Big Men Little People

by Alec Russell

  Whether it was because wavering MPLA supporters at the last minute turned back to the 'devil they knew' or that Savimbi's support had been over-estimated, provisional results for the election indicated that Dos Santos had about 50 per cent while Savimbi was trailing with 39 per cent. Tragically for Angola this was the cue for the spirit of the teenage Savimbi on the football pitch to reassert itself. Claiming the results were rigged, he returned to the bush and led his long-suffering countrymen into some of the bloodiest fighting in their long war.

  Before the peace process, Angola's war was fought mostly in the bush. Savimbi's success as a guerrilla leader had hinged on avoiding pitched battles and leaving the towns in government hands. But his strategy changed in 1992. This time he aimed to take over the cities, starting with those in the Central Highlands, his Ovimbundu heartland. By November 1994, when a new peace settlement was signed, a series of towns whose names meant nothing in the West were in ruins and up to 100,000 people had been killed.

  Among the most hotly contested targets was Huambo, the second city, which Savimbi had coveted during his long years in the bush in the Seventies and Eighties. When I visited it, months after the ceasefire and a few days after Johnny Alcides had confided his dream of returning, the bougainvillaea were in flower. If I blurred my vision on their vivid pinks and crimsons I could have been in New Lisbon, as Huambo was known under the Portuguese, when it held Formula One races through its streets. But there was little left of the old town. The streets of stuccoed colonial villas had been flayed by small-arms fire, mortars and artillery shells, first by one side, then by the other. Every now and then the sharp crack of a landmine could be heard testifying to the destructive seeds both sides had laid.

  The villain of the piece was Savimbi. Bitterness and pride consume 0 Mais Velho (the eldest one), as he is known to his supporters. As so many times before, once the war restarted after the election he dropped out of sight, fuelling rumours that he was wounded or dead. As a UN mission tried to breathe life into a new peace process in 1995, Savimbi became as elusive as Angola's long dreamed-of peace.

  Tucked away in the Angolan bush, Bailundo airstrip is a sight familiar to a dozen African countries: a bumpy clearing with a thatched hut as control tower, a khaki tent as passenger lounge, and the debris of war for decoration. I was squatting by the side of the airstrip, watching a United Nations airliner circle over head, when there was a low rumble behind me. Twenty yards away the bush parted to reveal a black Mercedes. It was in perfect condition. The sun glinted off its silverwork. Its wheels were unflecked by the airstrip's ever swirling clouds of dust. It purred past me at a walking pace and drew to a halt on the edge of the 'runway'.

  With immaculate timing, even as the aircraft drew to a halt to reveal its distinguished passenger, the then UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the side-door of the Mercedes opened and out stepped a figure whose appearance seemed more appropriate for a concert hall than an African battlefield. A crisply ironed black shirt in the Mao collarless style was just visible under an immaculate cream jacket. Clutching his familiar silver-topped walking stick, Savimbi strode forward to greet his visitor like a lion emerging from the bush to consume his prey.

  In the Eighties, at the height of his international prestige, the Unita leader was known as Africa's 'Gucci guerrilla', both for his snazziness and for his ability to tailor his style to suit his audience. In the bush he favoured hip-hugging fatigues with a pearl-handled revolver at his belt. When touring the West he opted for well-cut suits. But his sartorial instincts deserted him after the collapse of the peace process in 1992. With his white jacket, which he wore throughout the tortuous negotiations of the Nineties, he clearly intended to cut a dash as a serious world leader, but the outfit was instead likened to the garb of an ageing crooner. The analogy became increasingly appropriate as time passed: like a has-been artiste, Savimbi only had one tune.

  The two leaders embraced in a melee of suited UN aides and khaki-clad Unita guards. The encounter had been billed by optimistic UN officials as one of the most significant for southern Africa in several years. Since the election, Savimbi's public appearances in his own country could have been counted on the fingers of one hand. The UN saw the Secretary General's visit as a chance to secure a much-needed success following the disastrous operation in Somalia of 1992-3 and amid the continuing chaos of their mission in Bosnia, which was then in the throes of one of its many crises.

  The two delegations bumped a few miles through the bush to a stifling and gloomy old colonial villa with crumbling pink plaster walls. Many years before Bailundo had been a bustling community. Like the other towns on Angola's Central High lands plateau it was favoured by the Portuguese in the colonial era because of its dry climate, which offered relief from the relentless humidity of the coastal strip. It was here that Savimbi's grandfather had taken part in the abortive revolt against colonial rule. Now it had become a Unita garrison town and the accompanying journalists were policed with a manic intensity.

  Every step we took was monitored. Every building we visited had been carefully pre-selected and approved. No soldier was prepared to go beyond formulaic answers. Someone had pre pared a meal of charred chicken wings and warm beer which were served in a shell-scarred building on the edge of the town. We were herded there by Unita aides, who hovered at our elbows monitoring otir conversation as we nibbled the fare. All the while we willed a quick conclusion to the summit. No one was expecting anything significant to emerge.

  Perched on a sofa under a large Unita banner, BoutrosGhali talked of his delight at seeing his 'very old friend', a reference to the early Sixties when Savimbi was in self-imposed exile and they had met in Cairo. The UN head spoke fulsomely of Angola's will for reconciliation and the 'irrevocable' peace process. But he must have known the encounter was little more than an exotic photo-opportunity.

  Elegant and aloof, in marked contrast to the apologetic figure cut by the UN Secretary General, Savimbi said barely a word. His body language would have made him an ideal James Bond villain. Like all Big Men he clearly demanded the adulation of his aides. Boutros-Ghali was on paper one of the world's most influential men and yet he seemed like an apprentice before a grand-master.

  By the late Nineties Savimbi was possibly the most dangerous politician on the continent. He had one of Africa's most experienced and well-equipped armies, access to an endless supply of minerals, and he had long since outgrown his handlers.

  It is received wisdom that the Cold War arms race, while a drain on finances, at least served as a deterrent which staved off a Third World War. Seen from Washington or Moscow it is a glib argument, but the view from Luanda, Bailundo or indeed any other part of Angola is not so simple. At its height, Africa was a patchwork quilt of spheres of influence. Just as the pre independence map was coloured according to colonial power, so the post-independence map was shaded according to political orientation. African leaders were either on one side or the other. Their officers were trained either in Moscow and Berlin or Sandhurst and West Point.

  Many of the bloodiest battles of the Cold War were fought thousands of miles from the superpowers in African countries which most Soviet and American citizens would not, if asked, have been able to place on a map. No one knows how many people died in Angola as sacrificial victims on the altar of superpower politics - nor how many were mutilated by the landmines, which both sides sprinkled over the interior. But the answer to the first question lies somewhere in the hundreds of thousands, and the answer to the second is yet to be calculated

  Angola is thought to have more landmines than its 11 million people. Mother Superior Sao Paolo, the head of a Portuguese order of nuns, watched the appalling saga unfold. She arrived from Lisbon in 1962 shortly before the start of the anti-colonial war as a young idealist committed to living God's word. Since then her faith has had to struggle to survive as she watched Angola sink back into the pre-industrial age. Her order expanded and shrank as the fighting ebbed and flowed. For severa
l years she was forced to live in the bush. Each time she reopened her community, a different band of soldiers would commandeer her set-up and force her to close down. Now she is a wrinkled chestnut of a figure.

  'We're starting from nothing,' she told me. 'It's like when the Portuguese came here all those years ago. We are starting afresh.'

  Her wistful invocation of the arrival of the first Portuguese in the late fifteenth century would until recently have outraged most Angolans. The Portuguese were by common consent the most tenacious colonists. They saw their three African colonies, Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau, as reminders of their glorious sea-faring days and, disdaining what they saw as the defeatism of the British, Belgians and French, had no intention of sailing home without a fight. Even as Black Nationalism was sweeping through the continent in the Fifties and Sixties, they invested in a massive construction and public works programme, although the Angolans, of course, saw little of the wealth. The departure of the Portuguese in 1975, following a coup by left wing army officers in Lisbon the previous year, was as selfish and spiteful as anywhere else in the continent. More than a quarter of a million colonials fled Angola in the eighteen months between the coup and independence. Most stripped their homes and offices down to the electric fittings. The Polish correspondent Kapuscinski described how Portuguese traders packed all their stocks into wooden crates and waited at Luanda docks for ships to take them anywhere. 'I don't know if there had ever been an instance of a whole city sailing across the ocean,' he wrote in his memoirs. 'But that is exactly what happened. (3)

  There were even reports of people filling wells with cement and parking their cars and throwing away the keys.

  After a few days in Luanda, however, it is easy to understand the sad logic of the Mother Superior's sentiments. At independence it was one of Africa's most charming and lively capitals. But by the time of Boutros-Ghali's visit it had been reduced to a foul-smelling shambles. On the outskirts the Roque Santeiro market, a teeming mass of hundreds of stalls stretching over several miles, had become the commercial hub of the nation. Traders came from all over Africa to take advantage of the captive audience. A Malian sold me a CD of one of Angola's favourite musicians. He had just closed the bargain with the tale of how each month he made his way from Timbuctoo across some of the most anarchic countries in Africa when, with a weary inevitability, a squad of jumpy and ill-kempt policemen waylaid my car and held me and my companions from the BBC hostage until the right 'fee' was agreed.

  *

  One of the enduring mysteries and marvels of Africa is the ability of its peoples to pick themselves up from the most appalling disasters. It is a tribute to the extraordinary spirit of the Angolans that the capital maintained a spark even in the gloomiest days of the war. It boasted some of the finest seafood and liveliest nightlife in the continent. But the glitter of the beachfront bars was merely a façade: they were of course available only to the elite of businessmen, diamond dealers and mercenaries who thrived in such conditions. Luanda is a monument to the disasters of the post-colonial years. It is also a mausoleum for the Cold War.

  America and the Soviet Union were equally culpable although intriguingly both were relatively slow starters in what was to become the second 'scramble' for Africa. Having not shared in the colonial dismemberment, Moscow lacked the commercial, missionary and expatriate sources which kept the European powers abreast of the latest African developments. With its vast natural resources, the Soviet Union also did not need to compete in the scrimmage for Africa's mineral wealth, the continent's primary magnet. Thus, as the era of independence dawned, Moscow had a relatively sketchy knowledge of the continent. But amid the fiery denunciations of colonial rule by black nationalists the Kremlin swiftly grew to appreciate that Africa could be a useful piece on the global chessboard. The Marxist governments in Angola, Mozambique and Ethiopia received massive shipments of arms and equipment. In the Seventies the MPLA had an estimated 1,500 Soviet military advisors as well as 30,000 Cuban troops who were funded by Moscow. In the Eighties American diplomats estimated that Angola received $800 million of Soviet military aid a year.

  America was caught off-guard by Moscow's involvement.

  In the Sixties and early Seventies Washington was not over exercised by events in Africa. The success of the CIA's contact, Mobutu, in Zaire and the overthrow of the leftist icon Nkrumah in Ghana in 1966, just nine years after he took power, were deemed to have crushed Soviet hopes in Africa. But the 1974 coup in Portugal changed everything, raising in the West and South Africa the spectre of a large swath of Africa falling under Soviet control.

  The CIA launched an emergency operation to check the MPLA, first by backing the FNLA, Angola's third and northern based liberation movement, and then by helping South Africa's white minority government to assist UNITA. Initially the sup port was covert. America had only just disengaged from Vietnam. Washington knew that public opinion would never accept a fully fledged foreign adventure. But the support became official in 1985 when Congress lifted a law that prohibited aid going to the rebels. It was estimated to have peaked at about $60 million a year in the mid-Eighties under President Reagan.

  The British secret service, MI6, and the French and German intelligence agencies also poured in support. Intelligence officers used to boast that Savimbi had enough weapons to fight a Third World War - not bad for a man who first invaded Angola in

  1966 with a single pistol given to him by a sympathetic friend, Sam Nujoma, who was to become the first president of Namibia.

  Over the years the communications industry in Africa has shown a remarkable versatility in overcoming chaos. In the late Nineties there was a cellular telephone revolution as business men realized that cordless phones were the answer for a continent where thousands of miles of cable had been destroyed in war and dug up and used for fencing and homes. This was in the coming years to become a major business as the telecommunications revolution fuelled the opening up of the continent. Smallholders learned to use the internet to check crop prices. Small business people learned how to use telephone banking. And so in the first decade of the millennium a middle class started to gather momentum, accelerating a long overdue economic recovery.

  But back in 1995, news was still travelling slowly. I had barely brushed off the dust of the Benguela Railway following my dawn ride from Lobito before I became aware that more than five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall parts of Angola had yet to appreciate the Cold War was over- although, to be fair, in Benguela the problem was more a case of short-sightedness than of missing the news.

  A mile from Benguela's handsome pastel-coloured railway station was the squat, heavily guarded mansion of the provincial governor, Paolo Jorge. He was a veteran MPLA leader who had been one of Angola's first foreign ministers and who was renowned in Washington for stymying talks with the Americans with his incomprehensible dialectic. In an impromptu interview it soon became clear little had changed. The ageing apparatchik was still convinced the Marxist dream was

  nigh. Loyal party man, he was cautious and stilted. The only time he broke off from his dogma was as I rose to leave, when he delivered an encomium to a prominent British journalist whose enthusiasm kept him going, he said with a flourish, even in moments of doubt. Indeed they had spoken on the telephone just the other morning and he had been assured he was still on the right track in pursuing a Marxist-Leninist course.

  I walked away down the long central corridor past rows of empty offices with their mounds of meaningless bureaucracy, shaking my head at the absurdity of a Briton in the comfort of London still having the nerve to preach to Africa. Over the years, ideologues from both Left and Right have done much harm to Africa in trying to promote their views, and still, it seems, they have not learned to leave the continent alone.

  Jorge was far more expansive that night after a few glasses of wine. He was, of all incongruous settings for a diehard Communist, dining on board a Royal Navy warship, which was docked at Lobito to support a Briti
sh UN contingent. His hosts were one of Britain's highest-ranking generals and a senior diplomat from Whitehall. 'You mark my words,' Jorge confided to a BBC colleague over coffee. 'One day you will remember what an old African had to tell you. Communism is on its way back.

  'In Jorge's defence, the end of the Berlin Wall came to many politicians in Africa as a terrible shock. Moi and Banda both spoke to me of their 'disappointment' with the West. Mobutu vowed there would be no change in Zaire and fiddled for eight more years until he paid the price for his long years of misrule. He fled his capital baffled that the West, which had bailed him out so often, had deserted him. Africa's Left was equally strained. The Ghanaian Times, the then mouthpiece of President Jerry Rawlings, condemned the upheaval in Eastern Europe as the 'work of imperialism.(‘4) But mercifully for Africa, by the early Nineties most African governments accepted that Soviet-style planned economies had failed. It pained them to admit it, but Savimbi had been right when he told the revolutionary Che Guevara in the Sixties that Soviet-style Marxism would not work in Africa.5 It failed miserably, leading merely to bloated and corrupt bureaucracies, the destruction of indigenous agriculture and the impoverishment of peasants.

  Four years after my encounter with Jorge I met his successor in the pink-plastered governor's mansion. He too was an old school apparatchik, but he could see the way the world had changed and gave me a lecture about the wonders of the free market. In the new millennium it became clear that the free market for Angola’s elite meant nothing more than crony capitalism rather than a philosophy for general upliftment. For most Angolans, however, initially at least ideology was less important than peace.