5

The Mercenary Subgenre and Counter-Insurgency

The late 1960s saw the emergence of a subgenre of films focusing on mercenaries and soldiers of fortune, often fighting in post-colonial terrains of disintegrating states and brutal racial and ethnic conflict. For cinema, mercenaries have often been latter-day anti-heroes given the generally negative image of fighting for money along with the thrill of adventure and killing. Some films attempt to disguise the differences between mercenaries and professional soldiers with uniforms and a clear chain of military command; in others, mercenaries driven by the lust for money, adventure and women have proved to have considerable appeal for many younger cinema-goers bored by mainstream war movies.

Mercenary movies emerged in the wake of the rapid retreat from empire by Britain and France in the early 1960s. The subgenre developed out of themes familiar in some westerns, such as Richard Brooks’s The Professionals (1966), involving groups of men embarking on well-paid quests across dangerous and menacing frontiers. Cinema mercenaries are generally action and western heroes working through thin and largely predictable narratives, limited characterization and a dependency on high dramatic action to sustain audience interest, though some films also reflect anxieties in big business circles about the protection of precious investments in unstable post-colonial terrains. On occasions, thinness of character is compensated by an appeal to codes of moral conscience, serving as early templates for later action heroes such as Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator. Screen mercenaries also have an excellent capacity to handle an amazing array of weaponry while acting, in some cases, as latter-day chivalrous knights when they rescue women (often nuns) in danger of rape or, worse, from brutal, dark-skinned ‘savages’. The movies perpetuated colonial stereotypes of Africans and other former subject peoples of empire into a post-imperial era, freezing them in adventure sagas in the tradition of Rider Haggard, but with rather more military precision and state-of-the-art fire-power.

Mercenary movies in the English-speaking world of cinema also emerged out of declining audience interest in colonial war features, given the fact that most of the British empire had been relinquished by the late 1960s. There might still be a nostalgic imperial interest in a few spectacular movies such as Zulu (1964) and Khartoum (1966), but there was no militant or influential body in Britain to defend an imperial memory like the former colons in France.¹ It was the white redoubts of Rhodesia and South Africa which provided a good deal of the impetus for the new clutch of mercenary films with narratives, in many cases, stemming from popular South African or Rhodesian novelists such as Wilbur Smith and Daniel Carney. The continuation of white settler rule (up to 1994 in the case of South Africa) ensured that there was a vital Southern African fillip to the cinematic mercenary subgenre. The ending of the settler colonies did not lead, though, to the demise of the mercenary subgenre. By the 1990s, it gained new angles and perspectives as film producers ranged into other war zones such as West Africa, where mercenaries tended to be transformed into warlords.

In this chapter I will be examining a selection of films focusing on mercenaries and soldiers of fortune. The films I focus on in examining the genre’s evolution are: The Mercenaries or Dark of the Sun (1968), The Wild Geese (1978), The Dogs of War (1982), Blood Diamond (2006), Rambo (2006), Johnny Mad Dog (2008), Machine Gun Preacher (2013), Beasts of No Nation (2015) and The Siege of Jadotville (2016). I shall conclude by suggesting that the mercenary film subgenre is by no means exhausted and is likely to evolve into newer narratives, involving very likely increasingly hi-tech weaponry.

The emergence of the mercenary subgenre

The mercenary subgenre properly became established in 1968 with The Mercenaries (later renamed Dark of the Sun), directed by Jack Cardiff. The film was based on a novel by Wilbur Smith and starred Rod Taylor, Peter Carsten, Jim Brown, Kenneth More and Yvette Mimieux. The film was considered by one critic to be ‘one of the most mercilessly brutal war films of the 1960s’, though it would soon be rivalled by Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch in 1969.2 The film is set in the Congo following the hasty departure in 1960 of Belgium, the former colonial power. In the south, the mineral-rich region of Katanga has seceded under its nominal leader Moise Tshombe, but closely controlled by the copper mining giant Union Miniere du Haut Katanga. The UN Security Council passed Resolution 169 of 24 November 1961 condemning the secession as illegal and the ‘the aid of external resources and manned by foreign mercenaries’.³ Mercenaries began to be viewed as soldiers of fortune in the pay of big business, though many of the new mercenary films attempted to create a different myth centred on the idea of ordinary soldiers being duped by Machiavellian business concerns only too ready to sell them out.

The mercenary myth in the Congo was partly sustained by absence of any feature dealing with one of the most important rescue operations in Africa before the Israeli raid on Entebbe in 1976, namely the rescue of 1,800 largely white hostages in the Eastern Congo in November 1964. The hostages were taken by a group of left-leaning Simba rebels who revolted against the Congolese central government, now headed by Tshombe, in August 1964. The Simbas (often viewed in the western popular press as savage cannibals) were several thousand strong and seized control of the regional capital of Stanleyville. They emerged from an abortive revolutionary movement in the Congo in 1963–1964 following the return from China of Pierre Mulele, one of the coteries that had gathered around Lumumba at the time of independence. Mulele had received some training in guerrilla warfare from the Chinese and the Congolese analyst Georges Nzongola-Ntalala has seen his movement as the first real national liberation movement in sub-Saharan Africa fighting against neo-colonial rule. Emphasizing the need for strong discipline Mulele’s followers launched a guerrilla insurgency in early 1964, armed mainly with knives, shotguns and any other weapons that came to hand.4

The Mulelists succeeded in capturing most of Kwivu province and continued their insurgency until 1967; they had no real links with the Simbas who emerged from another left-leaning movement in the Congo called the Gizengists after their leader Antoine Gizenga. Like Mulele, Gizenga also went to China for guerrilla training and returned with a quasi-Maoist programme focused on the mobilization of the peasantry. Unlike the Mulelists, the Gizengist insurgents avoided any proper training and relied upon a rapid quick fix, including an immunization ritual involving drops of magic water called mai mulele that, it was believed, would turn bullets into water. Calling themselves Simbas (after the Swahili word for lion) the Gizengists had few modern weapons except for those they managed to capture, though the atrocities they committed terrorized the garrisons of many towns, causing them to flee before they arrived.⁵ Their rapid advance was not due solely to terrorism, though, but from the fragile structure of the Congolese post-colonial state that effectively disintegrated after independence.

The Simbas took hostage the white residents in Stanleyville and its surrounding districts. These included some American missionaries as well as many Belgian and other European nationals. The seizure attracted worldwide publicity and was a forerunner of later hostage crises: though, in this instance, both the British and US governments decided to avoid sending in any of their own troops. Eventually one of the most complex multi-national rescue operations of the Cold War was mounted after the Johnson administration in Washington decided to bypass the United Nations by supplying five C130 planes to insert some 340 Belgian paratroopers in an operation known as Dragon Rouge on 24 November 1964. Most of the hostages were rescued along with 400 Congolese civilians, although a further 200 were massacred by the Simbas. Over the next few months into the latter part of 1965 a follow-up operation known as Dragon Noir occurred in the Eastern Congo that included a group of some 300 mercenaries known as No 5 Column, headed by a former British army officer, Major Mike Hoare.⁶

The operation has been generally hailed a remarkable military success as the Belgian paras had apparently, rather like the US cavalry, arrived in the nick of time to prevent a bloodbath in Stanleyville, though twenty-nine hostages were machine-gunned by the Simbas in the centre of the city minutes before they landed. Critics of the operation argued that the operation was too little and too late; the initial para drop led the Simbas to disperse from Stanleyville into other localities such as Paulis and Kamina, where further massacres ensued.⁷ Nevertheless, for right-wing champions of mercenary warfare, this was perhaps the mercenaries’ finest hour. Hoare’s column (mostly South Africans) managed to rescue several hostages though their presence in the Congo precipitated the down-fall of Tshombe as post-colonial African leaders in the OAU reacted angrily to what they saw as a new form of white colonial involvement in African politics.

Many of the mercenaries had little or no formal military training, even though many had been fighting in Katanga since the early 1960s. Operating in defiance of the UN did much to secure a bad press, and one analyst suggested that Tshombe might have been better off without them, relying instead on Belgian assistance to train a black Katangese army.8 Much of the mythology surrounding white mercenary soldiering in Africa was due to its close association with the downfall and murder of the Congo’s first radically inclined president, Patrice Lumumba. Some analysts have suggested that Belgian mercenaries were responsible for the crash of UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold in 1961, though there has been little firm evidence linking them to this event.⁹ The mercenaries continued operating in the Congo even after Mobutu’s seizure of power in 1965 before an ill-advised revolt in 1967 led to them being expelled from the country. The same year the mercenary cause in Africa became even further weakened when different mercenary formations fought in the Nigerian civil war, in some cases on opposite sides like Italian condottieri of old.

Given this murky background, film producers tended to avoid, as far as possible, the politics of mercenary warfare in favour of depicting mercenaries as action heroes, working for the most part in small bands rather like combat units in the Second World War and Korea. Certainly, no feature film was made on the Stanleyville rescue operation, perhaps because it was a controversial operation that did not involve any US military forces. The absence of any such film left the field open for films on mercenaries, though by the time Dark of the Sun mercenary involvement in the Congo had come to an end as interest shifted to the Nigerian civil war that broke out in 1967.

Dark of the Sun centres on a train journey through a troubled frontier region, a trope familiar from the film North West Frontier (1959). The squad of mercenaries sent on the mission are tasked with not only rescuing hostages but also retrieving a cache of diamonds stored in a time-locked vault. This is a film as much about loot as rescuing anyone, with little space for romantic interludes either. The film over the years has become something of a minor cult classic, partly due to scenes of violence far more graphic than The Dirty Dozen. European mercenaries had acquired a notorious reputation by the time the film was released, and in Congo were often called ‘les afreux’ (the frightful) by the local people. Given that many were Rhodesian and South African, mercenaries became loathed by left-wing critics of European involvement in Africa and were sometimes labelled as ‘whores of war’ interested only in making money from other peoples’ conflicts, a factor that led the International Red Cross to strip them of prisoner of war status in 1978.¹⁰ The mercenaries had, though, a vocal defender in the form of the quixotic figure Mike Hoare, who had risen to the rank of captain during the Second World War in the London Irish Rifles and saw action in North Africa and Italy. Emigrating to Durban after the war, Hoare never settled back into civilian life as a chartered accountant. He went as a mercenary to Katanga in 1960–1961, before leading a unit called ‘5 Commando’ during the 1964 Simba revolt.¹¹

In his memoirs, Hoare attempted to put a Sandhurst spit and polish aura onto the activities of the mercenaries under his command, retaining as far as possible the drill and discipline, if not the hierarchy, of the British army. This was perhaps because he realized his own limitations as a charismatic leader of a disparate group of marginal men bound together by the pursuit of money along with adventure and the thrill of killing.¹² He tried to reshape the generally invidious mercenary image into something more politically acceptable, at least in right-wing circles in the west, by enhancing the mercenary narrative with Cold War language of men fighting communist penetration in Africa, although he was also keen to defend the white-ruled regimes in the South.13 Hoare’s narrative proved persuasive cinematically; he influenced not only Dark of the Sun but The Wild Geese ten years later. In the case of Dark of the Sun, the narrative collapsed into one storyline events from two separate periods of the Congo’s troubled post-colonial history: the recruitment by the secessionist mineral-rich state of Katanga under Moise Tshombe from late 1960 to 1963, and the additional campaign against the rebel Simbas in 1964.

Jack Cardiff shot Dark of the Sun in 1967 in Jamaica after the film crew were expelled from the Congo and failed to find an alternative venue in Central Africa. The film starts with two mercenaries – Captain Bruce Curry (Rod Taylor) and Sergeant Ruffo (Jim Brown fresh from The Dirty Dozen) – arriving in the Congo, while white settlers are waiting to be airlifted out. Curry is drawn broadly on the character of Hoare. The two men talk their way past a UN border post carrying their weapons, although the post flies not a UN but a Swedish flag, the country of the UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold, killed in a plane crash in Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) in 1961 during efforts to mediate the end of the Katangese secession.¹⁴ The UN appears remarkably unsympathetic and hostile to the mercenaries’ relief expedition; their train is attacked by a UN plane and badly shot up. At the same time, though, the mercenary group appears to be a model of inter-racial harmony.

In fact, UN soldiers were pulled out of the Congo on 30 June 1964 before the Simba rebellion broke out. The recruitment of mercenaries started in late August when some 100 white South Africans were flown to Kamina in Eastern Katanga province to help the Tshombe regime fight the rebels.¹⁵ The brief appearance of ‘President Mwamini Ubi’ of the Congo was clearly modelled on Tshombe as he explains to the mercenaries, in the company of a Monsieur Delage of the Belgian Mining Company, how much he needs the $50 million diamonds ‘to keep the Congo alive’, recalling Hoare’s account of Tshombe telling him, ‘We count on you. The Congo counts on you. You are our man of destiny.’¹⁶ Ubi allows the mercenaries to recruit a force of forty men from the Striker Blue Force of the 1st Battalion of the Congolese Army and promises to pay Curry $50,000 on his return.

The venture goes disastrously wrong. The time-lock in the vault means that the train cannot move for several hours and is only just leaving when the Simbas arrive. Rescuing the European refugees was always secondary to finding the diamonds and Dark of the Sun is a remarkably amoral film for, if the diamonds had not been there, no one would have been really interested in rescuing the Europeans.¹⁷ The Simba rebels are also rather better organized than previous films focusing on ‘tribal’ rebels such as the Mau Mau in Simba. They are well equipped with mortars and wreak havoc on the departing train, cutting off its rear coaches from the engine and stranding most of the European refugees. A massacre ensues which the mercenaries are powerless to stop, though they later launch a commando-style raid to secure the diamonds. But by then all the European refugees have been raped and murdered. Even the raid goes wrong as a fuel truck blows up, ensuring the party is now short of fuel. Curry leaves the survivors and his remaining soldiers in the bush to get fuel but finds, on his return, that the German mercenary Captain Henlein (Pater Carsten), who sports a Nazi swastika, has raped one of those rescued, a Belgian woman Claire (Yvette Mimieux) and run off with the diamonds. Curry goes in pursuit, killing Henlein after a dramatic fight.

What started as quite a political film descends into a story of romance and personal revenge while the Simbas disappear from the narrative.18 The ending is interesting for departing from Wilbur Smith’s narrative in the novel that has Curry, after ten days of trekking through the jungle, returning to the base camp with Claire (called Sharmaine in the novel) to fly out to Tanganyika with the diamonds.¹⁹ Cardiff clearly wanted a film ending that avoided any stress on the financial rewards of mercenary warfare, seeking instead a highly implausible moral justification. Curry now gives himself up to the one African mercenary in the group (the South African writer Bloke Modisane) for a court martial for murdering Henlein, though who exactly is to hold this court martial is left unclear. This was a combat movie that wanted to keep at least one foot in the mainstream war genre where proper chains of command apply and soldiers subject to a legal framework, a strategy that most critics found unconvincing.²⁰ The film certainly shocked with its violent scenes of rape and murder of white settlers, though one critic rather pompously dismissed these as being the type ‘found in sleazy magazines that displayed pictures of beheaded execution victims in remote, lawless countries’.²¹

Jack Cardiff was a noted film cinematographer who had shot such notable films as Black Narcissus and The Vikings. Dabbling with violent scenes was becoming less risky in the 1960s as would become evident in the films of such directors as Robert Aldrich and Sam Peckinpah. But even by Peckinpah’s standards, Dark of the Sun is quite a violent film and it was banned in Sweden in 1970 despite cuts. Unsurprisingly, Quentin Tarantino later praised the movie, and even Martin Scorsese has confessed to finding the film among his ‘guilty pleasures’.

It was increasingly difficult for movies to defend colonial rule, even of the most apparently benign kind. The German dramatization of Daniel Carney’s Rhodesian bush war thriller Whispering Death in 1976 is a rather interesting exception for the way it revealed itself as markedly out of kilter with the changing international mood on white colonial rule in Africa. The film capitalized on Dark of the Sun eight years before, and was really a Macaroni combat movie, though it was an exclusively West German production shot in Germany, the UK, South Africa, as well as Rhodesia in the last years of the Smith regime. Its plot had many of the features of a John Buchan adventure yarn, while its cast was a rather higher calibre than those of most Macaronis, for it included Christopher Lee as a convincing Rhodesian policeman or ‘Member in Charge’ along with Trevor Howard playing a gnarled Rhodesian plantation owner Dr Johannes, father of a beautiful daughter Sally (played by the Austrian actress and soft porn star Sybil Denning). Sally is engaged with the main protagonist of the story Terrick (James Faulkner) though she is raped and murdered by a ‘terrorist’ African gang led by a psychopathic albino known as ‘Whispering Death’ (played by the German actor Horst Frank).

This is a revenge narrative and one film poster had the slogan ‘A woman ravaged a man revenged’, with the black characters significantly smaller and marginalized from the white characters. The plot that involves a dark and evil nemesis bears some resemblance to Buchan’s American-educated preacher Laputa in Prester John (first published in 1910).²² Whispering Death has also been well educated, apparently overseas at an ‘excellent’ university, although all it has done is to exacerbate a profound racial bitterness that contrasts with the apparently happy and placid life of the village Africans in the movie and is derived from his ambiguous identity as a white-skinned albino African. Terrick duly gives chase to the fleeing Whispering Death in true Buchan style over the rocky landscape of Matabeleland in white-ruled Rhodesia. He evades the efforts of the Member in Charge to capture him and this leads the government to send in a team of crack paras to finish the job. They are too late for Terrick kills Whispering Death, who mutters before he dies that killing him will ‘solve nothing’. Terrick is eventually cornered and shot as he too refuses to give himself up.

Like many mercenary films Whispering Death is based on a shaky and dubious moral base given that it is premised on the idea that the central objective of the Rhodesian regime in the escalating bush war of the 1970s was to maintain at all costs the rule of law and to prevent any reprisals by whites that might be interpreted as racially motivated. Even if this might be on occasions true, the film fails to examine the wider political motivations for the bush war, which the Rhodesian regime proved eventually unable to win politically despite their superior military power.23 As with The Planters Wife a decade before, Whispering Death sees all African opposition though the lens of a ‘terrorism’ narrative, with Terrick at one point warning the ‘Member in Charge’ that they are faced with a new and more virulent form of terrorism that needed to be dealt with properly before it spread like some contagious disease.

The film, interestingly, reveals a nervousness and crisis of belief in the entire colonizing project though this is overlain by the gravelly voice of Trevor Howard’s white settler Dr Johannes, committed to staying for the long term in a country he has helped to build up. In the end, the film failed to emulate the success on the international stage of Richard Burton’s Wild Geese in 1978. Burton’s film is centred on a largely British group of mercenaries fighting essentially another Second World War movie complete with para uniforms. They are for most of the film in a fictional African land and only at the end fly into Rhodesia on their escape out of a war-torn terrain. The nemesis of Wild Geese is also a duplicitous British mining magnate while Whispering Death, by contrast, has a psychopathic African leader crippled by a physical flaw of being an albino that apparently shapes his essentially evil character. For all its attempt to pose as a film that celebrates the rule of law, Whispering Death cannot escape the constraints of a primitive colonial racism that equates African political leaders with terrorism and evil and sees only ‘good’ Africans in menial and subordinate roles to whites.

Dark of the Sun was followed a decade later by the rather less violent Wild Geese (1978). This film was the creation of producer Euan Lloyd, who later directed the SAS movie Who Dares Wins in 1982. Standing somewhat alone in the 1970s while the British film industry went into a state of decline, Lloyd was keen to bring out a film that would have some of the appeal of The Guns of Navarone. He saw an opportunity with The Wild Geese, given the cast included Richard Burton, Roger Moore and Richard Harris, and the film proved to be a commercial success.²⁴ Shot in the Transvaal (N. Lloyd ignored the cultural boycott against filming in South Africa), the movie was released two years after the trial by the MPLA regime in Angola of thirteen white mercenaries caught while fighting for the rival FNLA movement, four of whom were executed for mass killings. The trial was a major marker in the shifting climate of global opinion on the morality of mercenary activities, though these would still continue on an increasingly commercialized basis.

The Wild Geese drew on a thriller by the Rhodesian writer Daniel Carney, who also wrote The Whispering Death. The film exploited the opportunities to develop some of the themes of Dark of the Sun, with a group of mercenaries tasked to mount an operation to rescue an African politician, Julius Limbani, who has been kidnapped on a plane by a group of African generals in a fictional Central African country closely resembling the Congo. Limbani (played by South African actor Winston Ntshona) resembles Moises Tshombe who was dismissed as prime minister of the Congo in October 1965, kidnapped on a plane in 1968 and flown to Algiers, where he died from apparent heart failure in 1969. The kidnap was widely presumed to have been carried out by Francis Bodenan on behalf of French external intelligence (SDECE), though some analysts have suggested the kidnap was organized by the CIA to help consolidate Mobutu in power in the Congo.25

The link with Tshombe in The Wild Geese is evident from the start. His face appears in a montage of pictures in the opening credits while the character Limbani appears to be a reliable pro-western political leader. The copper magnate Stewart Matherson (Stewart Granger) wants Limbani rescued to secure a stable regime in the fictional African state, apparently under the influence of communist Cubans. But half way through the operation Matherson secures a new deal with the generals and abandons the mercenaries, forcing them to make their own way back to safety. They embark in some lorries that come under attack from a plane sent by the government of the African state (as in Dark of the Sun) but eventually secure, with the help of a missionary, a Dakota that is implausibly parked in the bush. After a gun battle with the enemy army, the survivors make it back to white-ruled Rhodesia, since no other African country is willing to take them in.

The story is loosely based on a widely repeated urban myth that in 1968 a real Dakota full of mercenaries landed in Rhodesia, though there is no evidence that Tshombe himself was on board. Despite references in the film to ‘Simbas’ (one wounded mercenary is shot to avoid him falling into their hands) the enemy the mercenaries face is a uniformed army commanded by Cuban officers while the soldiers under their command wear Portuguese army–issued caps. This suggests that they are at least being assisted by FRELIMO fighters from Mozambique, which had gained independence from Portugal in 1975.

The Wild Geese had no serious conception of politics, though one poster for the film shows the four mercenary leaders dominating a map of Africa. Issues of race are tackled through banal statements such as the hostage Jesse declaring, ‘If we have no future together, white man, we have no future.’ The film proved a success at the box office, but was rapidly overtaken by events in Rhodesia, where the bush war came to an end in 1979 with an agreement for the brief return of Britain as the colonial power, leading to elections in 1980 and the transfer of power to Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF. By the late 1970s the film’s recalling of events in the Congo over a decade before seemed increasingly dated. The film was most notable for championing what might be termed a neo-colonial model of political control through a compliant African leader enjoying some degree of popular support, usually from an ethnic or tribal base. This was the case of Moise Tshombe in the original Katangese secession in 1960–1963 in the Congo and would be attempted for a period in the 1970s by the Smith regime in Rhodesia through its client, Bishop Abel Muzorewa.

The 1965 coup of Mobutu helped consolidate the model of the patrimonial state in sub-Saharan Africa based on strong-man rule. This was increasingly viewed as a more effective means to maintain the borders of the state bequeathed by the departing colonial ruler, even though it ended up hollowing out both the state and the social infrastructure through massive corruption and elimination of most of the post-colonial governing elite.26 The Wild Geese pinpointed, albeit in a very simplistic form, some of these wider trends, especially in the way that Matherson secures a deal with the generals of the fictional state at the mercenaries’ expense, shutting out Limbani’s more ethnically based claim to power.

The film proved to be a commercial success and was the fourteenth highest grossing film in 1978, though the collapse of the American distributor, Allied Artists, led to it having only a limited circulation in the United States. The film indicated that there were continued commercial opportunities in mercenary films that were later reflected in the Dogs of War in 1982. The film was based on a novel by the best-selling British author Frederick Forsyth, who had already had considerable success with the film version of The Day of the Jackal (1973). Forsyth had become acquainted with mercenaries when he reported the Nigerian civil war. A maverick news correspondent, Forsyth, like Graham Greene before him, appears to have been recruited by MI6 in the late 1960s, via a handler known only as ‘Ronnie’. He was not apparently paid anything, though it is likely that the information flow was to some degree two-way, helping Forsyth to embellish his novels with interesting technical details.²⁷

The Dogs of War did not have the same level of tension as The Day of the Jackal, though what it lacked in fast-flowing and smooth prose it made up for with a narrative crammed with an amazing array of factual descriptions, including how to organize a coup d’état. Such packaging undoubtedly appealed to readers attracted to adventure yarns in the tradition of Rider Haggard and John Buchan. Like Buchan, Forsyth was good at explaining the background of his characters, though they were no longer well-connected ‘clubland heroes’ like Richard Hannay, but lower-class characters who had made their own way up in the world, usually after spells of military service, tough periods in the bush or a stretch in prison. Forsyth’s men were more anti-heroes than heroes, and Forsyth did not seek the same sort of ‘dramatic value’ that Graham Greene saw in Buchan’s novels involving adventure in ‘unfamiliar surroundings happening to unadventurous men, members of Parliament and members of the Athenaeum, lawyers and barristers, businessmen and minor peers’.²⁸ Such characters are notably absent from Forsyth’s novels, which usually follow men attracted to adventure in a rough post-colonial world where class ties and social background count for little, especially when it comes to trying to make a fortune in states where the European imperial writ no longer runs.

Here the theme of mercenaries being used by rich western business interests has a rather broader canvas. We meet the central character of the story, Shannon (played by the American actor Christopher Walken), in a war-torn Central American country from which he manages to escape in the by-now all-too-familiar trope of the turboprop plane beset by explosions and shell fire. Shannon is the quintessential loner and outsider and is never likely to settle down in any sort of stable relationship. Walken’s performance was admired by some film critics. Vincent Canby in The New York Times considered the film demonstrated ‘the kind of intelligence and thought one doesn’t often find in a movie aimed at the action-adventure crowd’, though he thought this was ‘as much in what the film doesn’t do and say as in what is actually on screen’.29

At one point, Shannon pours out his dreams for another life to his girlfriend Jessie, whom he meets for a tawdry night at a motel. He wants to move west and settle with her, but she has heard all this before and he lacks conviction. Violence and mercenary warfare are in Shannon’s blood. We know from early on that this film is never likely to end with the pretence of settling back into middle-class respectability, exemplified by the final scene in The Wild Geese when Burton’s character, Colonel Alan Faulkner, comes back to play surrogate father to the son of the dead Captain Rafer Janders (Richard Harris) at his prep school in Kent.

The Dogs of War is interesting for the way it probes what some feminists have seen as the ‘flight from commitment’ among some men in the wake of the slackening of constraints against deviancy in western cultures. The sociologist Barbara Ehrenreich has seen a significant shift in western culture away from an ethic of responsibility and ‘protective commitment’ to women towards one of ‘irresponsibility, self-indulgence and an isolated detachment from the claims of others’.³⁰ In part, this shift was a response to the rise of feminism and a rejection by many women of the older style patterns of male ‘protective commitment’. The thesis is perhaps too generalized since it does not encapsulate all men and sets up a rather mythical golden age when, in fact, some men in the nineteenth century or earlier sought escape in mercenary-type activities such as piracy, privateering or joining the Foreign Legion.

Nevertheless, many Hollywood and British war films during and after the war tended to assume that men in combat had girlfriends or wives to go back to, or would at least get married to once hostilities were over. In the film In Which We Serve (1942) for instance Able Seaman ‘Shorty’ Blake (John Mills) thinks, while he is in the water after his ship has been sunk, of how he first met his wife Freda. By contrast, Shannon has no commitment in The Dogs of War to anything beyond fighting, even if this appears to bring precious few rewards. He drives a hard bargain with a businessman, Endean, to engineer a coup in the country called Zangaro, but really the former Spanish colony of Equatorial Guinea. Shannon is paid $15,000 to go on a recce to the country, which is run by a corrupt and brutal dictator, General Kimba. Shannon’s cover as a birdwatcher is discovered and he is violently beaten up by the dictator’s thugs before being thrown out of the country.

Shannon is offered $1 million by Endean as expenses to engineer a coup and he meets up with former mercenary colleagues near Liverpool Street Station. The plan involves a mercenary group from Britain and France sailing close to the shoreline of the beleaguered state and attacking it at night after picking up a squad of African mercenaries on the way. Timing is all for Endean, like Matherson in The Wild Geese, wants a new dictator installed who they will be able to control in the form of Kimba’s former colleague Colonel Bobi (played with dramatic gusto by George Harris) whose main objectives are money and women. The plan works on this occasion; the ship lands the mercenaries and, in a dramatic shootout, the barracks and presidential palace are captured. Shannon shoots Kimba; while Endean and Bobi duly arrive by helicopter to claim power but Shannon has decided to leave a more democratic leader in power: Dr Okoye (played by Winston Ntshona in his second mercenary film), whom he encountered as a prisoner in Kimba’s jail. Shannon simply shoots Bobi and walks out to drive off with his men and the body of the one white mercenary killed in the operation.

Once again, a mercenary film has felt bound to take some sort of moral stand as with the ending of Dark of the Sun and the revenge shooting of Matherson in The Wild Geese. But, as in those films, this moral posturing lacks credibility because it fails to relate to Shannon’s slender character, which even Walken’s generally uncritical biographer Robert Schnakenberg called ‘little more than a nihilistic killing machine’.31 At another level, though, the film proved remarkably prophetic of a real attempted coup in 2004 to overthrow the dictatorial president Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasongo of Equatorial Guinea. As early as 1973 it appears that some people in Gibraltar were plotting a coup to overthrow the brutal dictator Francisco Macias Nguema in Equatorial Guinea and a boat called ‘The Albatross’ that was to be used to launch the coup attempt was intercepted by the Spanish authorities, apparently after a British tip-off. Several mercenaries, including a Scot called Ramsay Gay, were arrested in the Canary Islands. The Dogs of War was not a manual on how to launch a coup in a weak post-colonial African state, but the text was written after discussions with mercenaries involved in planning a real coup.³²

Whatever the exact truth of the matter, the mythology of The Dogs of War appears to have lived on in circles of right-wing adventurers and soldiers of fortune, and to have shaped at least some aspects of the bizarre plot now known as ‘The Wonga Coup’ in 2004. This was an attempt by a group of mercenaries led by the ex-Etonian British army officer Simon Mann. The plan on this occasion involved going into Equatorial Guinea by air rather than by ship, a decision that turned out to be very foolish. Mann and his group of mercenaries were stopped and taken off a plane in Zimbabwe on 7 March 2004 with $100,000 worth of weapons and equipment. Even if they had been successful, the coup plotters failed to consider what would have been the response from Spain, which was about to insert thousands of marines into the former colony for training.³³ Their incredible naivety suggests that it was not Forsyth’s novel alone which drove them onwards with the hare-brained plan, since Forsyth had stressed that the only way successfully to enter a small state like Equatorial Guinea was by boat, while his novel was set at a much earlier time in the history of post-colonial Africa. The state in Equatorial Guinea had now become considerably stronger due to large oil revenues that had been trickling into its coffers since the mid-1990s. Mann’s latter-day gentlemen adventurers were a throwback to an earlier time in Africa which had now gone for good.

As it was, the coup plotters ended up being charged in Zimbabwe with attempting to plot a coup. Mann was eventually extradited in 2008 to Equatorial Guinea, where he was given a thirty-four-year prison sentence, later commuted on 2 November 2009. It is evident from research by Adam Roberts that the British government probably knew in advance of the coup plot though it failed to tell the government of Equatorial Guinea,34 a feature (unknown at the time of the shooting of the film) that is reflected rather well as the mercenaries are shadowed in London by an apparent British agent.

Perhaps this was a case of truth attempting to copy fiction or, more likely, the film providing some form of rhetorical reference point through which public school chums could plot the bizarre coup that they thought would bring them quick and easy rewards. Their failure did not, by any means, signal the end of the mercenary film subgenre, which would continue to evolve in the light of changing patterns of political control in post-colonial Africa. The end of the Cold War in the early 1990s removed the need for rival superpowers to be in close control of pro-western or pro-Soviet regimes in sub-Saharan Africa. The reality of weak statehood became ever more apparent as some states effectively collapsed or broke down as ‘failed states’ in the 1990s.

This was dramatically exemplified in the case of the former British colony of Sierra Leone which had started out on statehood in 1961 with a GDP roughly equivalent to that of Portugal’s. After a long period of dictatorship under Siaka Stevens the country was in an extremely fragile state by the 1990s. It represented easy pickings for warlords, eager to gain access to its natural resources, especially diamonds, which could in turn pay for weapons for them to continue their activities involving the kidnapping of children as sex slaves and child soldiers, and the terrorizing of the civilian population.

The Revolutionary United Front (RUF), under its leader Foday Sankoh, was an especially dramatic example of this warlordism. The RUF was supported by Charles Taylor in the neighbouring state of Liberia and diamonds that were mined in Sierra Leone, often through slave labour, and then smuggled over the border into Liberia, where they were sold onto the world market. The issue became one of global humanitarian concern and the principal diamond monopoly, De Beers based in South Africa, came under growing international criticism for allegedly conniving in the trade in what were now termed ‘blood diamonds’. De Beers sought to distance itself as far as possible from these attacks by refusing to buy any diamonds from Liberia from 1985 onwards, but this face-saving device did not stop its share of the world diamond market falling from around 90 per cent in the 1980s to less than 40 per cent in 2012. De Beers remained an easy target for critics since it had formed a successful cartel early in the twentieth century and had been a prop to the apartheid regime in South Africa. The issue of blood diamonds in 1990s Sierra Leone could be linked with continuing structures of white or western imperial economic domination in Africa, even though the country concerned, Sierra Leone, had been independent for over three decades.

The film Blood Diamond released in 2006 and directed by Edward Zwick highlighted the illegal trade in diamonds from Sierra Leone. The film is a good example of how a ‘mercenary’ movie still needed to engage in some form with humanitarian concerns to ensure acceptance before western film audiences; it also reflected the epic ambitions of its director, who had previously directed Glory and The Last Samurai and was now, it seems, seeking to do something similar by revealing some of the apparently tragic dimensions of contemporary African politics. The film significantly avoids any focus on white mercenary forays into the African interior. In fact, it does not even start with mercenaries but a terrifying raid by RUF militias on a Mende village and the kidnapping, murder or enslavement of its inhabitants. The main character we see at this stage is the Mende fisherman Vandy (played by Djimon Hounsou, well known for his performance in Gladiator) who is carted off to work as a slave digging for diamonds, while his son is taken off to be trained as a child soldier. Working in the diamond mine Vandy chances upon a huge 100-carat pink diamond which he manages to bury before being ‘rescued’ by advancing UN security forces (who appear in a rather more positive light than in Dark of the Sun).

After learning of Vandy’s story the film then turns to the other central character, Danny Archer (Leonardo DiCaprio). Archer describes himself as a ‘Rhodesian’ and speaks in a strong English-speaking South African accent. We learn that he had left Zimbabwe as a child after his parents were murdered by Mugabe’s ZANU-PF guerrillas. He went on to become a member of the notorious South African 32 Battalion which fought a violent war in Angola in the 1980s, so he has all the essential attributes of a mercenary. But he is less a soldier of fortune than an illegal diamond dealer and is caught trying to smuggle diamonds over the border into Liberia in the fleeces of some sheep.

Archer is a loner like Shannon, though one who has a rather better knowledge on how to travel around Africa and negotiate with the locals. He can get out of tricky situations and speaks the Krio street patois that helps him cut deals with the violent juvenile militias. This still does not save him from being flung into jail after the attempted diamond heist and here he sees Vandy accused of hiding a large diamond. Archer decides to bring his former military contacts in South Africa into play. Selling a diamond hidden in a false tooth, he flies to South Africa to meet his former commander Colonel Coetzee (played by Arnold Vosloo) who lives on a heavily guarded farm in the Cape. Coetzee is a freelance mercenary with a private security firm like Executive Outcomes. A deal is secured and Coetzee commits himself to sending in a force to retrieve the diamond, which is the size of a small bird’s egg and clearly worth millions on the international market.

The film shifts back to the disintegrating situation in Freetown, which comes under RUF attack. Like the Simba guerrillas in Dark of the Sun, the RUF militias are adept at using modern weaponry, both mortars and rocket-propelled grenades, and make short work of government troops, who surrender before being summarily shot. Archer manages to contact Vandy and they escape Freetown. The realism of these scenes owes much to general news footage that was taken in Sierra Leone in the late 1990s and the courageous film Cry Freedom made by the Sierra Leonean film maker Sorious Samura, graphically depicting the wanton killing by the RUF militias and the severed limbs of many civilians.35 Despite this use of local footage, the film contains many of the tropes familiar from earlier mercenary films; the night shots of the RUF on the rampage in Freetown recall Cardiff’s shots of the Simbas running amok after capturing the train in Dark of the Sun. The ending, too, with an apparent change of heart by Archer on the run from his former South African mercenary colleagues recalls the decision to submit to a court martial by Currey, except that this time there is no going back for Archer who dies on a cliff-face. But he dies knowing that Vandy has managed to keep the diamond.

There is a giant imbalance between the worlds of Archer and Vandy that is partly explored, though never satisfactorily resolved. Archer has access to money, connections and travel that enable him to move around the African continent in a manner denied, until the end, to Vandy, who is in the early part of the film literally enslaved. We never seriously get into Vandy’s world, which is presented to us as at the start as a tourist brochure’s idea of a harmonious African village based on fishing rudely shattered by the violent entry of the RUF rebels. What is Vandy’s access to education? How is he able, with apparently little difficulty, to enter London in a smart suit at the end of the film into the world of western aid agencies and humanitarian concerns in order to help the campaign against the western diamond conglomerate?

In any case, the moral ballast of the film is provided from the third main character in the form of a white American journalist Maddy Bowen (Jennifer Connelly) who is in Sierra Leone to find more evidence to confirm the existence of the trade in illegal diamonds. Archer and Maddy develop a relationship of a kind, though the action film genre of the film ensures that it can never be explored in depth for fear of side-tracking from the central narrative. Maddy can at least be said to have a far more interesting and assertive female character than those of previous mercenary films. Her commitment to justice and human rights via exposure of the goings on in Sierra Leone jars with the apparently nihilistic and self-interested Archer, whose response is to spell out the letters ‘TIA’ standing for ‘This is Africa’: meaning, in effect, that it is pointless to imagine anyone can secure any real change. Maddy, however, manages to secure an eventual change of heart in Archer, who dies on the cliff-face knowing, like Curry in Dark of the Sun, that his life now has some meaning.

The juvenile rebels in the RUF are poorly portrayed in Blood Diamond. There was an opportunity here to move well beyond the well-entrenched stereotypes of barbaric tribal warriors waving their guns and wantonly killing and raping. It is hard to agree with James Berardinelli that the film was ‘uncompromising in the way it depicts the Sierra Leone conflict’. It compares poorly indeed to Johnny Mad Dog, directed by Jean-Stephane Sauvaire and released in 2008. This French-Liberian co-production focuses on a group of LURD child soldiers in neighbouring Liberia during the final phase of the civil war in the country in 2003. The film stands in marked contrast to Blood Diamond in the way it seeks to unravel the fragile identities of the group of juvenile warriors who kill their way across the Liberian countryside before entering the capital Monrovia shortly before the downfall of the regime of Charles Taylor.

The script was based on a novel by the Congolese writer Emmanuel Dongala titled Johnny Chien Mechant and follows the fortunes of the child soldiers, whose ages range from around 10 to 15. The children have bizarre names such as ‘Small Devil’, ‘Jungle Rocket’ and ‘No Good Advice’. They are clearly drugged up to commit various atrocities and the film depicts cocaine powder being rubbed into open wounds. The group is led by the ‘Johnny Mad Dog’ who appears at the start of the film to have little self-doubt in what he is doing. But many of the group are simply children who do not even carry real guns but wooden ones (one such child is later killed by a sniper) and some dress up in clothes stolen from terrified civilians, in one case, a white wedding dress while another boy sports a pair of butterfly wings. This theme of cross-dressing is not one explored, though, in Dongala’s original novel.

At one level, this was children simply wanting to dress up and play games in a world where the difference between reality and the fictional world has become blurred. Despite references to ‘liberation’ and ‘revolution’ in the broken patois of the group these are children whose world has been sizeably influenced by Hollywood. When one child asks Johnny Mad Dog what sort of a weapon he has taken possession of, he tells him that it is an Israeli Uzzi of the type used by Chuck Norris in Delta Force. Johnny Mad Dog then warns the group to be on the ready in case they encounter Chuck Norris or the Israelis on the streets of Monrovia. Behind this apparently pathetic statement lies, perhaps, a deeper truth that all war is to some extent the conflict of grown-up children and that the way we have now come to understand it is largely through film. It also accords with research by Paul Richards on dispossessed youth in the early 1990s in the Liberia–Sierra Leone border region for whom watching Rambo films helped in the creation of a new identity centred on a narrative of dispossession and living in the rainforest. This was a low-level form of insurgent conflict that shaded into gangsterism, where entry level for would-be participants was tragically low and the capacity to inflict damage on the social fabric extremely high.36

At another level, the film is a reflection about war and conflict as key agents in identity formation. The children have constructed various identities that are not unambiguously masculine, reflected especially in the wedding dress which one boy lovingly puts on at the start of the film. However, the film fails to provide a deeper explanation as to why the children construct their identities in the way they do, preferring to leave things at the level of suggestion.³⁷ We do not get to learn anything especially complex from this film, though some feminist theorists have argued that cross-dressing has traditionally been a way of challenging conventional cultural norms, in turn demanding differing audience responses.³⁸ In a state of social and political breakdown such as Liberia this reflects a wider search for new identities among an underclass of superfluous children who no longer fit into any clear social niche, though how they go about this remains largely unexplored.

The dramatic tension in the film between Johnny Mad Dog and the young girl Laokole compares to that of Archer and Maddy: They first meet on a stairway as Johnny Mad Dog’s child soldiers are on the rampage and kill a boy carrying a basket of oranges. Laokole, while scared, stands above Johnny and stares down at him to the point that the boy leaves her alone. Laokole fails to find her younger brother and we must presume he has been either killed or kidnapped. She takes charge of an orphaned girl and emerges as the moral heart of film. She has tried unsuccessfully to save her father (in the novel it is her crippled mother) who refused to run away when the child soldiers came: the crippled father in one sense represents the paralysis of an older generation when challenged by its armed youth. Laokole makes her own way and eventually confronts Johnny after he has been disarmed: there is a strong sexual frisson between the two, and Laokole allows Johnny to come back with her to the room where she now lives. Here she takes out a rifle and beats the now-whining Johnny to the ground, suggesting some form of domestic feminine challenge to the unchecked power of the boy soldiers. This is a film of a degraded form of insurgent movement that is fighting battles over status and economic deprivation. The central issue is really about access to education: the gun the children wield gives them some power over an adult world of education that has been denied to them. Blood Diamond was a pointer to the growing decline of the mercenary subgenre in the years after 9/11. There had perhaps always been a rather parochial element to the subgenre, largely set in the years after the Congo Crisis of the early 1960s in remote places far from the major terrains of conflict in the Cold War. Vincent Canby, for instance, thought that run-down Zangaro in The Dogs of War ‘wouldn’t even be important enough to engage the interests of Graham Greene’s most deprived characters’.39

By 2008, mercenaries seemed to be part of a form of war fast disappearing in the increasingly globalized world of insurgency and counter-insurgency. While Blood Diamond and Rambo suggested that there were still some possibilities left in the subgenre, it was going to prove increasingly hard to retrieve any form of heroism from the actions of individual mercenaries. Hollywood, nevertheless, attempted something on these lines with the film Machine Gun Preacher, directed by Marc Forster, in 2011. The film is based on the character of ex-biker Sam Childers (played by Gerald Butler) who told his own life story in the book Another Man’s War (2009). From a tough working-class childhood in Minnesota Childers married a night club stripper Lynn, who converted to Christianity at the fundamentalist Assembly of God Church. Childers eventually converted too and, in 1998, went to South Sudan where he encountered people fleeing from the militias of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). Together with his wife he founded a children’s village in South Sudan for war orphans called the Shekinah Fellowship Children’s Village or the ‘Angels of East Africa’.

This was a latter-day form of missionary work among the victims of the breakdown in post-colonial African states. Childers has claimed that the Shekinah Village has successfully housed and educated over 300 war orphans, though sceptics have suggested they are malnourished and unhappy. Fourteen local African leaders have written to Childers to complain that he has ‘dishonoured’ the original agreement under which they gave him 40 acres of land to build up the village. One of the leaders, Festo Fidi Akim, urged Childers not to return and asked that ‘someone with a good heart, someone who is humane … take over’. Government inspectors who have visited the village also confirm that Childers is rarely there and many of the children are in a poor with the village lacking many basic supplies like proper beds, medicines and food. Childers, though, has said that this is partly due to corruption.⁴⁰

Whatever the truth about the village, Childers has certainly been an unconventional type of missionary, armed not only with a prayer book but modern weaponry he knows how to use from a violent criminal (rather than military) past. He came from violent biker world though the first part of the film shows him discovering God and attempting to put his life on a more stable footing. We also learn that when Childers was not in jail he was a builder and he uses the skills to start building something worthwhile in his life. He does not become estranged from his wife despite regular trips to Africa that lead him to become known among the local rednecks as an ‘African Rambo’. The racist rednecks despise his efforts to help black Africans, suggesting that Hollywood continued to have some interest in the Rambo myth after Stallone’s retirement.

Here, the film parts company from Johnny Mad Dog for it fails to tell us much about the children that Childers professes to be trying to save. Childers encountered the children almost by accident in South Sudan when he was taken there by a friend, Deng, of the Sudanese Peoples Liberation Army to witness the horrors perpetrated by the LRA. It also interestingly parts from the Rambo films too, certainly Rambo III. Childers has some Rambo-like features as he takes up a cause that is apparently just, though the comparison is not exact: the screen Rambo in Rambo III was initially very reluctant to get involved in the Burmese conflict and already had his life in order working in a Thai village on the border. Childers, by contrast, wanders into the Sudan in search of a mission to give his life some form of purpose. He wanders into a society broken by complicated clan and ethnic conflicts that he sees only from afar and through a superficial moral glaze. The movie fails to get inside the mind of a man who appears as half psychopath and half crusader and it glosses over the reasons for the Sudanese conflict into which Childers has chosen to immerse himself. It bears some comparison though to the biopic of Jean Paul Vann in Bright Shining Lie by contrasting the claustrophobic domestic interiors of Childers’s home in the United States with the open vistas of Africa.41 For Childers, Africa is a terrain where he can lawfully practise as much violence as he likes and for an apparently good cause, though we never get to learn what his enemies in the bush are fighting for or the reasons for the conflict.⁴²

Only at the end does Childers finally come to experience doubts about his mission following the death of his friend Donnie. He does not reach this apparently through any liberal political conversion. Like Rambo, the film shows humanitarian liberals to be weak and ineffective in this type of brutal post-colonial setting. A female doctor challenges Childers at one point and accuses him of being a mercenary, though she is later brutally treated rather like the American missionaries. It is the will of the stronger that is apparently likely to prevail in this harsh terrain, though Machine Gun Preacher also suggests that, in the end, it is not worth putting American lives on the line to save the victims of murderous regimes and militias in the developing world.

More recently, the 2015 film Beasts of No Nation has continued the cinematic exploration of warlordism in West Africa in a rather less stylized manner than previous movies. Directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga, an American director who had directed the 2009 movie Sin Hombre concerning a Honduran girl attempting to immigrate to the United States, Beasts follows the fortunes of an African boy forced to become a child soldier after rebels attack his village. The film script was based on a novel with the same title written by Uzodinma Iweale, and is more successful than Johnny Mad Dog in penetrating the culture of warlordism in West Africa involving the psychological control of juveniles through the use of hallucinogenic drugs to create a murderous fighting machine. The film won shown in the Special Presentation Section of the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival, but the stark realism of this fictionalized documentary put a lot of film-goers off and led to poor box-office returns It grossed a mere $90,000 on an outlay of $6 million, though the film is now available on Netflix.

The camera follows the central character Agu (Abraham Attah), a young boy living in a West African village with his parents. The village is already in a buffer zone policed by ECOMOG forces, though this fails to prevent the swift descent into anarchy once the rebels arrive. Agu’s mother manages to leave the village in an overcrowded car but his father is murdered. Agu flees to the bush but is soon captured by a group of child soldiers of a rebel group known as the NDF. He is taken to the commandant (played with considerable poise by Idris Elba, previously notable for his performance as Nelson Mandela in the 2013 film Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom) who takes on the role of father to many of the orphaned children. The commandant promises to look after Agu, though still rapes him one night. Agu’s close friend among the child soldiers, a silent boy called Strika, also eventually dies from a gun-shot wound.

The authority of the commandant proves to be quite fragile once he goes to meet the Supreme Commander, who informs him he is not being promoted, as expected, but removed from his command. The commandant leaves with his warrior band, but once back in the forest it is clear he has no real means of supporting and feeding them. Morale declines as the ammunition runs out and the boys desert, leaving the commandant on his own and a pathetic wreck. Agu and many of the other boys fall into the hands of ECOMOG and the film ends with him in a missionary school attempting to re-educate traumatized child soldiers and bring them back into society.

It is Idris Elba’s chilling performance as the commandant that really ensures the continuing relevance of this powerful movie. He first appears as a leader in full command and completely certain of the purpose of his warrior band: not only can they take what they like, he promises, including any number of women from ‘enemy’ villages, but he justifies this in a debased language of national liberation ideology. He feels certain by the time that he meets the Supreme Commander that he has acted loyally and effectively and is shocked by the way that his hopes for promotion are rebuffed. While an effective leader of child soldiers, he emerges as naïve when it comes to understanding the wider pattern of power politics in this fragmented West African state. His warrior band has been used by senior figures inside the NDF for wider political purposes that remain unexplained. Side-lined, the commandant’s fall from grace is swift and decisive, though the film fails to examine what exactly motivated him in the first place. Indeed, the only character with any background in this film is Agu, necessarily so at one level, though it is questionable how much new is really learnt about child soldiers and the pattern of their recruitment. The movie certainly succeeds in depicting the fragile nature of warlord authority, which is constantly liable to being undermined by the loss of support from his band of followers, or being arbitrarily removed by those above him in a heavily contested power structure.43 Mercenaries too might be upstaged or sold out by duplicitous magnates and business tycoons employing them, though they are usually less beholden to the African troops they are fighting alongside.

Beasts of No Nation certainly succeeds in debunking the racist imagery of brutal and ‘savage’ African insurgents in mercenary films stretching back to the Dark of the Sun. Another film that moves away from this sort of imagery is The Siege of Jadotville (2016), directed by Richie Smyth and shot in Ireland and South Africa. The film re-enters the thorny terrain of post-colonial Congo, this time from the perspective of the Irish contingent to the UN peacekeeping force sent to the Congo in 1961 to try and reintegrate the country and end the Katangese secession. The film script was based on the 2005 book by Declan Power titled The Siege of Jadotville: The Irish Army’s Forgotten War recounting the story of the 158 men of ‘A’ Company, 35th Battalion (UN Service) of the Irish army led by its commander, Pat Quinlan (played by Jamie Dornan). The Company found itself airbrushed from history following their surrender after a five-day siege by the Katangese Gendarmerie, commanded by the French veteran and war-hero-turned mercenary Major Roger Faulques, at Jadotville (now Likasi) in Katanga in September 1961.

The action scenes of the film look like a modern version of Zulu, as the Irish troops find themselves surrounded and rushed at by hordes of Tshombe’s African troops, aided by small numbers of white mercenaries. But, unlike Rorkes Drift, this is a modern, rather than unconventional, war as the Irish are shot at by a Mystere jet along with mortars and small arms fire before they themselves start to run out of ammunition.44 They manage to inflict quite high casualties on their opponents (an estimated 300 killed), including a dramatic sniper shot at a white-suited figure directing the rebels, working for the Belgian mining interests propping up Tshombe’s regime. While some of the Irish are wounded, none in the event is actually killed and one is left asking why the incident disappeared in the way it did from public memory in Ireland, beyond the obvious answer that concepts of traditional military honour still prevailed in Ireland in the early 1960s, rooted in a brief tradition stretching back to the 1916 Easter Rising and the war of independence of 1919–1921, ensuring that the idea of surrender became equated, by some at least, with the apparent ‘sell out’ at the time of the December 1921 Treaty. Smyth has also suggested that the airbrushing was the result of wider forces at play in the complicated politics of the Congo. Ireland had only joined the UN as recently as 1955 and was anxious to try and display its credentials as a neutral country in the Cold War. Jadotville rather dented this project, especially as it was the only time that Irish troops found themselves operating alone.

The film portrays the Irish as well led and motivated, but side-lined by a UN leadership geared to wider diplomatic manoeuvring by its egotistical Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold and his special representative in the Congo, the Irish academic and politician Conor Cruise O’Brien (unconvincingly played by Mark Strong). The UN plan was to first negotiate with Tshombe and, if this proved unsuccessful, to arrest him as a last resort in a police action.⁴⁵ The Irish were only lightly armed and soon found themselves hard-pressed to match the weaponry of their opponents; whose numbers have been variously estimated between 500 and 4,000–5,000. A Swedish contingent was sent to try and reinforce them but failed to get through and the Irish had little choice but to surrender given their ammunition was running low. The film fails to deal with the brutal treatment of the Irish before they were finally able to go home to a frosty reception.

The film is inaccurate on some points. The assassination of Lumumba at the start is shown as a bullet to the head in a jail cell, whereas in reality he was executed by a firing squad overseen by Belgian officers. Likewise, while the mercenaries supplied to Tshombe (curiously referred to as ‘General’ Tshombe) were led by the urbane Roger Faulkes, many were Rhodesians and South Africans. The Soviet Union is referred to at one point as the ‘Soviet Republic’ while the film hints at a conspiracy to assassinate Dag Hammarskjold when a jet appears behind his plane flying to Ndola to meet Tshombe. In practice, no evidence was found at the crash site to confirm that the plane was shot down, and it crashed anyway at night as it came in to land.⁴⁶ The trope refers to a wider diplomatic struggle while the Jadotville siege was going on as Hammarskjold frantically tried to obtain delivery of a few jets promised to him from the Ethiopian government. The jets were held up by the reluctance of the British colonial government in Uganda (this was a year before the country’s independence) to give flight clearance.⁴⁷ As a result, the Irish were shot at from the air by the Fouga jet which had complete freedom of the skies, an image considerably different to the UN plane in Dark of the Sun.

The Siege of Jadotville still manages to weave the siege at the local level with a wider pattern of global events, as the Congo became locked into Cold War superpower rivalry. Quinlan learns from a widow living in the area that Jadotville has the world’s largest uranium mine, radiation from which killed her husband. It is evident that it is not just Belgian mining interests that are stake in the conflict, and Tshombe appears as a figure working for wider western interests. The UN is portrayed in a note at the end of the film as largely resolving the Katanga issue once Tshombe was driven out of the province by UN forces in 1963, though it failed to point out that he returned as prime minister the following year. Eventually, too, a US-backed military regime came to power with the 1965 military coup in Kinshasa that led to the long period of kleptocratic rule by General Mobutu.

Summing up

Mercenaries are unlikely to disappear from the cinema screen, certainly in the immediate future. With origins in macho action narratives in films like Dark of the Sun and Wild Geese, they function, strictly speaking, as cinematic anti-heroes, even if they never seriously rival truly demonic characters such as Hannibal Lector. The anti-hero is shaped as much as the hero by the memory of past heroism, and anti-heroes often engage in a vain quest to regain the heroism of a past now denied to them.48 We can see this in the desperate efforts of film producers and director to clothe their mercenary anti-heroes with some sort of moral gloss, despite this being thin and unconvincing.

Some mercenaries will certainly continue as staple antiheroes in action movies, while there are some signs that mercenaries will even find a home in fantasy movies, evidenced by the 2009 epic Avatar (written, produced and directed by James Cameron). In this instance, a private security company has not just taken over the running of a war but the defence of mining operations in an entire planet. Set in the mid-twentieth century, the narrative has humans escaping an overpopulated and dying earth to colonize the distant planet Pandora, the moon of an unnamed gas giant. The mining operations threaten the existence of the Na’vi, a 10-foot-tall blue-skinned humanoid species indigenous to the planet and worshippers of the goddess Eywa.

The film breaks from the conventional masculine mould of most mercenary features by starkly contrasting the feminine world of the Na’vi with the crudely masculine world of the colonial intruders, essentially modern American militarism writ large in the form of the Resources Development Administration (RDA). This concern runs the planet rather like an updated British East India Company or British South Africa Company in the days of empire. The RDA wants to protect its operations from constant Na’vi attacks; its giant soil movers return with arrows in their wheels recalling Indian resistance to loggers in the Amazon jungle. The security force is a mercenary one recruited from the military back on earth and led by a Hartmann-type character, Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang). The Colonel hires Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a paraplegic ex-Marine, to replace his dead brother so that he can become an ‘avatar’ or one of the Na’vi-human hybrids who are operated by genetically matched humans.

Jake comes to sympathize with the Na’vi after falling in love with Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), the daughter of the leader of the Omaticaya clan. He forms a guerrilla army to resist the RDA’s operations once it is obvious that the RDA has no serious interest in understanding Na’vi culture, despite their use of an anthropologist Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver), who realizes she is there only to gather military intelligence, Grace changes sides to join the guerrillas and the resulting war takes a suitably fantastic and naturalistic form, with aerial attacks by large birds and resistance in the forest by Na’vi and animals, recalling similar images in The Return of the King (2003). The enemy, by contrast, is a mechanical one equipped with huge earth movers and robotic craft resembling macho Marines.

A more politically engaged approach might perhaps have involved a revolt from within the US military against their own masters, an idea that never reached the final film script.49 However the film is interesting in the way it explores both sides in an insurgent–counter-insurgent war. We start with the central character Jake, but, as an ‘avatar’, he moves from the world of humans and Na’vi and back again. Here, at least in the realm of fantasy, Hollywood finally gets to explore both insurgency and counter-insurgency in the same movie, though anything so balanced in mainstream features continues to present serious political and commercial problems for the industry.