Bush War in West Africa
‘… the guerrillas are rather good at demolitions, I must say. There is a road which runs between Gago Coutinho and a place called Chiume, about 48 kilometres west of the Zambian frontier, north-south … you have to cross in any case marching into the country, and I did so in both directions. They were carrying out a rather good demolition operation when I was there and they blew up five trucks … the explosives were obviously put together very well indeed, by men who had been trained in the work and they were effective.’
Basil Davidson, speaking in 1971 at Ned Munger’s Africana Institute,
California Institute of Technology, Pasadena.
The briefing at Santa Eulalia lasted well into the evening and was initially handled by a baby-faced lieutenant with his left arm in a sling. His shoulder had been creased by an AK bullet in an ambush the week before, we were told.
‘It could have been a lot worse,’ the young officer admitted: ‘we were caught in an ambush in some heavy jungle country and the bullet ricocheted off the gun turret onboard the Panhard that I’d commandeered as a command post … it happened during a routine convoy run south of here. In good English he elaborated on some of the problems faced by Comsec D Command.
‘The enemy enters northern Angola from an area along the Congo frontier, roughly-speaking between Matadi – that country’s major port – and Kinshasa, the capital.
‘Many of the rebels who arrive in Angola from Congo-Brazza cross the river at night in shallow-bottomed dug-outs [pirogues] and though we had problems in the past, naval patrols have been quite successful in stopping some of these infiltrators. But if you’ve seen the river, you’ll know that the Congo is wide – miles across in places. Also, there are thousands of floating islands constantly being carried downstream by the current.
‘It is easy to hide in those matted reed or papyrus islands if you see the lights of a patrol craft approaching and it’s physically impossible to inspect each one of them … that would need thousands of men’, the officer suggested.
Once across the frontier, it took the average insurgent about six weeks to reach Sector D.
We were shown our position on a map of the area. Also pin-pointed were other camps in Sector D—Zala to the north, Zemba lying further towards the south and the pivotal crossroads settlement of Nambuangongo slap bang in the centre. There were four other Portuguese military bases in the area, each responsible for the security of a segment.
As soon as the revolutionaries had flooded into Angola from the Congo in the early stages of the war, the small hilltop hamlet of Nambuangongo in the Dembos was chosen as the new rebel capital. (Photo Manuel Graça)
Nambuangongo, he told us, was a most interesting place, with a history that went back to the earliest days of the war.
‘Nambu’, as the troops liked to call it, had been the original headquarters of the insurgent army in Angola. They’d taken it by force, killed everybody there, including a number of logging people and their families who had taken refuge at the home of the local Chef do Poste. Fighting in the vicinity of the camp had not only been fierce, but consistent, and it had been that way since March 1961, the lieutenant said.
At which point another officer, Captain Ramos de Campos took over and told us that the guerrillas still tried to retake the hilltop base from time to time. They had come close to doing so several times, he reckoned, especially when most of the troops are away from base either out on patrol or on convoy duties.
It was at Nambuangongo, he explained, that the rebels had achieved some of their best successes in the past. Their political commissars would talk about ‘our most glorious victories against the Fascist colonial forces’, an expression regularly used on the guerrilla radio station broadcasting out of Brazzaville.
Apart from terminology, said de Campos, you couldn’t really scoff at that notion, because early on, they’d actually pushed government forces all the way southwards to the outskirts of Luanda. There was a time, several months in fact, he said, when they were masters ofjust about all they surveyed … from the Congolese frontier south.
‘But no longer … these days we have a tight grip on the place. But that doesn’t mean we can be lax’.
He explained that it was part of an insurgent master-plan to recapture Nambuangongo, ‘snatching it out from under us again would be regarded as quite a significant victory and frankly, so it would be too.’ Portuguese losses in the environs of the camp were still comparatively high, ‘so they’re still at it, literally as we speak.’
Another officer at the briefing was Captain Virgil Magalhan. His job was to outline guerrilla tactics, which was when he called for the blackboard to be rolled in.
Using a pointer, he detailed how the war had entered a new phase, how the insurgents liked to lay their ambushes, the types of their weapons and mines they were equipped with and where their main camps were believed to be situated.
The sector experienced about four or five actions a week, he declared. Most were ambushes on patrols or convoys. As opposed to the early days when they attacked in bands often 200 strong, they now concentrated in groups of about 20 or less. What was also different was that some of the men that had come through from the north had been trained outside Angola— in Zambia, Congo-Brazza or further afield. Quite a few had been to Russia, Cuba, China, Tanzania, Algeria, Egypt and elsewhere.
‘As for ability, they’re a mixed bag, which actually holds for most of Africa’s so-called Liberation Wars. The majority of fighters are indifferent, reasonably well-trained, but lacking either focus or purpose. That said, their section leaders can sometimes be pretty good when it comes to tactics and the use of more advanced weapons like heavy machine-guns or mortars. The balance, thankfully, are dismal. They’ve been taught, but they learnt nothing …
‘Still, they persist and recently they tried a new gimmick,’ he elaborated. ‘While they’d previously restricted their attacks on camp sites to the dark hours, they’d resort to making the occasional daylight mock attack on a particular area. A group would make a show of strength near the forest, perhaps half a mile or so from one of our bases, while snipers hidden on higher points would attempt to pick off the officers.
‘This is something also used by the Vietcong, but the aim of these clowns has always been deplorable. Not all of them, mark you, because we’ve had some men killed, but even then they are rarely accurate at anything more than a 100 or possibly 150 yards — which is one of the reasons why our casualties have been so light’. Things could change, radically perhaps, he added, but that was the situation at that time.
It was notable that in spite of the threat, Portuguese officers – in all three services – quite often displayed rank in the various operational areas. With the potential threat of attack omnipresent, one would have liked to think that they might have discarded their epaulettes and gold braid, or at least used muted shades which would not have been difficult to distinguish from a distance, very much as Western military forces do in hostile areas. Granted, they removed all rank on patrol or while on convoy duty but by then, the insurgents knew exactly who the officers were. They had their own means of monitoring activity in Portuguese Army military bases. No doubt they also used some of the domestic African staff as informers; it had always been the African way.
There was a good deal of speculation in the camps visited on the kind of training received by the insurgents. It was a consistent theme in most of the operational sectors.
The perception among the majority of Portuguese troops was that as an enemy, the guerrillas were an inferior element, though to this outsider, that didn’t make sense considering the number of troops the rebels had succeeded in tying down. The argument, as presented, applied as much to basic tactics as to accurately firing their weapons.
In truth, it was a fundamental misconception that had obviously cost lives in the past, for while the ability of the majority of African guerrillas was nothing to shout about, there were some brilliant and innovative combatants within their ranks. Nino, – later General Nino (who was to become President of Portuguese Guinea) was among them: he successfully ‘ran rings’ around the Portuguese Army in what has since become Guiné-Bissau.
The common denominator among them all was that in the choice of weapons, the insurgents tended towards the AK-47. Functional under all conditions and ubiquitous, it was the weapon of choice among most revolutionary armies in Africa and it is still that way today, well into the New Millennium. Going solely by results, the Kalashnikov has proved remarkably effective over more than a half a century in other wars in Asia and the Middle East. The Viet Cong and anti-Israeli Arab forces like Fatah, would use nothing else, nor AQIM – Al Qaeda in the Maghreb – in the recent war in Mali.
Even today, Hizbollah, the Iranian surrogate force in Lebanon, prefers the AK to anything that the West has to offer.
It was notable that apart from AKs, RPDs or Simonov Soviet-manufactured rifles, Portuguese forces occasionally came up against the occasional 19th Century blunderbuss that fired just about anything. The opposition wasn’t averse to including nails and small chunks of iron or rock.
‘It’s the irregular stuff that causes the damage’, said Captain de Campos. ‘These antique pieces can sometimes rip holes the size of saucers in a man’s chest.’
He was right, of course. I had seen the effect of these old guns in parts of Tanzania and Zambia in the past, where local Africans use them to hunt larger game like buffalo and, occasionally elephant. Given the chance, any game ranger would confiscate the lot. More often than not, the museum pieces would wound and not kill. The animals would then wander off into the bush and be left to die, sometimes weeks later.
Yet consistently, the guerrillas most times lost more of their own men in actions than did the Portuguese Army because they weren’t using their carbines to good effect. Even though they might initially have had the advantage of surprise in an ambush, it was the same almost each time when there was a contact.
The AK would be put on full auto and firing would continue until the magazine was empty: obviously most of the shots went high. This failing appeared to hold good for Mozambique and thereafter, the Rhodesian War. In their bush wars that followed the departure of the Portuguese, the South Africans had similar experiences.
Nambuangongo from the air after the settlement had been retaken by Portuguese forces. (Photo Manuel Graça)
Nonetheless, the insurgents would work to a series of systems that had strong Soviet overtones: almost everything was done ‘by the book’.
They would choose a stretch of road with good visibility for some distance in both directions. If the area was heavily foliated, they’d attack from a position above the road, firing down on the convoy. This gave them the advantage of being able to escape. There was a perpetual fear of gunships among the rebels and even if they did manage to mutilate a patrol, they would rarely hang about and finish the job.
Captain de Campos told us of an ambush he’d experienced a short time before. ‘Just before I’d been promoted to captain, I was based in a village a few miles from Terreiro, a small coffee-producing area in Sector F, just north of here’, he explained.
‘The sector had been reasonably active, but at that stage it was fairly quiet, and had been so for a while. We thought that the main insurgent force might have passed us by. It was a Friday morning, shortly after the week-end supplies had been dropped and I had to go into the village to see what fresh provisions I could get for the men. We try to eat fish on Fridays, not easy in this bush country, but not impossible either.’
The captain chose seven men and set out in two jeeps, his own leading. Driving into town he kept his foot down hard on the accelerator. The road was good for this kind of mountainous country and he was eager to get back in time for lunch.
‘We came round one of the many bends in the road, fairly close to town. As we turned sharply and dropped into a dip in the road, they opened fire from a position above us … let rip with everything and the noise was awesome. It was actually a good spot for an ambush.’
‘That’s when you start reacting instinctively; I had to get us out of this mess, All eight of us simultaneously jumped off the jeeps, firing into the grass immediately ahead.’ It was standard procedure, he reckoned. It was also a precaution that could sometimes result in some of the insurgents lying next to the road becoming casualties.
But you had to know what you were doing, he warned. On your own in heavy bush country and away from the vehicles, it could quickly become a one-on-one issue; the ambushers would sometimes slash at anybody nearby with their machetes. He used the word catanas, as the Angolan long knives or pangas were called by local people.
‘It took a little while, but we eventually got clear of our attackers after emptying a few magazines and hurling all the grenades we had in the group…must have been about a dozen. Only when we were in comparative safety of the elephant grass, did I call for casualties from my two corporals. By then I’d heard the whistles used by the enemy officers and knew that our attackers had pulled back.
Details of the attack were interesting, and the captain answered all the questions put to him, especially with regard to extricating his men.
‘One of the men in the second jeep had been hit in the thigh — a bad wound that bled profusely. A dumdum bullet had blown most of the flesh away on the upper leg exposing the bone and that meant we had to get this guy back to base immediately or he would have died on us from loss of blood.
‘Now had the terrorists stuck about a little longer with harassing fire, they could have done some real damage. But they, as the saying goes, shot their bolt and were off.’
The captain estimated the attacking force at about 20 to 25 strong. They were well dugin about 30 yards on the rise above them. Their position was not easily defensible, but they had the advantage of height; they could see pretty well where the all the Portuguese were positioned after they’d disembarked.
‘All we had was tall grass ahead and a road behind’, said the captain, ‘and clearly, they didn’t use the opportunity as they might have done.’
‘We saw afterwards that they’d initially broken a path through the thick bush and were able to disappear down this jungle trail as soon as things got rough. Only one of their number was left behind—an African irregular who had taken a blast from one of the grenades that killed him.
Several blood trails indicated that one or more of the attackers had been wounded. More important, they hadn’t managed to remove any of their used cartridge shells. ‘It’s the unwritten law among these people – they bring back their empty shells to base … if they can manage to do so, of course.’
The Portuguese were puzzled in the beginning, but then captured rebels admitted that they were only issued with more ammunition if they could produce their original casings. That prevented them throwing away good ammunition and claiming they had been in an action.
‘Also, they rarely fired their guns indiscriminately … it might attract a nearby Portuguese patrol.’ The old shells were often used again, sometimes many times over. Back at base they were reloaded and reissued.
The captain mused: ‘It’s a question of economics—African economics’
Another aspect of the ambush which the officer noted was that the attackers had left behind a dead comrade. They probably didn’t have enough time to move the body, he thought, ‘and in any event, we were coming up fast.’
Essentially, he explained, by not leaving casualties behind, the idea was to deprive their adversaries of evidence of casualties … all of it was psychological, he suggested.
‘Often, after an action, we’d find blood traces where we knew one or more of the wounded had sheltered. But then we wouldn’t be able to establish whether it came from someone KIA or wounded.’
The rebel army in northern Angola by the time I arrived in Sector D was estimated at about 6,000 regulars. Their numbers were more preponderant than the strength of the Portuguese Army, though with conscription back home having taken effect, things were improving.
Apart from the insurgent army, there were two or three times that number of African civilians who lived in the jungles and among the mountains of the sector, many of them caught in the perennial crosshairs of conflict.
Though not part of the regular insurgent movement, civilians provided useful support when needed, customarily acting as porters or bearers. They’d also be tasked with taking out the dead and tending the wounded in their villages if the casualty couldn’t be hauled back to their own lines.
The majority of these irregulars might have been innocent bystanders to start with, but that was no longer the case. Early rebel successes had given many of these tribal people the desire for more of the same, often as a result of tribal associations or simply because they were sympathetic to what the rebels referred to as a just cause.
Living permanently in the jungle, they were able to harbor groups passing through. They’d feed, and if necessary, hide those guerrillas operating in the vicinity of their villages or, in the lingo sanzalas. These were often large enough to house makeshift field hospitals.
Life in the primeval forests around Nambuangongo, Santa Eulalia and the other strongpoints was fundamental to the kind of tropical existence that had evolved over centuries. It was possible for locals to grow fairly large crops of their more popular cassava root (manioc) in any one of thousands of jungle clearings. The root is pushed a few inches into the earth by hand. Fertile ground, lots of rain and a hot tropical climate sees the plants through to maturity. Crops can sometimes be harvested every other month, or the tubers, not unlike potatoes, might be left in the ground for harvesting later, either by the villagers or the rebels.
Local inhabitants also grew small quantities of maize or sorghum to supplement their diet. When a rebel group intended to stay in an area, villagers might plant beans for variety. Meat was always scarce, especially in wartime where a rifle shot might draw attention.
Captured ELNA guerrillas who were persuaded by the Portuguese to continue to fight the war, but against their old compadres. The tall man on the left was killed in a contact soon after he posed for this photo. (Author’s photo)
‘We see these communities from the air from time to time, but mostly there is nothing we can do’, the captain stated.
He wasn’t overly critical of the role played by these civilians. In most cases, he said, they had little option but to help when ordered to so by a bunch of armed newcomers. Whether their hearts were in it or not was another matter. If they didn’t assist, they could be accused of siding with government forces. Then it was not only the individual at risk, but his entire family. And those pointing a finger needed little proof: a bullet behind the neck would end the argument.
‘We have exactly the same problem as the Americans in Vietnam and the British experienced in Malaya’, he explained as he waved his hand across a map.
‘The guerrillas are now doing the same here in Africa … trying to win the support of the civilian population’. For a variety of reasons, it would seem that they have succeeded quite well, he declared.
We travelled by road convoy between Nambuangongo and Zala – the northernmost Portuguese army camp in Sector D. Our guide and translator was Captain Ricardo Alcada, a lawyer from Lisbon with a coruscating mind that all too often disguised a twinkling sense of fun.
On his second voluntary tour of active duty in Angola, this enthusiastic young officer had been drafted into the army in the dark days of 1961 and had seen some of the worst excesses of the insurgent-led campaign. That effort – and some of the massacres he’d witnessed – hardened his approach towards any kind of compromise with an enemy that he utterly despised. He’d quite blandly refer to them in mid-sentence as barbarians.
As an infantry officer, his makeshift unit –quite a few postings to Africa from Portugal were piecemeal, with the men being slotted into available posts – had played an important part in stemming the tide of the invasion from across the border. He’d done his time and was proud of the consequences. When our paths crossed, he’d been back in Angola about six months.
‘The war has changed a lot in the four years I’ve been away’, he told me as we charged down one of Nambu’s hills in an open jeep that seemed to be held together by screws, fishing nylon and a couple of bolts.
‘I had to re-assimilate just about everything I’d been taught before. Even my approach to ambushes was different when I returned … which meant that I had to be much more careful … more cautious than before … landmines, of course.’ As officers, he suggested, they were required to think three moves ahead and, more often than not, attempt to do something totally new.
‘One of our colonels called it experimenting with guerrilla war, which he believed was essential. With time, he’d tell us, the enemy became familiar with the manner in which we operated, our deployments, our weaknesses, our clever old wiles.’
Since he had been back in Africa, Captain Alcada had narrowly avoided being killed twice, both occasions in ambushes close to the camps to which he’d been posted. Both times, he candidly admitted, was because he had been careless. He put it down to lack of foresight in believing that conditions were still the same as before, when he left Angola in 1963.
‘On one occasion, I was temporarily seconded to another unit. We were in the vicinity of a sanzala – a village in the jungle. It didn’t occur to me at the time that those people had possibly set a trap, or that they could be anywhere nearby. We hadn’t seen a trace of the enemy for days.
‘After casually scouting around, I entered what appeared to be a makeshift camp with some of my men: I’d intended talking with the chief and was taken to a hut where four elders were sitting, one of them quite senior. I had barely settled down on my haunches when a group of terrorists opened fire on us all from the opposite side of the jungle. Not one of the soldiers was hit, but they did manage to kill one of the old men and wound some of the others … idiots!’
‘They’d surrounded the lower side of the village, carefully avoiding the rest of my patrol … just kept on firing for a minute or so and then rushed off into the undergrowth.’
There were no grenades … nothing big … just rapid-fire. Probably AKs, he concluded afterwards.
‘I got up afterwards, with four men still on the floor and it took a little while to sort out the wounded from the dying. I had been lightly grazed across the back, but you can imagine how I felt: I was incredibly lucky – could easily have been one of them.
‘Anyway, that was another of my “lives” used up. They’re getting scarce now so I’ll have to watch my step’, said Alcada as he quietly chuckled. His sense of humour, I was soon to discover, was quite infectious.
‘Just goes to show’, he exclaimed afterwards. ‘Can’t take anything for granted in this war. One minute you see the bastards—if you’re lucky. The next you don’t … but by then they might have you in their sights.’
Captain Alcada, who I got to know well after the war and whom I subsequently hosted in my Cape Town home, often referred to the war as a bagful of tricks. It was his favourite expression, having a good feel for the English language. Fully bilingual, he’d spent a few years at one of the better English schools when he was young.
In spite of media opprobrium – British newspapers and the BBC especially, were coming down hard on Portugal because of their ongoing colonial wars – Captain Alcada still had a fond regard for the British and their traditions as well as their casual, beer-imbibing lifestyle. That might have been one of the reasons why rugby maintains a rather special niche in the minds of so many of the Lisbon and Oporto upper set. Like many Portuguese officers, he also spoke passable French.
‘This is not a proper war’, he would say, usually impatiently and after a few drinks. ‘It’s a game— something lethal … and incredibly so.
‘Call it a game of chess with variations of Russian roulette. You never know when you’re going to collect the next bullet. And remember, we’re fighting this war in their backyard, not ours – Angola is their turf,’ he’d declare, head high and more often than not with a sweep of an arm for effect.
He liked the analogy with regard to chess. It was the one game to which he was addicted. I’d often marvel, sober or after a gutful of drinks, how he’d take on any number of his fellow officers and thrash them all.
Then he’d start to ruminate. In Vietnam, he maintained, the Americans had systems, codes, statistics and the rest to go by. Some battles were fought by computer. ‘Here in Africa, we Portuguese and our enemies put most things down to chance … every move we make is a gamble’, calculated most times, but a gamble, nonetheless,’ he asserted.
Alcada spoke forcefully, often with the aplomb of somebody far senior than that of a lowly captain in the infantry. He typified the traditionalist, the sort of person who yearned for an era when the world was ruled by kings, archbishops and princes and by friendly, if not always-benign dictatorships, in part because he was a product of just such an environment.
His background suited him well; Ricardo was part diplomat, part doctor of law. In Lisbon he had been secretary to the Under-Secretary of State and I thought it peculiar that he should have chosen the more difficult route by returning to Africa in a bid to make his mark.
On one issue Captain Alcada was outspoken, and vociferously so. He believed that there were too many ethics involved in the war in which he was engaged, too many rules, he would tell us. His view was that in order to win, you needed to institute a no-holds-barred campaign, much as the Germans had done. Then, almost disparagingly he’d throw Churchill at you: ‘In the struggle for life and death there is, in the end, simply no legality,’ was the quote and it was word perfect.
Coffee was the mainstay of many of the settler farmers in Angola’s high-lying regions, particularly in the north of the country. While the war went on around them, locals still tried to bring in the crop. (Author’s photo)
After reflecting a few moments, he’d add a rider; ‘the bastards we’re up against had no compassion when they came across the frontier and slaughtered our women and children. Now only one criterion remains paramount—for us to win.’
Alcada suggested that the only way to ultimately achieve victory was to get the Portuguese army into the jungle; ‘Tackle the enemy on his own turf and at close quarters’. Also, he deplored the American concept of what was termed ‘limited attrition’. One of his theories revolved around what he termed ‘pace of hostilities’.
There was no such a thing as pace of hostilities in wartime he would say. You needed to do what was necessary and in as short a time as possible … kill or be killed …
‘That is why my unit has been so successful in this area. We fight the enemy in his own environment … and we beat him every time. The policy of wait-and-see is pointless—the Americans are proving that under similar conditions in Vietnam. The French army proved it in Algeria.’
And of course, with time, Captain Ricardo Alcada was proved correct, even though his own country gave up all its possessions in Africa.
More’s the pity that Captain Ricardo Alcada didn’t have Iraq to underscore the kind of logic that made him something of a maverick among his fellow officers. Most of them deplored their African postings and, indeed, I encountered very few who couldn’t wait to get back to the Metropolis.
In contrast, the still-youthful captain loved it…