7

Road to the North

An important aspect of colonialism in our country, and in other Portuguese colonies as well, is Portugal’s underdevelopment; the social, economic and cultural backwardness of Portugal.

Amilcar Cabral, the first insurgent leader in
Portuguese Guinea, today Guiné-Bissau

It took us almost a day to travel between Nambuangongo and Madureira on our way to Zala in Angola’s heavily tropical north. The country between the two military posts was mountainous and covered in forest that was both forbidding and verdant. Fast-flowing streams cut across the road at almost regular intervals. It was the kind of terrain that was admirably suited for waging a guerrilla struggle.

‘This is the nearest we have come to Vietnam-type conditions in Southern Africa’, one of the convoy officers said to me as we left headquarters, which had also played a prominent role for the guerrillas when they held the high ground. ‘This and portions of Cabinda where swamp covers much of the lowlands’, he added.

‘Not the kind of country in which to wage a war … you can hardly get about and when you need top cover, there usually isn’t any because the helicopters are being used elsewhere,’ he stated.

We travelled on one of the lumbering old Panhard armoured personnel carriers that the Portuguese army used to protect civilian trucks, which, at first glance, seemed better suited for European roads than one of the remotest regions of Africa. It was a pleasant experience, though, Cloete Breytenbach and I perched atop the turret and enjoying the view. We would not have had it otherwise because it was stifling inside the machine.

Our escorts – a couple of dozen men – followed in their troop carriers and sat crouched, eyes intent and with their weapons ready. Ambushes were a regular occurrence, we were assured.

There were three APCs in the column— one at each of the extremes and another towards the centre which was for our use. Like the soldiers, we wore regular army camouflage. It was necessary, we’d been told because once out there, anything unusual drew attention and a couple of Gringos in civilian garb certainly would have been.

‘You must look inconspicuous. If they think you’re important, their snipers will go for you … not the best shots, but then you don’t want to take chances. Nor do we …’

Another of the wags in our party said that if the gooks were actually aiming at us, we were quite safe. ‘They’re terrible shots … you’d be lucky to be hit … it’s the fellow next to you that’s got to be worried’, he quipped.

By all accounts, snipers were more of a problem than the Portuguese were prepared to concede. Captain Alcada told us later that they constantly targeted officers if they had the chance and, as in any war, he suggested, people doing that kind of thing tend to improve with time. He’d been targeted several times because even though he’d removed his epaulettes, he always travelled on the van and it was clear to everybody who was in charge.

I could see my beard worried him a little. It was out of character and it was only then that I realized that I was the only person in any of the camps we’d visited that had one.

Although the area we moved through was very much a part of northern Angola and immediately adjacent to the Congolese frontier, I’d found the nights unusually cold for the tropics. Getting up in the morning was almost as bad as a cool London dawn; it could be cold, misty and miserable.

It was the altitude, of course, much the same as at Eldoret in Kenya, on the Equator – where, over the years, I was to spend many days with Hoffie Retief and his family who eventually decamped to Malindi. Not an evening went by without the servants lighting a large log fire; as soon as the sun dipped, temperatures plummeted.

This part of Angola was a lot different from East Africa. It was tropical and heavy undergrowth encroached everywhere. If not constantly kept in check, the foliage would soon envelop roads and buildings, within weeks, in fact, if not regularly pushed back. Roads not regularly used by traffic, soon reverted to bush and had a distinctive mist which the locals call cassimbo. It often enveloped the countryside after sunset in what locals liked to call ‘the cool season’. By nine in the morning the sun would have caused it to dissipate, but until that happened, nothing moved on the roads. In fact, it was noon before the last of the previous night’s dew had evaporated and until then, each time we passed under a cluster of trees, drops would rain onto our shoulders. After ten minutes or so, many of us would be soaked, especially those travelling ahead.

The leather straps on my cameras turned a disgusting green within days of arriving in Sector D and no matter what I did, it stayed that way until we returned to normalcy. It was still a lot better than the Cameroons, I reckoned at the time, where the humidity allowed mushrooms to grow on the carpet of your hotel room.

Apart from our three Panhards and the accompanying troop carriers, there were about a dozen trucks in our convoy hauling an assortment of arms, munitions, supplies and replacement troops to outposts in the interior. We were travelling relatively light because much of the equipment had already been off-loaded further south, at Cage, Canacasalle, Nambuangongo and elsewhere. What was left would be delivered to Madureira and Zala.

‘Zala is the end of the road—thank God’, our driver commented. He was relieved that we were almost there. It had taken him two days to get that far from Luanda—a distance of about 150 kilometres and thankfully, there had so far been no mines.

On the way back, he said, they picked up all the coffee in the surrounding farms. His group did the run five or six times a month, but less in the rainy season.

Two squads of Portuguese soldiers head out into the bush onboard their German-built troop-carrying Unimogs. (Author’s photo)

‘Then it’s hell …’

We’d arrived in the middle of Angola’s dry season and as he pointed out, it was bad enough. Also the roads were in pretty bad condition. Under normal conditions they would have been scraped every few months or so, but the war had stopped all that. Consequently, tropical downpours and the constant movement of heavy traffic would sometimes create holes and culverts in the dirt that could swallow a jeep.

Our column fared no better. There were times when we’d be reduced to a crawl, slower than an average man’s walk. Then we’d amble alongside our vehicle until it picked up speed again. In several places, we skirted huge boulders in the road.

‘We should really get something done with what’s left of these roads’, the captain suggested, but though they’d tried, the rebels intensified their activity each time they spotted heavy equipment arriving from Luanda. Then there would be mines all over the place and the casualties would mount.

‘The war has been getting hot again, so the authorities haven’t been able to get down to it this season’, he said. In other sectors they had managed to keep roads in a reasonable state, as I was later to see in Cabinda and in the east, but the Dembos had a slew of problems that were all its own.

Almost like clockwork the convoy would be ordered to halt. Then we’d wait for the stragglers and the officers would order out perimeter defences to prevent attack.

Every third or fourth vehicle in the convoy was a German-built Unimog (Mercedes) personnel carrier with a bunch of Portuguese soldiers sitting back-to-back. All the troops onboard faced outwards, almost reminiscent of famous Robert Capa photos of the Spanish Civil War. The Mercedes was much-favoured among Franco’s Nationalist forces, but then, they got them free from Hitler.

Convoy routine, though pretty basic could also be tedious. There was a sergeant who was in charge of each of the troop carriers and he sat next to the driver up front and we’d constantly hear them barking orders.

‘He’s ordering them to keep their heads up; which means that some of the soldiers have nodded off … it happens all the time, the captain explained. The dreary road, the monotonous jungle terrain and the dust made the men drowsy and for some, sleep came easily.

Our transport was more casual than most. Either by accident or design on the part of colonel Joâo Barros-e-Cunha at Nambuangongo, the men around us could almost all speak some English, with one or two of the men quite fluent. It was clear from the start that they enjoyed the change, posing for the camera whenever the lenses appeared. Thrown in among them was a pair of estrangeiros taking photos, asking questions or passing smart-arsed comments.

The trip could be interesting. Conversation along the line of the column was interrupted every 15 or 20 minutes or so by a radio operator in one of the Panhards calling up another section of the convoy.

‘Echo … Lima … Nove… Dois… Zero.’ His staccato voice would echo across the jungle.

If there were any enemy about, they would easily have picked up his voice, not that it would have mattered as there seemed to be more wisecracking among the men than sitreps.1 It went some way towards easing tension.

The men would shout at each other from one vehicle to another and several times, almost as if on cue, the men would start singing and the rest of the column would follow in unison.

The hit of the day that year – even in Portuguese Africa – was Tom Jones’ Delilah and surprisingly, while travelling on these jungle roads, in the back of beyond of the universe, everybody seemed to know the words. These were melodies probably not unfamiliar to many of the insurgents in the bush around us. That ditty would be followed by It’s Not Unusual and other songs made famous by that Welshman.

For all the bonhomie, this was a country at war. At one stage as we approached Madureira, a mountain-top post in the heart of the coffee country, a couple of shots rang out from one of the ravines ahead. More followed at one or two-second intervals.

‘Get your head down … behind the barrel’, the captain ordered, pointing towards the Panhard’s turret. Some of the troops around us slipped quietly into the tall grass next to the road. Nobody said a word as we waited.

Radio clatter started up again. ‘Echo … Lima … Nove … Dois… Zero,’ the operator calling. Even the troops on the far side could follow.

After five minutes of intermittent talk the convoy rolled out again. Captain Alcada explained that somebody had fired a clip into the first Panhard and that a patrol had been sent out to scout around.

‘That’s exactly what these clowns often hope for. They fire a few shots, then we send in a patrol—slap-bang into an ambush…they’re waiting for us.’

‘When it happens to my guys, I’ve taught them never to follow any tracks … always stick close to the bush … make your own paths if the bush allows, and unfortunately, it often doesn’t because it is so dense. It’s the AP mines that I worry about and those bastards have got a lot of them … .’

Though circumstances would vary, the insurgents would never hang about. Once things were not going to plan, he explained, they’d pull out, principally because of fear of encirclement, which I thought, considering the formidable bush on both sides of the road, to be impossible anyway.

I was only to learn later of the terrible price both soldiers and civilians were paying in this war as a result of the indiscriminate use of mines. There wasn’t a Portuguese Army base that didn’t have at least one victim who had lost a foot or had a leg blown off.

And that, almost half a century ago, was only the start of it …

As we approached Madureira, Captain Alcada showed us where he’d made his first real contact with the war.

It was a lonely spot in a valley, on the outskirts of what had once been a delightful little logging settlement. As with the rest of Angola’s north, the forest crept right up to the road. Nearby stood the burnt-out remains of an old farm house where we could still spot patches of whitewash against the few crumbling moss-covered walls that remained. There was something about the place that was foreboding.

It was late April 1961, he told us. He was a young fares then, in charge of his own platoon. ‘We came down this stretch of road towards Nambuangongo in the early hours, a bunch of us, travelling in a column of three jeeps … no Unimogs then.

I’d been ordered into the first one by my superior and I couldn’t argue … we were already aware that there were landmines just about everywhere, but then somebody has to lead the way and that’s usually the junior officer.

‘As we came out of the darkness to this spot I felt uneasy. I still don’t know why, but I’d asked our driver to slow down. Then we emerged from around that corner’, he said pointing at a cluster of palms.

‘In the road ahead of us was the head of a woman on a stake.’

In Alcada’s book, this was symbolic, a warning of sorts. The head, with long black hair matted with blood had been purposely placed there by the enemy.

“They were pretty damn bold in those early days and that face, pitted already by rot and dirt and the insects clinging to it kind of took us by surprise. I’ll never forget it … I can still see the dark cavities where her eyes had been … what was left of her jaw was hanging askew’.

Convoy duties in the interior – often a tough regimen that could take days to traverse some of the toughest roads in Africa. (Author’s photo)

The woman had obviously been Portuguese. It didn’t take them long to discover that she’d been the wife of the man that ran the farm and he’d also died in that first attack.

‘… never found her body. God only knows what medicine they used it for … .her husband, we learnt later, together with a couple of young kids were also missing, presumed dead, as more civilized people used to phrase it.’

That was the night, Captain Alcada continued, that really got him going in this war. It was his first real baptism in a conflict that ultimately claimed many of his contemporaries.

Later, over a couple of beers we talked about it and this young officer admitted that nothing else had shaken him up quite like that experience, either before or after. ‘There have been others since—some far worse. But that one had a special significance. It was revolting.

‘My immediate response was one of rebellion. I suddenly wanted to murder … to kill everything black, man woman or child. I wanted to do to them what they had done to her. At the same moment I had to pull myself together … I had three black soldiers under my command in that same patrol.’

Captain Alcada admitted that to control his instincts was no easy task. ‘I knew that I still had to satisfy this primitive lust for blood and I did it another way’.

‘I took an oath. I knelt down and made the sign of cross, very much as the Spanish Conquistadores probably did when they first went after the Incas, though for very different reasons. I swore that I would avenge these deeds and that I would do so with enough enthusiasm to become a name to be feared among these people, though to me just then they were more like fucking animals.

‘I would become a deadly hunter of people, those who had started the war. At the same time, I would retain my integrity and that of my flag – to the best of my ability, at any rate.

‘Also, though this had become personal, I would fight my war justly and fairly. Unlike some of my colleagues, I would take prisoners and not shoot them out of hand. But I also promised myself that I would kill more terroristas than any other Portuguese officer who served in my command.’

Not normally an effusive individual, Captain Alcada’s revelations had been instructive. I found it demonstrable how one man coped under powerful emotional pressures. I was also aware that the captain had garnered a reputation that had followed him back to the Metropolis as a war hero and that he had probably done more than his share of killing, though he was never to talk about it with me.

Captain Alcada was a good, if ruthless officer. He was also tough but fair on his men. Somehow, he’d managed to achieve a balance between how he might have reacted and how he eventually responded when faced afterwards with similar problems.

Several times in the years that followed, we’d meet, both in South Africa and in Portugal. Each time he’d be reasonably forthcoming about what new experiences he’d had. He wouldn’t tell me everything, but enough for me to ponder on, sometimes for a long time afterwards. While almost all these events involved bloodshed and some were horrendous, he admitted, he’d always managed to keep his emotions in check.

He’d like to call it ‘keeping my cool’, which was when I told him he’d been reading too many American books about Vietnam, which was when he admitted that he had.

I recall him telling me that night in the mess at Madureira of how, eight years after seeing that woman’s head on a stake on a jungle road, rebel headquarters in Kinshasa had put a price on his head.

‘Not the highest bounty for some of the men fighting alongside me,’ he declared with a smile ‘but enough to tell me that I might have accomplished what I originally set out to do …’

Madureira was then one of the smallest mountain-top military camps in Sector D. The road to the garrison wound two or three times around the mountain before you reached the gate of the encampment topped by two machine-gun turrets.

Surrounding slopes were covered in neat rows of metre-high coffee bushes and the ordered pattern of the plantations in the vicinity stood out vividly in contrast to the jungle below which had recently been cleared up to the barbed wire and the adjacent minefield.

This Portuguese army post was possibly one of the most beautifully situated in Angola. Like Nambuangongo and Santa Eulalia, it had previously been a coffee estate. The old farmhouse, standing at the very pinnacle dominated the countryside for almost 50 kilometres in all directions. On a clear day, one of the officers joked, you could see forever…

The jungle splendour was staggering. Faraway in the distance resplendent greens blended almost imperceptibly with blues and yellows and purples. Evening brought out a shower of reds and oranges in profusion. Unnamed mountain-tops towards the horizon provided more ragged contrast. Had this been Kenya or Sarawak, the setting would have been a tourist attraction of note. The sunset alone compared with anything I’d experienced elsewhere in Africa.

The war that had blighted these images was stamped on the scene, almost indelibly. Four trucks stood ready in the central parade ground and troops with an assortment of weapons – rifles, automatic weapons, grenade launchers and mortars crowded around. They were being briefed. To complete a Malayan Emergency-type scenario, there were more heavy machine-gun turrets on the periphery.

‘This is where the action is’, said the young captain who commanded a company of soldiers that had been posted to Madureira for two years after we had exchanged greetings. ‘You have come to the centre of the war,’ he added. Then he suggested we move to the mess.

A patrol of 40 men were going out that afternoon, he explained. It was nothing definitive, but some of his people had picked up the trail of a large enemy squad that had entered from the Congo, probably overnight. His troops weren’t after the men as much as the stuff they were reported to be hauling through, probably on their way further south. There had been one captive and spoke of about 30 or 40 mines. They were of metal, which headquarters had deduced, suggested anti-tank.

In the insurgent group, it had been reported, there were also about a dozen mysterious parcels, carried in slings between pairs of men. The contents hadn’t been identified but it was Madureira’s job to search and destroy. If possible, they were to discover what new ‘secret weapon’ the enemy was introducing into Angola.

‘They’ll try rockets next, probably 122mm Katyushas, like the Vietcong have been using around Saigon’, Ricardo commented. He added that there were already RPGs galore … they were in every contact, he added.

It is worth mentioning that the RPG-2 of the Portuguese wars in Africa soon gave way to the more sophisticated RPG-7, both originally of Soviet extraction. Though the ‘bark’ of the RPG-7 is worse that it’s bite – unless it is armour-piecing because it cannot penetrate heavy steel – these rocket propelled grenades have been used to good effect by just about every insurgent army in the world. I gathered afterwards that South African scientists had reverse-engineered several versions, with the intention of producing them in quantity in South African factories.

RPG-7s were also used in the Battle of Mogadishu in October 1993. Thousands had been secretly shipped from Yemen to the Somali warlord Mohamed Farrah Aideed (by al-Qaeda, one report maintained). He used them to ambush an assault force of about 160 men travelling in a dozen vehicles and made up of US Army Delta Force and Ranger teams. Of the almost 20 aircraft involved – including a number of Blackhawks – two were shot down by concerted RPG-7 fire.2

The Portuguese Army patrol left soon after lunch. We weren’t invited along because they’d be out overnight and we hadn’t been issued with sleeping bags.

The troops were to be taken out seven or eight kilometres by road and would then continue on foot. A party of paratroopers had been dropped several kilometres to the north and between the two groups – in a kind of pincer movement – they hoped to cut off the guerrilla group before they buried their loads and bombshelled. Captain Alcada said it was a favourite rebel ploy; the tactic that followed had become standard Portuguese Army practice.

As soon as the gooks thought the odds were against them, he added, they’d bury their supplies and heavier weapons and disappear into the bush. ‘They knew the area very well. Also, they’ve got some locals to guide and track for them – so there won’t be any problem finding the cache later.’

Alcada was confident of the eventual outcome of the sortie. He’d done it himself often enough before, he told us. It was no secret, he reminded us, that ZANU and ZAPU insurgents then clandestinely entering Rhodesia from Mozambique and Zambia were using similar tactics.

Huge supplies of arms, food and water were being ferried across the Zambezi or brought into the country overland from entry points such as Beira and Nampula. This stuff would be buried at predetermined spots with about a day’s march between each supply drop and would be made use of by other bands of infiltrators who followed later. The objective was to get as much equipment into the territory as possible. It gave succeeding units a measure of independence from outside sources of supply and allowed for a wider field of operations.

The captain in charge at Madureira told me that there were about 3,000 African civilians in his area, which stretched about 10 kilometres in all directions. Of them, about 300 were guerrillas, many of them veterans and armed with automatic weapons. There was no question that the majority of the civilians were sympathizers: if they acted otherwise they would be quickly dealt with.

‘It’s tough, with this well-trained hard-core that we’re targeting, but then things are difficult in these mountains’, he explained. More pertinent, they were holding the civilians as hostages. We’re made aware of that because once we’ve knocked the terrorists around a bit and perhaps killed some of their leaders, villagers come to us and tell us what has been happening. In contrast, if they attempt to escape, they’d be shot. And so will their families … something used in Algeria as well.

Obviously, they’re all aware of this, so they stay put – for the time being. Meantime, we wait’.

The Captain made the point that the region in which Portuguese forces were operating was severely stressed economically. All the old jobs had gone, except for those around the base where coffee was still being harvested, though he had to provide enough guards to keep the workers safe. He was aware that most of the civilians were eager to return to a more settled way of life, but hostilities made this impossible.

The road through the Dembos north of Luanda was always tough and demanding. The elephant grass was sometimes taller than the vehicles in which we travelled, which allowed the guerrillas many opportunities for ambush. (Author’s photo)

‘They want the work. They also need to produce their own crops without it being taken from them by rebel squads passing through. Most of all, they really miss the occasional shindig where they haul out the pombe3 that had been prepared by the women during the week and where they can dance around the drums after dark.

‘They want to get drunk and kick up their heels without worrying about somebody arriving from the jungle unannounced and perhaps getting themselves shot.

‘We see it often enough when a group of civilians arrive from the jungle. The beer comes out and they sometimes celebrate for a week.’

The captain’s unit was called Cobra. Each man in the camp wore a flash on the right shoulder of the uniform displaying one of these reptiles with its hood raised.

‘That’s us—the way we think and the way we operate’, one of the younger officers declared after we’d been briefed.

An African officer, he’d been born in Beira in Mozambique, all the way across this vast continent on the Indian Ocean. Before conscription he’d spent two years studying economics in Lourenco Marques, the Mozambique capital. Like his contemporaries, they’d almost all completed their mandatory period of active service and he had only five months of military service to complete. ‘Then I’m going home’, he declared, a huge smile creasing his face.

‘It’ll be a great day when I get on that plane again and this time I’m going the right direction’, he reckoned.

On the wall of the officers’ mess the word cinco (five) had been pencilled in above one of the dates. On the month following the word quatro (four) appeared above the same date and so on until the unit’s final five months of service in Africa had been notated. All else had been torn off the calendar because after those critical five months nothing would matter anymore, the men reckoned. At least they would be out of the army, even though it might take a while because many of the soldiers would have to return by sea and that could take weeks.

This simple action typified the approach of most conscripts fighting in Angola. All that mattered was how much time they still had left to serve. Once finished with the ordered, stultified rigmarole, the majority reckoned, life was for living again.

While at Madureira, one of the Portuguese Air Force spotter planes circled low over the camp a number of times. The pilot flapped his wings acrobat-fashion to attract attention. He wanted to land and this was his way of telling us, though I would have thought it would have been easier to use the radio.

Madureira, like most other camps in the sector, has its own landing strip, even though the post was perched on the topmost crest of a mountain. The air strip lay a few kilometres further down in the valley and the pilot had to warn the base beforehand. Troops would then be sent down the line to secure the runway.

‘The men have to ensure that the aircraft is not attacked on touching down, which has also happened before’, the young African officer explained.

Departure was another matter. I did so several times and each time it seemed to get hairier. Much worse than Lesotho’s Matekane Airport, the strip was not only inadequate; it was about 100 metres too short for any kind of conventional take-off. Only the smallest planes could land, and while the pilot might arrive with two passengers, he could only take off with one.

Once pilot and passenger had been strapped in, the man at the controls would back his aircraft towards the furthest edge of the jungle, furiously rev his engine and release the brakes. The little plane would race forward, pick up speed and if there was enough forward momentum, it might even lift off. More often than not, the plane would hurtle over the edge. In theory, the plane might have gained enough speed to dip down and right itself over the edge of the precipice. It was a dangerous experience, but it made for a good few yarns at dinner parties afterwards.

As one pilot wryly commented, ‘The mountains here have their own rules … it is better to take off downhill and downwind because in these parts, the hills are likely to outclimb you …’

It was also at Madureira and Zala that the Portuguese waged their first helicopter campaign against in this insurgent conflict in 1966.

UPA/FNLA units had been causing a lot of problems and at one stage, were attacking army convoys almost at will. They’d lay their ambushes and strike, withdrawing into the bush immediately afterwards. Things went on this way for a while, but then casualties started to mount because the rebels knew that Portuguese troops weren’t able to come in after them. Military Command in Luanda finally decided to deploy ten choppers in the region for a week.

‘We had them running between here, Zala and Nambuangongo and the results were good’, another officer explained. Distances are short and when a patrol spotted rebel activity in an area, he’d radio in and the helicopters would strafe the area with their 20mm guns,’ he said.

‘One week became two, and then a month. After four months, the guerrillas were reporting serious casualties … we were able to monitor their radio messages back to the Congo,’ the youthful lieutenant told me.

‘We’d always have at least two choppers and their crews standing by. If needed, they’d take in some of the commandos – our Special Forces – who had been detached to us from Luanda. They’d be dropped by the helicopters and unlike the usual run-of-the-mill troops, these guys would go hunting; they’d go right into the bush after their quarry.

‘Sometimes they’d be dropped behind an attack area as a stopper group, perhaps two hundred metres from the road. In this way, hopefully, all avenues of retreat would be cut off. Or the rebels would be caught in a crossfire.

‘We killed 37 that first week—apart from dozens wounded or taken prisoner’, the officer said.

‘So you see Sir, we like to fight this war a little differently to what they do elsewhere’ said the lieutenant afterwards in the mess.

He admitted that there was much internal debate among some of the officers about whether conditions in Africa were different from elsewhere. In the end, it took one of the American military attachés on a rare visit to the front to explain what was really happening.

His comments were direct and from what I gathered, they didn’t please many senior officers. For a start, as an accredited diplomat, he’d not requested permission to address a serving group of officers in this foreign war, which was considered mandatory in most countries. More significant, there were those in Lisbon who always maintained that what was going on in the ‘overseas territories’ was unique, in part because they always held that these were temporary ‘inconveniences’. The wars would be suitably dealt with in time, was the consensus. They were wrong, said the American colonel.

The diplomat, a strictly military man, had apparently experienced South East Asia for himself over several years. What he had to say had a significant impact on many of the Portuguese Army officers that he addressed and, with the benefit of hindsight his comments might be as applicable to what is going on with al-Qaeda today in some of the world’s trouble spots like Iraq and Afghanistan.

A single Soviet TM-47 anti-tank mine caused this kind of damage. Everybody on the vehicle was killed in the blast. (Author’s photo)

Like Vietnam, he declared, the ‘seek and destroy’ war in Angola had no front lines. The enemy could be anywhere and anybody at all. He – and increasingly, she – was an extremely elusive enemy. This adversary was also becoming a much more efficient factor which needed to be dealt with much more efficiently than was currently the case.

Moreover, like Vietnam, the war in Angola was not isolated. It was very much part of the Cold War effort by the Soviets, which, he pointed out, was one of the reasons why the Portuguese Army in Angola, Mozambique – and Portuguese Guinea especially – were using the same equipment with which some other NATO countries were equipped, like American F-86 fighters and the Fiat-built Aeritalia G-91 attack jet.

Like Vietnam, this was a war that was being fought by conscript armies. American enlisted men served 365 days in Vietnam. Portuguese troops were in Africa twice as long.

Earlier in the war, the American pointed out, there were a lot of rudimentary PMD-6 antipersonnel mines in their distinctive little wooden boxes. As he observed, these pressure-activated blast devices had since fallen out of favour with the guerrillas on both continents because wood rotted in the tropics and the mine mechanism would shift.

The war had been upped many notches since it began, was the Colonel’s view. As in Vietnam, helicopters had become a means to an end, though unlike the Americans, there wasn’t a Huey Cobra in sight. More serious was a recent development in Portuguese Guinea where Moscow had introduced the first shoulder-fired anti-aircraft guided missile, the SAM-7.

These devices might soon find their way into the hands of one or more of the Angolan insurgent movements, or even terrorist groups abroad, he warned. As we are now aware, the American diplomat was right.

In November 2002, al-Qaeda operatives tried to destroy an Israeli-owned Boeing 757 passenger jet with 261 passengers and 10 crew onboard at Mombasa International Airport, in the largest harbour city in East Africa.

Incompetence coupled to bad judgement caused both missiles to go wide. But later that morning a suicide bomber did ram a truck loaded with explosives into one of that city’s Israeli-owned seaside complexes.

A dozen tourists and staff were killed in the attack.

Our convoy reached Zala in Sector D the following day. Zala, a magic name in the Congo among the rebels, was the ‘end of the line’ for guerrillas infiltrating southwards from the frontier. With its huge airstrip and long, uneven approach road though some of the harshest bush country that we’d experienced, Zala military base lay at the northernmost tip of Sector D.

Because of a narrow defile through the hills, insurgents heading further south had to pass close to the Portuguese garrison. For weeks, while travelling from the Congo, they’d held their fire. On reaching Zala they often liked to celebrate by making their presence known, more often than not letting rip with a clip or two. Because the jungle in that region was especially dense, few of the enthusiasts would have penetrated close enough to hit the target.

Still, as one of the officers explained, it was the gesture that counted: they were signalling their achievement and in all probability, they were mighty proud of it.

‘We come under fire fairly often’, the camp commandant told us through an interpreter. ‘But it’s usually a case of exuberance. They’d reached the “promised land”.’

The presence of so many insurgent groups transiting that northern reach required vigilance on the part of the Portuguese Army, and obviously the presence of helicopters helped. Guard duty was usually double strength and night patrols around the camp numerous. There wasn’t much activity by the defenders: they just dug in and waited.

One of the African stewards at the camp was an insurgent who had been captured three years earlier. His name was Alfredo and he’d been a minion of one of the insurgent generals who’d been captured alive. By some account, this ‘senior commander of the Liberation Forces’ needed little coercion to switch sides.

Lisbon offered the general respect, amnesty as well as a squad of turncoat rebels to do his bidding. A monthly salary – much more than he’d been getting in his old job – was part of the deal that was clinched with a party and a document signed and witnessed to that effect. Having compromised himself and his headquarters by betraying half a company of men, he was sent further up the line to the necessary, but not Alfredo, his former steward.

We kept him here because he was valuable. He could read and write in French and Portuguese and understood enough of the Bakongo language to be useful. Also, he knew his old boss and we’d show him some of the communiqués and ask his comments, just to be sure the general was doing what was expected of him.

With time, Alfredo proved himself exceptionally useful since he had one great passion—interrogating captured terrorists. He spoke their lingo and it provided him with the kind of authority he’d previously lacked. In fact, with no training, he was thoroughly adept at what was required of him since he had seen his former master at work in the past both questioning and torturing captured Portuguese. He also appeared to take pleasure in the measure of trust engendered by his new masters.

One of the officers explained that Alfredo would have made the ultimate spy if they could depend on him to return if they let him loose across the border again. ‘But he’s his own kind of man. Here we can keep an eye on him and we’re aware of some of his tricks. If we let him go, we’d never see him again: he’d do the turncoat thing with his old bosses and would probably be that much the stronger for it. Here in Zala, he does the job, even if he is a little brutal sometimes.’

Apparently Alfredo would spend an hour or two with a man in a room. By the time he came out he knew his history, where and by whom he’d been trained, who his grandmother was and exactly what the prisoner had been expected to achieve in this area.

‘We’ve got much valuable data about how the enemy works over a period of time, so he stays. He has a bank account in Luanda and every few months or so, he’ll go down on one the flights for a weekend on the town … got a wife there too. When the time comes for him to report back at the airport for the return flight he’s there … never missed a plane … yet.

I was to hear from one of my Portuguese friends after Lisbon had abandoned its overseas territories in 1975 that Alfredo was one of thousands of Africans who were subsequently allowed to make new homes for themselves and their families in the Metropolis. He’d settled in the heart of Lisbon and loved it.