The Angolan capital that became Executive Outcomes’ new base of operations is one of Africa’s most unforgiving conurbations. The poverty there is of apocalyptic proportions. Perhaps for this reason, Luanda was once described by Jon Jeter of the Washington Post’s Foreign Service as a city “awash in oil and mired in poverty.” The tragic economic situation has been made even more horrific in recent years by outbreaks of Marburg, the deadly hemorrhagic fever related to Ebola. One of our colleagues, having visited the place, once said that it was like Mumbai’s Jhopadpathis, only worse, if that were possible!
Approach Luanda from the air during the rainy season and you’re greeted by an awful mishmash of muddy pools, wrecked cars and tenfoot high piles of garbage. And pullulating crowds that for all this, will greet you with a smile. At its heart, this is a place of nebulous neglect.
Getting up close doesn’t help much either. The city is a hive of tens of thousands of nondescript, mud-colored shacks and shanties, many of them roofless. This conglomeration stretches from one unbroken horizon to the other, a monochrome copy of Lagos without its Victoria Lagoon. In an enlightened moment, British scribe Sam Kiley talked about some African cities having become “grand Guignol horrors.” That’s Luanda!
We arrived on one of the company’s Ibis Air Boeings a little after dawn. Parts of the city were cloaked in a cold, clammy mist that sometimes creeps across the bay from the sea, especially in the cooler months. Frenzied movement on the ground below looked like something out of an old newsreel film: everybody scurrying about, buildings, tin shacks, favelas, slum tenements and roads pushed out sporadically like amoebic pseudopodia that ended in a congeries of bush or jungle or at a stream on the outskirts. To those who lived there, pain must have been a solvent.
In the middle of this apparition appeared Luanda’s Aeroporto de 4 Febereiro, the country’s only international air terminal. A bright neon sign on the roof announced in bold letters, “Bem Vindo: Welcome.”
Even while taxiing, it became apparent why the UN regarded Luanda as its most important staging post in Africa. By six in the morning, the roar of scores of aircraft—mostly ex-Soviet Tupolevs and some high-slung Ilyushin-76s—could be heard through the sealed bulkheads of our 727. There were also a few of the more familiar Antonov-12s, looking deceptively like American C-130 Hercules transports. Not for nothing did the crews refer to them as “Hercskis.”
This same routine was repeated unwaveringly seven days a week, Christmas and Good Fridays included. Angola’s starving millions were waiting for their bowls of gruel.
Because of the war in the interior—as it then was—many of the country’s population centers were either cut off from the outside world or under siege. The way Jon Jeter described it, “Just about everyone was half a step away from starvation.” He painted a succession of vignettes that were uncompromising and grim.
Writing from Kuito in the Central Highlands—it was a busy place thirty or thirty-five years ago when the Portuguese were still in control and trains ran between Benguela at the coast and the Congo’s Copperbelt—Jeter set the scene:
“The cargo planes that keep this city alive land every few hours, trembling to a halt amid cracked concrete and yawning potholes. With the roads already close to impassable, relief workers worry that the approaching rainy season will shut the airport as well, hobbling their efforts to deliver food to thousands of peasants who pour into Kuito each month, chased from the countryside by an unyielding civil war.” And that in a country the size of Texas.
Coming in to refuel, you couldn’t miss the detritus of war. Like a giant knackers yard, it lay about everywhere. On the verge of the airport were great heaps of rusting radar towers, scanners and reflector dishes. There were scrapped generators and pylons, all of it once Soviet, reminding everybody that, in its day, Luanda was as strategically important to Moscow in the South Atlantic as was Castro’s Cuba in the Caribbean. The airport was a junkyard and as such shared a kinship with Mogadishu’s airport across the continent at the Horn.
Some of the revetments that had previously sheltered Sukhois, MiG-21 and MiG-23 fighters had collapsed. Others had been washed away by tropical downpours that in fifteen minutes can turn large swaths of Luanda into a swamp. Similarly with the military barracks at the southern end of the runway: it too was in ruins. So were airport repair sheds, their technicians having long ago returned to Mother Russia and the new order that there awaited them. In between, more wrecked Soviet jets and helicopters littered the periphery. It was a panoply of senseless waste, more so than at any other airport I’d seen.
Yet, in the middle of it all, there was a clear-cut division between civilian and military, and the best part of the terminal was reserved for the air force. It was immediately apparent that South African mercenaries were allowed to come and go at will.
Driving into town was something else. There were soldiers everywhere. We had been warned before leaving South Africa to be polite. If we weren’t, they told us, Executive Outcomes couldn’t help. Or rather, they wouldn’t.
A month before, an Angolan Army colonel had had an AK magazine emptied into his chest; he’d refused to show his ID card at an airport checkpoint. The entire scene was neatly encapsulated by a comment from John Edlin, another old Africa hand, then working for Associated Press: “While Angola is a land of extremes, Luanda is populated by psychos.”
We had barely left the airport when we saw a glistening pair of aircraft wings straddling the roadside. The fuselage of what was obviously a passenger jet lay half-a-mile on, occupied by squatters. The pilot—drunk, of course—had put the plane down short of the runway. Several passengers were killed but he survived long enough for a military squad to smell his breath, frog-march him to a clearing and shoot him.
Though the accident had taken place several years before, nobody had bothered to move the wreck. There was no need to, an official explained. If they did, he argued, they might be depriving povos1 of their homes. It was rumored that two of the three engines were found to be repairable and both were sold for a hundred crates of beer to a Lebanese businessman who, in turn, passed them on to an airline in the Middle East for real money.
Angola’s civil wars—five or six of them by now, nobody’s counting—have been hard. For five centuries the country was ruled from Europe with an exploitative efficiency that rarely masked its brutality, and like it or not, much of the suffering that followed independence in 1975 was Lisbon’s fault.
While Britain and France prepared its African subjects for the inevitability of Uhuru, Lisbon would have none of it. Portugal’s three African colonies—Angola, Mozambique, and today’s Guiné-Bissau—were as much a part of “Greater Portugal” as any city back home, they would argue. With solemnity, these Lusitonian apologists would declare that after five centuries on the “Dark Continent,” it was Divine Will that they were still there, which, on reflection was arrant dribble. It is notable, though, that Lisbon stayed on in Africa twice as long as the British held on to its American colonies.
And make no mistake; the majority of these Europeans really believed that God was on their side, which is why they fought so hard for fourteen years from 1961 onward to keep a grip on their colonies. In the end, proportionate to their respective populations, Portugal lost more men in its African wars than America in Vietnam.
One of the more bizarre consequences was that just as the Belgians had done in the Congo, Lisbon handed over to a people, totally unprepared for self-governance, one of the largest and richest countries in Africa. There was only a handful of university graduates among the indigenés.
Almost three decades after independence, the Portuguese imprint on these African states is ineffaceable. For one, the official language is Portuguese. So is much of the culture in the cities. There were a couple of excellent little Fado bars in Luanda when I was there with EO. So is the food: most meals (for those who can afford restaurant fare) offer caldo verde for starters, usually with an excellent Dáo on the table.
Forgotten is the trauma that resulted when the Portuguese were eventually bundled back to Europe in 1975, the majority leaving only with what they could carry.
That happened shortly before independence when Angola declared itself Marxist. In the civil wars that followed there have been a lot of people killed. Though Savimbi is now dead and Unita, as a consequence, has been emasculated, the killing hasn’t stopped. Each day there are people dying in some of the biggest minefields on earth.
From Luanda we were taken by small plane to Cabo Ledo, Executive Outcomes’ first major headquarters in the country once it had achieved a foothold.
As the aircraft banked over the coast, we spotted irregular groves of topsy-turvey baobabs. Beyond, almost like a sentinel on a promontory that jutted into the Atlantic, stood a lighthouse that Lisbon’s engineers built more than two centuries ago. There weren’t too many houses along this stretch of coast but the Iberian imprint among those that stood was unequivocal. When Portugal colonized Angola in the fifteenth century, they brought with them their distinctive red clay roof tiles, still today as much a feature of the homes in Lobito and Luanda as in Coimbra and the Azores.
Cabo Ledo was originally taken over by former SADF Parachute Regiment Colonel Chris Grové. Not long afterward the first FAA battalion of eight-hundred men were being put through their paces by South African vets in preparation for the series of battles that eventually ended in the recapture of Cuito, Huambo, Uige and Soyo.
Little had changed at the old air force base. The runway was lengthened to accommodate larger Soviet jets and to receive some of the overflow when the main runway in Luanda was obscured by fog, but its terminal building was still an unpainted wooden shack about the size of your average garage.
As we stepped off the plane, we were met by Brigadier Nick van den Bergh, a powerfully built man with a full beard who had been a staff officer with 44 Parachute Brigade during the Border War. A pivotal figure in the company, he had been appointed by Eeben Barlow to handle EO’s interests in this West African state. Though he did the two-hour road trip to Cabo Ledo often enough, Van den Bergh and his wife had made a home for themselves in Luanda: a simple triplex on a terraced block with few redeeming features. Situated in a noisy street with broken down cars outside, the place cost the firm three-quarters of a million dollars. It was a rip-off considering that the place was jerry-built and cluttered, and he blamed the oil companies for contaminating the economy.
We stayed at the van den Bergh home whenever we visited the capital and would lie awake each night listening to automatic fire reaching up from the Luanda docks. The army had instructions to kill anybody who entered the area. Pickings must have been good because there were casualties in abundance.
For all that, the South Africans shared the Cuban penchant for creating a reasonably comfortable environment for themselves at the base. About all that was missing was air conditioning.
To one side, spread over about a square mile was a FAA airborne training base with enough BMP-2s scattered about to give it the appearance of an armored headquarters. From our verandah, we would watch them cluttering off on the day’s exercises and clearly nobody seemed to bother with maintenance; the machines belched fumes like old steam engines each time they were started.
By the time I got to Cabo Ledo, EO had about twenty men stationed at the base, half of them white, mostly communications, logistics and transport techs. There were also a few pilots like Namibianborn Werner Ludick of Lone Hill, whose job it was to ferry unit commanders about in the company King Air. His photos of the Pilatus Porters used by EO in combat are still the best of the bunch.
The big event of the day was invariably the barbecue—or as the South Africans preferred, braai. Bottles of Red Heart Rum would be hauled out and the fellows would talk about home, the latest rugby scores and, of course, women. In circumstances where you didn’t dare touch the local sluts because a third of the population was infected with HIV, every night was party night.
On the third day, we went to what was eventually to become EO’s main training facility in Angola, a Special Forces base at the mouth of the Longa River, or as it is featured on the map, Rio Longa. The trip was an hour-and-a-half by road and we stayed the night: you don’t travel around this country after dark, especially with roadblocks armed by troops who are almost always plastered.
We followed the coast for part of the way through the Quicama National Park, which had been almost totally eviscerated of wildlife. Important visitors would come to Angola a quarter of century ago and be awed by the range of animals: elephant herds that were sometimes hundreds strong, lions at every watering hole, buffalo, leopard and even the occasional rhino. By the 1990s, however, there were more people in Quicama than animals.
The elephants went first, for their ivory. Then most of the antelope, because Luanda was tardy with victuals for their troops. Finally the big cats were hunted for their skins, for which there was a big demand in Cuba. It seemed that every one of Fidel’s pilots couldn’t return to Havana without at least one photo of something he had shot. Nobody said anything about them having used automatic weapons to do so.
EO’s base on the river was one of the best on the continent. It fringed a great, tropical waterway and might have been an appropriate setting for a remake of one of Rider Haggard’s great yarns. At one point near the estuary, the river was a quarter mile wide. The camp itself was gathered like a safari boma around clusters of tall palms while lianas dangled everywhere. We could hear the monkeys cavorting as we arrived. The thirty-odd South Africans based there lived in tents, their metal beds raised several additional inches off the ground because of scorpions and snakes.