Barrel of a Gun Read online

However, from a sufficient distance, African troubles do have their comic side. It can sometimes be quite amusing as cultures clash and egos need to be nursed. The illustrious former Newsweek and London Daily Mail correspondent Peter Younghusband has captured much of what happened over three or four decades of reporting on the continent in a book recently published in Cape Town, titled, appropriately, Every Meal a Banquet, Every Night a Honeymoon.4

  An uproarious read, it puts much of what happened in Africa yesterday thoroughly in context.

  Some of the stories that emerged over the years had more sinister implications. This became apparent as the Congolese war spread eastwards towards the Ugandan and Rwandan borders and then south to Katanga (now Shaba Province). By then a mercenary army had been raised, commanded by the same Mike Hoare with whom George Clay went into battle before he was killed. Moise Tshombe, meanwhile, had declared Katanga independent and overnight Hoare, the ultimate mercenary, changed sides.

  The UN intervened and another civil war followed. However, these were real wars and a lot of real people, innocent or otherwise, were being slaughtered.

  Because of faulty or inadequate phone and telex links with the world outside, most of the hacks worked from the Edinburgh Hotel in Kitwe, a modest mining town in Zambia then listed on the map as Northern Rhodesia. It was part of the Central African Federation, a British political invention that, as might have been expected, failed after only a few years.

  The border between Northern Rhodesia and the Congo at the time was patrolled by the Federal Army, a very professional, little military force that operated in a typically British fashion. All the African countries in the region except the Congo (Zaire) and Angola (which was Portuguese) were still British territories and Whitehall’s influence was manifest. Here an event, or rather a series of events, took place which will be remembered long after we are all gone.

  Peter Younghusband and his Daily Express colleague John Monks were involved. Since I had commissioned Chris Munnion to write his book and sent him around the world in a bid to capture some of this history while I was still into publishing, I’ll repeat what he told me on his return.

  Apparently, Younghusband and Monks were relaxing in Kitwe one evening, having just returned to file their copy to London from Elizabethville, the Katangese capital (Lubumbashi, today). They were approached by a mild-mannered American who introduced himself as Weldon Wallace of The Baltimore Sun. Wallace was that newspaper’s distinguished music critic and he had been covering the opera season in Milan when the Katanga crisis erupted.

  ‘My newspaper noticed that I was the man nearest the spot and asked me to pop down here to cover the story’, Wallace explained to Younghusband. ‘I have actually never been to Africa before so I wonder if I could possibly get a lift with you to Elizabethville?’ The two old hands pointed out the difficulties of getting through the roadblocks and explained that as he, Weldon Wallace, had an American passport, the Katangese might easily pick on him as his government was involved with the hated United Nations, then occupying parts of Katanga.

  ‘We felt a bit guilty about this, especially as he was such a nice guy’, Monks said afterwards, ‘but it really was becoming a hairy run and we knew that having a stranger with an American passport could easily put us all at risk’.

  Wallace appreciated their point. Unbeknown to Monks and Younghusband, he’d earlier sought out two other newly arrived journalists, Arthur Bonner, a fellow American, of CBS as well as Lionel Fleming of the BBC, who travelled on an Irish passport. All three journalists agreed to drive to Katanga together the following day.

  Weldon Wallace had heard mention that Africans across the border were starving and he’d thoughtfully loaded his hired car with cans of dried milk and sacks of flour. ‘I thought if I distributed food to refugees, it would generate a spirit of goodwill and enable us to pass through to Elizabethville’, he said at the time. He was soon to learn that there was precious little goodwill left in Central Africa.

  The three men set off early, quickly negotiated the Northern Rhodesian border post and drove down the hill to the Katangese frontier a mile beyond. It was still early morning, but the Katangese troops lounging around the border post were drunk and high on pot. They could scarcely believe their eyes when three white men emerged from the car cheerfully waving their passports – two American and one Irish.

  As the cry went up ‘Americans! Irish! UN spies… kill them… kill them!’ the three realized their error and tried to get back to the car. They were beaten and dragged at gunpoint to a fetid shack about 100 yards away while other troops cheerfully ransacked the car and began bayoneting the bags of flour in the trunk.

  The shack to which the three scribes were shepherded had a floor of compacted cow dung and a tin roof.

  Wallace: ‘It was hot and very smelly but that was the least of our problems. We were being slapped, beaten and jabbed with rifles. As the man who appeared to be the sergeant screamed threats and insults at us, hands reached out and grabbed our wallets and watches.’

  Through a window, Wallace saw a large white man approaching. It was a guardian angel in the unlikely form of Peter Younghusband. ‘When he saw what was going on, an expression of astonishment crossed his face. He inclined his head in acknowledgement of our plight. My hopes rose.’

  Monks and Younghusband had set out for the border shortly after Wallace and friends. At the Northern Rhodesian border post they had exchanged pleasantries with a Federal Army officer, a major whom Monks, then based in Rhodesia, had known for some time. They were told that two Americans and an Irishman had just gone through. With mounting concern the pair approached the Katangese border.

  ‘The first thing we noticed was this great cloud of flour hanging in the air. The troops were fighting over the spoils from our colleagues’ car’, Younghusband remembers. ‘It was an amazing sight. There were these crazed black men reeling around covered in white flour, their eyeballs rolling. We realized something pretty nasty was going on. A Katangese immigration official indicated that three white spies had been “taken for execution”.’ Monks and Younghusband made a swift decision. Younghusband would try to do what he could to calm the situation which by then was totally out of control, while Monks would dash back to the Northern Rhodesian border post to summon help from Federal troops.

  ‘Bigfoot’ Younghusband strolled as casually as he could towards the shack where he heard sounds of another commotion. He glimpsed the terrified face of Weldon Wallace through the window and made his way to the door.

  ‘I burst in and, trying to sound authoritative, I bellowed in French: ‘Stop this immediately! These men are famous journalists who have come to see President Tshombe.’ I was armed with nothing more useful than a Katangese press card which I brandished wildly. It didn’t work.’

  The Katangese officer, his face contorted in fury, stepped towards the big guy, knocked the press card out his hand and hollered ‘Spies, spies… you are all spies.’ With that he slapped Younghusband across the face.

  ‘I was transformed from a liberal to an Afrikaner nationalist in 30 seconds flat’, Peter recalled with wry humor.

  There was nothing funny about his situation at the time, however. He was pushed onto the floor with the other three. To his horror, one soldier dragged a Bren gun into the open door of the hut, spread-eagled himself behind it and pointed it at the hostages, for that was what they’d become. The others, meanwhile, kept ranting with a chant of ‘Kill them… kill them’. The Bren gunner suddenly rolled over onto his back and started to laugh.

  ‘I sensed they were waiting for somebody’, said Younghusband. ‘So I urged the others to try not to show their fear… if they see it or smell it, it makes them worse, which was much more easily said than done.’

  The Katangese immigration officer suddenly appeared in the doorway and spoke to the soldier in charge. He pointed at Younghusband and said he knew him as a British journalist. Peter was ordered to his feet and told to get back to the other side of the border. Wall
ace, Bonner and Fleming were then dragged out of the shack and bundled into a vehicle that took them several miles down the road, where the car swung off into a clearing in the bush. Wallace took up the story.

  ‘The soldiers crowded around. They tore off our jackets and ordered us to remove the rest of our clothing. One of them said they did not want our clothes to show bullet holes… I was convinced this was the end. We were going to be executed there in the bush.’ The half-naked trio was then pushed into a line. Once again the soldiers cocked their rifles.

  Back at the border post, Younghusband found John Monks with some Federal troops in armoured cars. The friendly major was talking urgently into a field radio. Monks had got through to his old friend, Sir Roy Welensky, the Federal Prime Minister, who ordered his troops to do everything possible to rescue the journalists. The troops then drove to the Katangese border post where the major was now trying to reach his opposite number in the Gendarmerie on the radio. He succeeded.

  A senior Katangese officer raced to the scene just in time to prevent what would almost certainly have been the execution of the three men. They were given back their clothes, shoved back in the car and handed over at the border post. Bonner and Fleming were shaken but unhurt. Weldon Wallace also had no injuries but was white and shaking and clearly in shock.

  Monks and Younghusband rushed him back to Kitwe and summoned a doctor from the nearby copper mine.

  ‘Weldon was put straight to bed and heavily sedated’, Monks said. ‘Just before he went under, he kept muttering that he had to write a story for his newspaper. He had to file, were his words. We told him not to worry, which was when he went into a deep sleep.’

  The two men sat down at a typewriter and, under Wallace’s name, composed a dramatic first-person account of what had happened. ‘My American passport nearly cost me my life yesterday…’ it started, and went on in punchy Fleet Street style. They then cabled it to The Baltimore Sun which ran it prominently with Weldon’s by-line and his picture under the banner headline ‘A Captive of Wild Katangan Troops’.

  By the time the newspaper’s music critic came to in Kitwe’s Edinburgh Hotel, there was a pile of cables from his editors as well as his proprietor congratulating him on his escape and his story. They advised him too that he was being nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for ‘a story written under great pressure’.

  Poor Weldon was totally bewildered. ‘But I didn’t write anything… what are they talking about?’Monks and Younghusband tried to tell him that he’d dictated his account to them before he was sedated, but he was not convinced.

  Younghusband told me: ‘He went straight back to the US and we had a long letter of thanks from him. However, he said that, under the circumstances, he could not possibly accept a Pulitzer nomination… a pity because that’s the closest we ever came to winning a prize.’

  Monks’ hometown newspaper, the Melbourne Herald, meanwhile, ran the story of his exploits under the memorable headline ‘Australian Reporter Saves Three from Natives’.

  Considering the risks of covering the African beat, I reckon I must have been pretty lucky over the years. Apart from some scrapes and being left half-deaf from a series of blasts while covering the Angolan War, I have been fortunate to have survived a career that spans more than four decades in the field, though I’d like to think that it’s not over yet.

  I use the word ‘survive’ lightly, as there is something inexplicable about emerging on the other side alive and with all your bits and pieces intact. People talk about a sixth sense, a kind of warning of danger. My theory revolves around a seventh, eighth or even a ninth sense, ‘every cell inside you crying out to live, just live!’ as it was graphically described by Arkady Babchenko, a brilliant young Russian writer when he talks about his experiences in Chechnya in One Soldier’s War in Chechnya.5

  Throughout it all, I have been doing what I loved best, be it going into Beirut with the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) during the 1980s Israeli invasion of Lebanon; covering the war in El Salvador with a group of American mercs; or, during the Balkan War, flying in a Joint-STARS operation with the United States Air Force over Kosovo. I didn’t regard any of it as inordinately demanding at the time, though it obviously was, because I earned a good living from the proceeds.

  Nor was it a chore to traipse around some of the African and Middle Eastern conflicts that I’d chosen, or been chosen, to cover. It was the same when I joined the Police Air Wing, a paramilitary helicopter unit in South Africa, in the winter of 2006 for a combined three-week ground and air operation that resulted in the destruction of about 20 tons of marijuana in what was once known as Zululand.

  Before that, I went into Angola with South African units on longrange penetration strikes. During ‘Op Daisy’ a week-long onslaught deep into Angola, I was embedded with an attack force that involved Ratel infantry fighting vehicles from 61 Mech. ‘Op Daisy’ was hardly a success, and we were mightily intimidated by the way the enemy deployed anti-tank mines. I was on the turret of one of the Infantry Fighting Vehicles (IFVs) when we triggered a TM-57: my only injury was a broken arm, and though I was choppered out to have it set, I was back again by nightfall.

  It was also in Angola in 1980 that I went into combat with 1 Parachute Battalion, and, as mentioned earlier, while with the unit, attacked what we thought was a rebel SWAPO base at Cuamato. With Charlie Company (79/81), we were dropped straight into the bush from a string of Puma helicopters and it didn’t take us long to realize that the enemy was all over the place, many of them armed with RPG-7s. Most of the youngsters around me were still in their teens and they fought with a kind of dedicated resolve that astonished us older guys.

  South Lebanese M113 armoured personnel carriers – American made and supplied, mainly to Christian forces in Lebanon – were very much in evidence in the areas adjacent to the Israeli border. (Author’s collection)

  Close to me in that attack was one of the war dogs of his time, a young Lieutenant Johan Blaauw, who led from the front throughout. I was with him when he used a grenade to flush a bunch of the enemy from a bunker that had been used for storing fuel. Johan was lucky to have survived the back-blast, which left him with his face and uniform seared and almost no hair on his head.

  Also involved in that attack was that incorrigible British mercenary, Peter MacAleese, who later went on to fight in Columbia’s drug wars. He’d gone straight in with us from the helicopter and was the first to tackle an enemy soldier whom he’d spotted targeting our approach with a rocket-propelled grenade.

  We eventually took the base, but elements of the parachute battalion suffered fatalities, including Leon ‘Chunky’ Truter, a youngster who took a shard of steel in the brain after an enemy mortar landed in the middle of his squad. It was a lucky shot for the enemy and it did serious damage.

  I was there when – after a spell of going in and out of consciousness – ‘Chunky’ breathed his last. Afterwards I visited his mother in Cape Town to tell her that just before he died, he’d quietly called for her. I heard afterwards that she never got over his death.

  As Charlie Company section leader Manie Troskie recalled afterwards, ‘Chunky’s’ death had an effect on these youngsters and I was to see some of it myself from up close. If they had any reservations about warfare before, a kind of primitive hatred emerged. Overnight, these adolescents became focused, their instincts atavistic, brutish and elemental and beyond the comprehension of most ordinary folk. But then, that’s the way it is with all wars, which was why Charlie Company went in the next day and thought nothing about killing as many of the enemy as they encountered in an engagement that lasted several hours.

  ‘We had a score to settle’, said Manie at the 30th anniversary of the Cuamato attack at a resort outside Bloemfontein. ‘And let me tell you,’ he said in Afrikaans, ‘ons het daardie donders goed gebliksem’, which loosely translates into ‘we fucked them up good and proper’.

  What remains vivid was the counter-attack that came after we’d bedded down lat
er that night: salvoes of Soviet 122mm Katyusha rockets forced us to scamper into a row of trenches that had been vacated by Angolan troops earlier in the day. I deal with another aspect of that attack later in the book.

  Curiously, a lot of what took place when I found myself in Africa and the Middle East might be summarized as events that ‘just kind of happened’.

  I’d initially qualified as a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Shipbrokers at the Baltic Exchange in London and though the British capital never bored me, being officebound and stuck in a tedious, unimaginative routine certainly did. The overcrowded, often stifling Underground was a nightmare, which was why I ended up in Nigeria. Bit of a contradiction in terms, I suppose, but at least things were happening in West Africa.

  In Angola’s flat, arid hinterland that Lisbon had long ago called Terras do Fim Mundo – Land at the End of the Earth – the troops used whatever high point was available to observe the activities of the other side. (Author’s collection)

  By the time I got to Lagos, I’d barely missed the first army mutiny, but there was plenty more action before the second putsch took place in July 1966 and still more coups, mutinies and revolutions have taken place since then. Suddenly, I was thrust into the kind of African upheaval that had become commonplace in Africa and has never quite let up since.

  My office was at Lagos Airport, where there was constant movement to London, New York and Johannesburg. I could easily get my stories and photographs out without drawing attention to my actions by using ‘pigeons’, otherwise known as obliging third parties. I’d approach boarding passengers in the departure lounge at Lagos’ Ikeja Airport, these days officially referred to as Murtala Mohammed International Airport, and ask them to take an envelope or two out of the country, which is unheard of today.

  I sent scores of news reports out of Nigeria that way. What was curious was that during the year that I reported locally, not one of my typed reports or any of the rolls of film that accompanied them went missing. There was no fax or e-mail, or even computers as we know them today, but such were the good old days.