The War for Africa was written in the beginning under serious constraints. It is essential that I flag these up for this new edition, which features a new prologue and epilogue. Context in history is all-important, and new facts and insights constantly surface.
As I researched and wrote the initial account, published here unchanged from the original from page 55 onwards, I was also beginning to uncover a terrible truth about one of the important war leaders that, for reasons of life and death, I could not then reveal. Also, the young South Africans whose stories I heard and told had fought the war without knowing about historic and secret events unfolding far to the south that would transform their lives but which, at the time, were hidden from them and also from the world at large: if they had known, some of them at least might have wondered what the fight was about.
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General Jannie Geldenhuys, the gentlemanly chief of the South African Defence Force, gave me unfettered access to ‘ordinary’ soldiers who did the fighting at the height of the Cuban-South African war in Angola in 1987–88. My wish was to write a book on the conflict seen through the eyes of those fighting men: Geldenhuys gave me freedom to interview as many of them as time, energy and money allowed. He promised there would be no interference from top levels of the military or government: there was none. I and my original publisher stipulated that there would be no question of the book being subjected to official scrutiny or censorship: there was none.
I pieced together the account that follows of the War for Africa through scores of interviews with men who were in the front line. The only officer I interviewed above the rank of colonel was General Geldenhuys.
Only now can I say that Geldenhuys would surely have withheld his permission had he known the horrific facts I had begun discovering at that time about South Africa’s key wartime ally, Jonas Savimbi, leader of the Angolan rebel movement UNITA (the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola).
Thanks to my close friend, Tito Chingunji, at that time the foreign secretary of UNITA and number three in the liberation movement’s hierarchy, I had begun documenting a series of truly appalling atrocities committed by Savimbi against his own people. The full story will be told in a book, as yet only part-completed, but much has already been revealed in several newspaper accounts I have written.1
Basically, Savimbi, at a certain point in UNITA’s resistance war against Angola’s ruling MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola), began executing some of his top officers and their wives and children in bizarre ceremonies at Jamba, his forest headquarters in southeast Angola.
On one occasion, as described to me by several eyewitnesses, Savimbi summoned the entire population of Jamba to a central clearing where the people saw a giant stack of wood and blindfolded men tied to nearby trees. Savimbi arrived with some of his senior officers, all wearing scarlet bandanas.
Savimbi rose to speak on a day that would be remembered as Setembro vermelho (Red September). Witches had been plaguing the movement, he said. Some would that day breathe their last and would no longer be able to retard the war effort.
An armed detachment marched towards the blindfolded men. The troops lined up, fired and the men slumped dead, still held by their ropes to the trees.
Savimbi had only just begun.
He ordered every person in the crowd, children also, to gather a twig each and cast it on the woodpile. The giant bonfire was lit. O Mais Velho (The Eldest One) called names of women and asked them to step forward: they, he said, were witches whom he had condemned to death. Children would die with their mothers because ‘a snake’s offspring is also a snake,’ eyewitnesses recall Savimbi saying. One of the women who died that day was Aurora Katalayo, a paediatrician and haematologist who had trained and qualified as a doctor in Switzerland. She was the widow of a popular and outspoken guerrilla commander, Mateus Katalayo, who had been executed by Savimbi three years earlier. Aurora had resolutely refused Savimbi’s invitations to sleep with him either before or after Mateus’s death.
Aurora, according to several accounts, cursed Savimbi’s soul aloud, called him a criminal and warned he would never win as she was frog-marched from the crowd with her four-year-old son Michel. Mother and son were pitched into the fire. Tito Chingunji said the proof Savimbi gave of Aurora’s witchcraft was the ‘Swissification’2 of Michel and his 12-year-old sister M’Bimbi – but, said Tito, she really died because of her resistance to Savimbi’s sexual advances.
Subsequently, my friend Tito was detained by Savimbi with his wife Raquel and their four children. As I struggled to help Tito, contacting intelligence agencies in London and Washington who had worked closely with him and urging them to act on his behalf, I received death threats from UNITA thugs who also threatened to mutilate close members of my family. My efforts failed. Tito was executed by Savimbi with his wife, children and entire extended family of about 50 people. Suddenly I knew the full meaning of bereavement, a cosmic despondency, a wrenching, terrible deprivation of a friendship that had endured amazing adventures and difficulties and had, I hoped, many rich years to run. All the efforts and subterfuges by me and others to preserve Tito’s life had bitten the dust. His death must have been as lonely as that of Steve Biko.3 His life was snuffed out callously and evilly.
The circumstance of this story in relation to the War for Africa was that thousands of UNITA soldiers fought alongside South Africans. They were the ‘poor bloody infantry.’4 Many of them riding atop South African armoured vehicles were swept away by enemy fire like chaff in the wind. These ordinary peasant soldiers were not guilty of Savimbi’s crimes, but I had no access to them as I endeavoured unsuccessfully to save Tito’s life. Their role in the war deserved nevertheless to be told, so I interviewed Colonel Fred Oelschig, the senior South African Defence Force liaison officer with Savimbi throughout 1986–89, and added his analysis as a postscript to the book. Oelschig’s own account appears, again unchanged, at the end of this new edition. Oelschig did not know, when I talked to him, what I had been discovering about Savimbi, and I have no idea what he knew at the time about events at the heart of the UNITA movement.
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Some two years before the first shots were fired in the War for Africa, in the face of what the then South African government perceived as a ‘mortal threat’ to its existence, an unusual meeting took place in a Cape Town hospital. South Africa’s Justice Minister Kobie Coetsee visited Nelson Mandela, the patriarch of the banned African National Congress (ANC) who was in the 22nd year of life imprisonment after being convicted on charges of sabotage and conspiring to overthrow the apartheid state.
‘In my mind I had the picture of a man who was determined to seize power at all costs,’ said Coetsee when recalling his thoughts before his first meeting with the man deemed one of the mortal threats to the South African state. Coetsee, however, was immediately impressed by Mandela, whom he likened to ‘an old Roman citizen, with dignitas, gravitas, honestas, simplicitas [dignity, seriousness, integrity, openness]’. The two men struck up an unlikely friendship. Mandela, who had undergone a prostate operation, was clad in a dressing gown and immediately charmed Coetsee, who recalled: ‘He acted as though we had known each other for years and this was the umpteenth time we had met. He chided me for not coming to see him sooner.’5
After that first encounter, Coetsee had several more meetings lasting up to three hours with Mandela, sometimes in the comfort of Coetsee’s own Cape Town home where Mandela enjoyed his first alcoholic drinks in more than two decades – his favourite tipple South African medium cream sherry.6 The ice was broken. Negotiations, no matter how tentative at first, had begun that would lead to Mandela becoming a free man and then state president within less than nine years.
Coetsee formed a special committee, which included Niël Barnard, the young head of the National Intelligence Service, and Barnard’s deputy, Mike Louw, to broaden the discussions with Mandela. These detailed ‘talks about talks’ lasted up to seven hours at a time, and Mandela’s diary notes 47 meetings in all.7 Officials took Mandela for walks in the countryside and to fish and chip shops. On a stroll along Cape Town’s crowded Sea Point beach no one recognised the man who had been hidden from the world since 1961. In a further development, Mandela was moved to Victor Verster Prison, near Paarl in the Cape winelands, where he was given his own three-bedroom house with his own chef, a butler and a swimming pool. There Mandela was able to receive up to a dozen visitors at a time, including young opponents of the National Party government, as officials sought the elusive formula for an ‘honourable release’for Mandela.
‘Thus for four years before the rest of the world knew anything of it, the future of South Africa was being explored in secret conversations in hospitals, prisons and a cabinet minister’s home between government officials and their principal political prisoner,’ observed the distinguished South African journalist Allister Sparks.8
Secrecy and confidentiality about these early rounds of talks were the demands of both Mandela and Coetsee. It was the stuff of an unwritten John Le Carré novel.
Meanwhile, as the talks accelerated between the government and Mandela, young men from South Africa and Angola were fighting, dying and being hideously wounded as they battled deep inside Angola. Had the white South African youths known what was happening behind closed doors in and around Cape Town, it is questionable how many would have felt motivated to wage war as hard and as courageously as they did.
The South African soldiers on the front line represented virtually the whole spectrum of young white opinion at that time, from the far right for whom there could be ‘no surrender’ to liberals who realised that something had to change in their own society. Many served with patriotic fervour: others did so reluctantly and with little enthusiasm.
Three thousand South African soldiers and probably about 8,000 UNITA guerillas fought in alliance against the Marxist MPLA army, Fapla (the People’s Armed Forces for the Liberation of Angola), and its Cuban and Soviet allies.
A fuller story would have emerged if I been able to interview all the men who fought in the war, but that was of course impossible. I do regret not having met Lieutenant David Mannall, of 61 Mechanised Battalion, an armoured unit that fought the biggest and most crucial battle of the War for Africa on the banks of Angola’s Lomba River, against Fapla’s crack 47 Brigade on 3 October 1987. It took Mannall, then aged only 19, some twenty more years to get down all his thoughts on paper about the heat and horror of battle: his thoughts would have enhanced my account.
Mannall was just one of hundreds of thousands of white boys conscripted, at the age of 17, to compulsory National Service through the 1960s into the early 1990s in defence of homeland and border security and against communist-sponsored terrorism and a possible communist-backed takeover.
Mannall describes how many of his fellow young conscripts were mainly concerned with how to lose their virginity before they were flung into battle, and then: ‘How could we know that when we lined up at Grootfontein [a forward base in Namibia] our squad would be decimated, most survivors deeply scarred – some for life. We were all destined to be casualties of war: we just didn’t know it yet.’9 Photos of the uniformed conscripts show teenagers, many of whom had not begun shaving and who look scarcely older than my own 13-year-old grandson.
Mannall’s trusted driver in his Ratel anti-tank armoured car was David Corrie who ‘detested being in the army and all forms of authority.’ When the battle against 47 Brigade began ‘the fighting was mercilessly brutal and un-fucking-flinchingly deadly! The full might of Fapla’s artillery and mortar shells exploded in an almost unbroken thunder around us … At times micro-volcanic eruptions of earth being excavated by shells exploding nearby left clouds of dust hanging in the sky, sometimes reducing visibility to a few metres.’ Then came the dreaded call over the communications network. Mannall’s squad had taken its first fatality. A Ratel commanded by his friend, Adrian Hind, had received a direct hit from a Fapla tank. Hind, badly wounded and confused, clambered out of his armoured car and began stumbling across the field of battle between the two sides. As he lurched towards the South African line he was cut down by Fapla guns. A rifleman named Graham Green sprinted forward under intense enemy fire, reached the mortally wounded Hind and carried the near lifeless body to safety. Green was later awarded the Honoris Crux [Cross of Honour], the old South Africa’s highest military award for conspicuous courage, but Adrian Hind died of his wounds before he could be airlifted out of Angola to hospital.
Soon, more South African teenagers would die and others would lose legs, arms, hands and, in at least one case, half of a face.10 Of the return to ‘normal’ life, Lieutenant Mannall observed: ‘Societal norms dictated we “button up” and tough it out. We were discarded, dismissed, left to find our own way. Some did OK, others less so.’
A Johannesburg psychiatrist told the London-based New Scientist magazine that post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was commonplace among his young soldier patients until the end of the 1980s. ‘Then added to the familiar symptoms of PTSD we began to see anger towards the system that had let them down,’ said Dr A. At first they showed trauma resulting from the loss of friends in battle. But then they began to show signs of trauma from loss of innocence. ‘They were taught that the enemy was the ANC which was equated with communism, which in turn was equated with being non-human. But suddenly [following Mandela’s release in 1990 from imprisonment and a public admission of negotiations] they’re seeing the “enemy” as a person with a family, who reads newspapers and speaks the same language.’11 The re-humanisation of the enemy raised agonising questions and the spectre of self-doubt for many of the youngsters who fought in Angola.
This book never pretended to be a full account of the War for Africa. That would have required extensive research in Havana, Moscow and Luanda. I did subsequently try very hard to make a film looking at the war through the eyes of ordinary Cuban soldiers who had taken part in it, but that foundered on stultifying bureaucracy in the Cuban capital. The prologue that follows does contain parts of a long interview I conducted with Cuban General Rafael Del Pino Diaz, who commanded the Cuban Air Force in Angola before defecting to the United States.
I also met in UNITA territory a 17-year-old Cuban soldier, Private Samuel Ducentes Rodriguez, who became a prisoner-of-war of the guerrillas before he had fired a shot in anger. A cheerful and warm little man, Rodriguez became a kind of mascot to his UNITA guards. He had begun to speak Portuguese and the local Ovimbundu tribal language. Jonas Savimbi promised Rodriguez he would never be harmed.
In March 1976, with UNITA facing a Cuban blitzkrieg, Rodriguez, despite Savimbi’s assurances, became one of 17 Cubans executed by a UNITA firing squad. His death stirred and depressed me greatly. It somehow crystallised all the futility of war’s deaths. My wife at that time, Kathryn Kane, was also deeply upset. Although she had never met Rodriguez, I had told her about him. She wrote a poem, titled Rodriguez, which appears in abbreviated form before Part 7, Chapter 28 of the main narrative and which for me captures the poignancy and symbolism of the young Cuban’s death.
Because my story has its limitations, as spelt out above, as a history of the conflict, readers will no doubt take them into account. I have yet to read any better warning about the dangers of as-it-happened war reporting than that in George Orwell’s classic book on the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia, and I repeat it here: ‘It is difficult to be certain about anything except what you have seen with your own eyes, and consciously or unconsciously everyone writes as a partisan. In case I have not said this earlier, I will say it now: beware of my partisanship, my mistakes of fact, and the distortion inevitably caused by my having seen only one corner of events. And beware of exactly the same thing when you read any other book on this period!’
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A headache for anyone trying to get his or her head around the manifold complexities of Angola is the proliferation of acronyms that its conflicts have spawned. I have tried very hard to keep them to a minimum. The most important are the MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) and UNITA (the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola). The MPLA’s army during the civil war was called Fapla (the People’s Armed Forces for the Liberation of Angola) and the UNITA army was called FALA (the Armed Forces for the Liberation of Angola). To avoid confusion, I refer to the MPLA army as Fapla, but I avoid the use of FALA for the UNITA guerrilla army.
Two other terms, anhara and shona, appear frequently. They are Ovimbundu and Ovambo words for open grassland. I have somewhat arbitrarily used shona to mean open patches of grassland within the forest away from the rivers, and anhara for wide strips of grass and marsh lining Angola’s deep, clear and beautiful rivers. My apologies to Ovimbundu and Ovambo purists for my cavalier use of their languages.
Fred Bridgland
Edinburgh, UK
2 January 2017
1 Fred Bridgland, ‘Angola’s Secret Bloodbath: Jonas Savimbi and His Hidden War Against UNITA’s leaders’, The Washington Post (29 March 1992); Fred Bridgland, ‘The Dragon of Death who had to be slain’, Sunday Telegraph, London (24 February 2002); Fred Bridgland, ‘The Ghost of Savimbi still hovers over Angola’, The Scotsman, Edinburgh (22 February 2003); Craig Whitney and Jill Jolliffe, ‘Ex-allies Say Angola Rebels Torture and Slay Dissenters’, New York Times (11 March 1989); Sousa Jamba, ‘A Butcher with a Ph.D.’, The Spectator, London (18 March 1989).
2 Many of UNITA’s intellectuals and medical personnel were educated at universities and colleges in Switzerland, including Savimbi himself. Savimbi seems obviously to have been accusing Aurora of having ‘gone Swiss’ and not returned to her African roots. It was a spurious allegation. She had resolutely refused to have sex with him, and so much of what went awry inside UNITA was down to sexual rather than ideological reasons.
3 Biko, the leader of South Africa’s Black Consciousness Movement, was beaten to death by security police in September 1977.
4 British soldiers in the trenches in World War I referred to themselves as the ‘poor bloody infantry’.
5 Robert Harvey, The Fall of Apartheid: The Inside Story from Smuts to Mbeki (Palgrave, Basingstoke, UK, 2001).
6 Allister Sparks, Tomorrow Is Another Country: The Inside Story of South Africa’s Road To Change (Hill and Wang, New York, 1995), p.33. Sparks, who died in 2016, was for many decades one of South Africa’s finest journalists and most courageous editors.
7 Sparks, Tomorrow Is Another Country: The Inside Story of South Africa’s Road To Change, p.36.
8 Sparks, Tomorrow Is Another Country: The Inside Story of South Africa’s Road To Change, p.36.
9 David Mannall, Battle on the Lomba: The day a South African armoured battalion shattered Angola’s last mechanised offensive (Helion and Company, Solihull, UK), p.84.
10 It hardly needs saying but the same calamities were engulfing young Angolans and some Cubans and Soviet Russians on the other side.
11 Sue Armstrong, ‘Problems faced by young whites for whom the old certainties have vanished’, New Scientist, London (22 October 1994). Dr A requested that his full name be withheld for ethical reasons.