I quote further:

When wars and massacres loom on the horizon, they see what’s happening. They have the ability to tell the world; and they do, for the most part, in measured, reasonable terms. And then – nothing. The deluge comes. It is worse even than they expected; more brutal than they could dream, so that afterward their reasoned moderation feels like cowardice, and ‘professionalism’ and ‘balance’ seem like euphemisms for self-serving ambivalence. Most become cynics. Some are drunks. And when they do go home, making excuses to themselves, some of them write fiction.

Dickey, always the master of the understatement, encapsulates it well.

There were other times when circumstances would remind me of Elspeth Huxley’s incisive comment about the continent. She famously miswrote that ‘Africa is a cruel country; it takes your heart and grinds it into powdered stone—and no one minds.’

I suppose it was to be expected that I should eventually turn to television reportage. From 1980 on, I made almost 100 documentaries on more than 30 countries in Africa, the Middle East and Asia, as well as South and Central America. It was good while it lasted, but I moved on when the politics linked to the film industry started to get to me. As I was to discover, making television documentaries is one of the toughest regimens around.

One notable experience was filming in Rio’s slums, or as they are known in Brazil, favelas. The Brazilians with whom I came into contact said that either I or Alwyn Kumst, my cameraman for that venture, would be killed. We’d be ‘iced’ by what they referred to as ‘some of the most brutal criminals on God’s earth’. It never happened, even though we went in every day for weeks: the wretched people with whom we dealt were among the most helpful I’d encountered anywhere and, let’s face it, they didn’t need to help us: we didn’t even speak their language.

Since then, I watched that remarkable movie Cidade de Deus (City of God), and our detractors may have been right. But those favela folk, pathetically distressed, destitute and still living today in some of the worst ghettos on any continent, knew exactly what we were doing. They actually helped us with our movie, aware, that by our actions we were for the underdog.

It was Brazil’s state security apparatus that eventually came down on us and we had to up sticks and get out fast. However, I had my film, shot by Alwyn Kumst on miniscule 100ft rolls of 16mm film using a hand-held Arri. He has since gone on to make a name for himself in Canada’s film industry.

That documentary was followed by Aids: The African Connection, which made the shortlist in the documentary section for the Pink Magnolia Awards at one of Shanghai’s film festivals. Then came the documentary that I produced on the Afghan War: the one that commemorated the fifth anniversary of the Soviet invasion.

My final documentary film, sponsored in part by Washington’s Howard University and flighted on PBS in the United States, covered the fall of Idi Amin and the last days of the Ugandan Civil War. It was called Africa’s Killing Fields and what a tragedy that debacle eventually turned into: the absurd brutality of a maniac, all those lives lost… I deal with that period as well within these covers.

After all the adventure, there came a time when I needed to break free from an existence – for that was what it really was – that allowed precious little time for my family. I was always on the road, or in the air. My lovely wife Madelon, in all those years, was all but a single parent and my children grew up without me. As it was, I hardly ever spent quality time with the two younger ones.

What finally forced change was my last visit to Gulu in Northern Uganda. Even now that part of Central Africa is being primed for rebellion from Southern Sudan. I went in there with a television crew from Antenne Deux after my own cameraman refused to leave his hotel room in Kampala. He and his girlfriend – who was doing sound – said the north of the country was too dangerous, though that’s why I hired them as a team, dammit!

They were right, of course. We had to leave Gulu in a hurry because filming had been forbidden by the local military commander, but we went ahead anyway, rather pointedly and dangerously ignoring his order. Clearly, if we hadn’t left as soon as the camera stopped rolling, we’d have been arrested and who knows what would have happened? One of the sequences captured during that assignment was of the Gulu town jail: there was blood dripping down the wall from between the bars.

Just as we were leaving Gulu, word arrived of a rebel force approaching from the south. We could hear the firing and were left with only two options: hit the trail or get ourselves arrested by the Ugandan Army.

They shot at us all right; but we got safely to the cheering mob at the edge of the next town. They’d heard the gunfire and spotted us hurtling down the only road, through the kind of undulating bush that you find throughout much of Northern Uganda. Meanwhile, I was huddled on the floor at the back of the vehicle, as if that would have been protection against RPG rocket fire…

Although the 10 or 12 minutes it took to cross Injun Country seems like aeons, I realized that if any of us had taken a hit that day, it would still have been a six-hour drive to Kampala to get help. After years of misrule, we could hardly count on what was left of medical services in the Ugandan capital, even if we could have found a doctor. In any event, Aids was rampant and we had been warned that the country’s blood supply was contaminated. None of us would have survived a gut wound.

At that point, I decided that Uganda should be my last war. However, since then, because I’ve needed to fill gaps, I’ve covered a few more. The death of Bob MacKenzie in Sierra Leone – my compadre from guerrilla fighting in El Salvador, Vietnam and Rhodesia – took me back there in 1995. I also ended up going into Hizbollah country in South Lebanon after the spate of bombings in Israel in March 1996, and that, too, fringed on the cathartic. And then, for Jane’s Defence Weekly, I spent a while with Hizbollah in Beirut.

War in the Balkans and then Sierra Leone again in 2000, followed. In West Africa, I mingled with a variety of regular and unconventional forces. As well as Neall Ellis and his helicopter gunship team, there were a handful of SAS operatives as well as a squad of Royal Marines and a Parachute Regiment detachment that were active on the outskirts of Freetown. The two British regular units worked the periphery of Lungi International Airport and it wasn’t long before the rebel force was bloodied. British media spoke about a handful of rebels killed in a series of contacts: in fact, the number was in the hundreds.

There were quite a few South Africans within those British ranks, as there are today with the British Army in Afghanistan, and it was nice to make contact so far from home.

When talking about life as a war correspondent, the last word should go to Lord Deedes, Bill to his friends and an erstwhile member of that illustrious and civilized Old School of Journalism that seems to have passed the modern generation by. Bill died in the summer of 2007 and it says much that at the age of 93, he was still writing. He ran his column in the Daily Telegraph to the end. In fact, he was still working a few weeks before he died.

As a reporter for the Morning Post, young William Deedes covered the 1930s Abyssinian campaign that Evelyn Waugh captured so exuberantly in his book Scoop. Those who have read it can’t fail to detect the unmistakable link between Bill and the principal character, but as Waugh subsequently commented, ‘that’s all part of the game’.

‘Journalists do not make good historians,’ the venerable Lord Deedes wrote in the introduction to a book put out some years ago.⁶ The old warrior went on: ‘They like to deal in bright colors, and much of history is grey’, which is true.

As for me, I don’t profess to write history, but, as people like to say, ‘I was there’. What’s more, it was interesting, it was colourful and it was exciting.

Let those be my reasons.

AL J. VENTER

Cape Town, July 2010