel, there was a pile of cables from his editors as well as his proprietor congratulating him on his escape and his story. They advised him too that he was being nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for ‘a story written under great pressure’.

Poor Weldon was totally bewildered. ‘But I didn’t write anything… what are they talking about?’Monks and Younghusband tried to tell him that he’d dictated his account to them before he was sedated, but he was not convinced.

Younghusband told me: ‘He went straight back to the US and we had a long letter of thanks from him. However, he said that, under the circumstances, he could not possibly accept a Pulitzer nomination… a pity because that’s the closest we ever came to winning a prize.’

Monks’ hometown newspaper, the Melbourne Herald, meanwhile, ran the story of his exploits under the memorable headline ‘Australian Reporter Saves Three from Natives’.

Considering the risks of covering the African beat, I reckon I must have been pretty lucky over the years. Apart from some scrapes and being left half-deaf from a series of blasts while covering the Angolan War, I have been fortunate to have survived a career that spans more than four decades in the field, though I’d like to think that it’s not over yet.

I use the word ‘survive’ lightly, as there is something inexplicable about emerging on the other side alive and with all your bits and pieces intact. People talk about a sixth sense, a kind of warning of danger. My theory revolves around a seventh, eighth or even a ninth sense, ‘every cell inside you crying out to live, just live!’ as it was graphically described by Arkady Babchenko, a brilliant young Russian writer when he talks about his experiences in Chechnya in One Soldier’s War in Chechnya.⁵

Throughout it all, I have been doing what I loved best, be it going into Beirut with the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) during the 1980s Israeli invasion of Lebanon; covering the war in El Salvador with a group of American mercs; or, during the Balkan War, flying in a Joint-STARS operation with the United States Air Force over Kosovo. I didn’t regard any of it as inordinately demanding at the time, though it obviously was, because I earned a good living from the proceeds.

Nor was it a chore to traipse around some of the African and Middle Eastern conflicts that I’d chosen, or been chosen, to cover. It was the same when I joined the Police Air Wing, a paramilitary helicopter unit in South Africa, in the winter of 2006 for a combined three-week ground and air operation that resulted in the destruction of about 20 tons of marijuana in what was once known as Zululand.

Before that, I went into Angola with South African units on longrange penetration strikes. During ‘Op Daisy’ a week-long onslaught deep into Angola, I was embedded with an attack force that involved Ratel infantry fighting vehicles from 61 Mech. ‘Op Daisy’ was hardly a success, and we were mightily intimidated by the way the enemy deployed anti-tank mines. I was on the turret of one of the Infantry Fighting Vehicles (IFVs) when we triggered a TM-57: my only injury was a broken arm, and though I was choppered out to have it set, I was back again by nightfall.

It was also in Angola in 1980 that I went into combat with 1 Parachute Battalion, and, as mentioned earlier, while with the unit, attacked what we thought was a rebel SWAPO base at Cuamato. With Charlie Company (79/81), we were dropped straight into the bush from a string of Puma helicopters and it didn’t take us long to realize that the enemy was all over the place, many of them armed with RPG-7s. Most of the youngsters around me were still in their teens and they fought with a kind of dedicated resolve that astonished us older guys.