Big Men Little People

by Alec Russell

  More out of curiosity than conviction that Terre'Blanche had anything to say, early that Saturday morning, eighteen months into the 'new' South Africa, I found myself parking my car beside half a dozen horses tethered to the stands of the Klerksdorp showground. The rapt expression on the face of the two lookouts left little doubt that E.T. was in full flow. In their late teens and wearing pale blue and grey camouflage shirts and khaki trousers they were staring through the stands with all thoughts of their duty forgotten.

  As ever, he looked like a cross between an Old Testament prophet and a Boer commando leader. His booming voice was thundering warnings of the coming apocalypse as in his heyday when his rallies drew several thousand heavily armed supporters. But this was more like a weekend cultural get-together. The stands were less than half-full. There were barely 300 people, mainly farmers with pinch-faced wives and blue-eyed blond children in khaki drill. A few bourgeois types stood around uncomfortably in jackets and ties. The only enthusiasm came from the horses. Saddled up and ready for action, as if for a Boer War costume drama, they pranced up and down. As the final indignity, a storm broke halfway through Terre'Blanche's speech and his audience ran for cover.

  At the height of his fame in the late Eighties E.T. was nicknamed 'Ramboer' when he jettisoned his beige safari suit, the platteland uniform, for designer fatigues. The sartorial shift came on the advice of his one-time lover, Jani Allan. Shortly before she was found with him trying to break into the Paardekraal she wrote about being impaled on 'the blue flames of his blow torch' eyes. Those fires were still blazing as I was ushered into his presence in December 1995. My strategy was simple. I would allow him a few minutes for the usual guff and then would ask him straight out whether it was not time for the AWB to stop its threats of war, and whether Mandela's reconciliatory approach had led him to modify his views on race. I never had a chance.

  *

  You are not from Africa or South Africa. There is always silence before the storm. We are heading for total destruction. If you know the history of Africa, a year or two after the black takeover comes the second revolution … and the reason is that Mr. Mandela can never give all those beautiful things he promised to his electorate. We are organizing right now to meet that onslaught. We don’t want to run as penniless refugees as white colonists did in the rest of Africa. Out of the chaos of smoke and disaster we will take a part of this land and keep it as a Third Boer Republic where we will reign and try our utmost to live in peace with our neighbours. The reins are falling out of Mandela’s hands and the stallion is bucking harder and harder . . .

  *

  And so the stream of consciousness flowed on and on for more than twenty minutes, starting in a low growl and climaxing with a Pavarotti bellow. He broke off mid-sentence as he reached the 'historic' role of the Zulu. Rising to his feet he strode out of sight, muttering in Afrikaans to his colleagues. It was, explained one of his generals - a cheery fellow in a boiler suit who had come all the way from the Cape - the end.

  I sat there for a few minutes pondering South Africa's good fortune that Terre'Blanche's magnetism and oratory were inspired by bigotry and not more of a brain. It may be that the Afrikaner, for all his love of strong leadership, does not have the sentimental and romantic streak which allows a leader like E.T. to win votes. But it is easy to forget that he was for a time a player on the national stage. He was a buffoon, but then so, too, Hitler and the Nazis in their early days were derided by many Germans because of their thuggery and silly rituals. By moderating his aims and methods E.T. could have whipped up white conservatism into a potent force. As it was, however, in one of many ironies hastening the new era, it was Terre'Blanche who finally shattered the myth of the white man with his gun once and for all - or almost.

  Against my expectation, just three weeks passed before I was next embroiled in a heated talk with men in khaki about the Voortrekker Monument. But I was several thousand miles from Klerksdorp in the heart of Sierra Leone, where a band of Afrikaner hired guns were fighting for a diamond concession. It was a scene that could have been lifted from the previous century and yet it also hinted at a way forward for Africa in the years ahead.

  'Jesus, Jesus, be a fence all around him every day. Jesus, we want you to protect him as he travels on his way.' The nine pupils at the Koidu Mission school kept their eyes fixed on the ground as they sang their haunting farewells to their head master. It is always sad when a much-loved teacher leaves a school, but the wrench is even harder when your school lies in the middle of a war and your only teacher is taking up a new post. I had had a dispiriting journey from Sierra Leone's capital, Freetown, a hundred miles to the west. I had come via the second town of Bo, where scores of villagers had had arms and legs chopped off in random attacks by armed bands. So it was all the more inspiring to see the schoolboys lined up and singing to their teacher in front of a blackboard, even if the timetable was months out of date.

  The Catholic Church has a controversial record in Africa. Most notoriously priests in Rwanda exhorted the Hutu mobs in their slaughter of Tutsis. But in Koidu, a war-ravaged mining town in the heart of Sierra Leone, Father Andrew Mondeh was doing all he could to provide hope to a community which had plumbed the depths of despair. Since 1991 when Sierra Leone was invaded by a shadowy rebel movement led by a former corporal, Foday Sankoh, Fr Mondeh's pupils had sought refuge in the bush more times than they could remember, as rebels and government soldiers ('sobels' as they were dubbed by the war-weary population) took turns to loot and kill the very people they were claiming to liberate or defend.

  Whenever the fighting slowed, Fr Mondeh led his flock from the bush and started again, as did the thousands of villagers who were lining the road in from the airstrip on my arrival, naked to the waist, digging with picks, shovels and their bare hands in the hope of finding the stone which would change their lives. Koidu was the capital of Kono, one of the richest and deadliest regions in the continent, a fifty-mile-square patch of bush where diamonds literally seeped from the soil.

  I arrived on Fr Mondeh's last day. The following dawn he was due to catch a flight to Kenema, a southern town, on one of the dilapidated Dakotas owned by the Lebanese traders who controlled the diamonds. He wanted to say goodbye to his friends, so we walked down the rutted path from the mission towards Koidu's dilapidated main street, where we rejoined Simon, the town's taxi driver, who had brought me in from the airstrip in a doorless chassis held together by wire and string.

  Fr Mondeh had an eclectic group of friends. We started with Abdul Karim Hassan, one of the leading diamond dealers, whose family had been in Sierra Leone since the 1950s, when his father joined an exodus from Lebanon to West Africa. Cross legged in dark silk pajamas serving sweet flavoured coffee as if we were in the Levant, he was as incongruous as a colonial officer in a solar topee. But the Lebanese had lasted longer than the British because they had stayed out of politics and focused on business instead.

  'We've been here for donkeys' years,' he said. 'Africans can't live without us and we can't live without them. You get used to their ways, the cassava leaves and palm oils and all that. There are risks, but we like it. It is our Phoenician blood.'

  The Lebanese are bitterly resented in West Africa, like the Asian traders in East Africa, but they offer a vital service. In the Liberian capital, Monrovia, there are Lebanese who have lost a fortune several times in the cycles of chaos since war erupted in 1989, and yet still they come back. In Kono every morning, soldiers, lowly officials and villagers lined up outside the Lebanese stalls to haggle over the value of their latest find. Fr Mondeh was a regular visitor but he had other matters on his mind. He had the drive and enthusiasm to bring peace, but he needed the Lebanese to pay for it, and they did, weaving deals with the soldiers to keep the town and their businesses alive.

  Major Augustine Kamara, the commander of the Koidu garrison, was next on our tour. His command post was more of a prison than a barracks as the people of Kono had successfully pleaded with him to k
eep his drunken soldiers off the streets. It took much of the afternoon to talk our way first in and then out of his gate, so the sun was setting and the Lebanese generators were roaring into life as we spluttered up the rocky outcrop that overlooked the town for the final call.

  The car could not manage the incline so we walked the last few hundred yards to the compound of sturdy stone buildings that lined the hilltop. The British district commissioners had lived there in the colonial era. It required little imagination to picture them sipping their sundowners on the veranda with its magnificent view of the surrounding bush. After independence in 1961, it became home to expatriate staff from the Standard Bank. Now it was once again the headquarters of a 'governor general', or at least that is what expatriates in Freetown had dubbed the new man in charge.

  We had come to see Fr Mondeh's 'African brother', a man who was worshipped as a saviour all the way to Freetown. He was known in Koidu as 'Colonel Rudolph', or more simply

  'Sahr', the local name traditionally given to a first-born son. On the eastern horizon close to the border with Guinea you could just make out a granite pinnacle. It was the final post on an ancient diamond-smuggling route through the jungle. The Sierra Leoneans had long venerated it as a cradle of voodooism. As the shadows lengthened, it was just a smudge. But in the early morning its stark outline dominated the view. For Colonel Rudolph and his men it meant only one thing: they had dubbed it the Voortrekker Monument. Colonel Roelf van Heerden - Rudolph was his nickname - was a wiry man with a dose-cropped beard. Sitting on the veranda, leafing through papers and sipping a cup of tea, he was more than happy to admit the irony of his position. He had spent most of his adult life fighting to defend white minority rule. His CV read like a roll call of apartheid's special forces. In the Eighties he fought in Koevoet ('Crowbar'), the counter insurgency unit, which spearheaded a ruthless anti-guerrilla campaign in Namibia and Angola. He also served in the Civil Co-operation Bureau (CCB), the military intelligence unit which specialized in political assassinations. The end of apartheid, he conceded, had left him high and dry: 'We were not very popular in the new way of thinking. The new guard wanted us out of the way' - not that, he added firmly, he had any regrets for what he did.

  And yet the new era had also liberated him. He still did the same work, but financially, and in his view spiritually, his post apartheid life was the most rewarding time of his career. Colonel Van Heerden was a mercenary, or rather, as he put it, a consultant. He was, he explained carefully, the senior operations commander for Executive Outcomes, the ultimate new age security firm. The end of the Cold War and the eclipse of white rule in South Africa spawned a new breed of African mercenaries. These are not the 'Dogs of War' of the days of Bob Denard and 'Mad' Mike Hoare. Instead they call themselves consultants, talk of contracts and the law and tout their trade in brochures from air-conditioned offices. Men like Van Heerden shudder at the thought of being the inheritors of the tradition of Terre'Blanche. But in the iconography of the continent that is what they are. They are white men with guns using superior education, training and firepower to have their way over Africa. The only difference is that they are motivated not by ideology nor duty but by a bottom line.

  Executive Outcomes was by far the most successful of these new outfits. Founded by South African veterans in 1989, EO began as a counter-intelligence consultancy, but developed into Africa's premier private army. It could call on a limitless supply of veterans following the end of apartheid. Not only did these include some of the world's most experienced bush-fighters but they also had a healthy incentive to do their job. With their backgrounds many would have spent their lives looking over their shoulders if they had stayed in South Africa. EO swiftly gained a reputation for going where no one else dared - and for winning its battles.

  Legend has it that EO first came to the attention of Sierra Leone's government in November 1994, when Valentine Strasser, the young military ruler, read about them in Newsweek. The American news magazine had published an article about EO's success in Angola, where they had led the government forces to a series of victories against UNITA. The bumptious Strasser is said to have been hooked by the tale. He had taken power inadvertently in 1991, when as a young army captain he marched into State House with fellow junior officers to protest against the government and the head of state fled into exile presuming it was a coup. Since then Strasser had proved as incompetent and corrupt as his predecessor and had failed to halt the rebels' advance after their invasion in 1991, so when Western mining companies followed up the Newsweek article and promoted EO he was easily convinced. In May 1995 EO's first men arrived in Freetown, guaranteeing to restore order. In return they were to be given more than a million dollars a month and a fat mining concession in Kono for sister firms.

  One hundred years ago EO's Sierra Leone contract would have passed without comment. The British Empire was effectively founded by the private armies of merchant adventurers.

  When Robert Clive won much of India, he was fighting on behalf of the East India Company, not Whitehall. Cecil Rhodes' British South Africa Company operated in a similar way. He recruited a force of 'volunteers' to take over what was to become Rhodesia.

  A hundred years later, however, a very different morality prevails. The word 'mercenary' conjures up images of the drunken Brits fighting in Angola under the incompetent and brutal leadership of Costas Georgiou, a Greek Cypriot former British army sergeant who posed as 'Colonel Callan' and was executed by the Angolan government in 1976 having been found guilty of murdering fourteen of his fellow mercenaries. As for white South African mercenaries, their background brands them as beyond the pale. Indeed, there was outrage in the West and in South Africa when the news leaked out that Van Heerden and his men were waging war in Sierra Leone. The South African parliament passed an anti-mercenary law prohibiting private security groups from basing themselves in South Africa, but unsurprisingly it had little effect. Sitting under the thatched canopy over his veranda Van Heerden ventured that the criticism was a little unfair.

  'For me it seems our mission has been a great achievement,' he said. 'When we came, the rebels were five kilometres away and everyone had fled into the bush. Now the place is back to normal. Police work is not the main purpose we are here; we are here for business. But if we were not here where would all these people be - dead or in the bush? Last Christmas the government was struggling to pay our contract and a delegation of chiefs and businessmen came to see me and said they were busy collecting money and they would foot the bill. Why do people call us mercenaries? We are soldiers in a contract with a legitimate government. A mercenary is someone who supports whoever pays him. Definitely we do not do that.'

  Fr Mondeh nodded vigorously throughout this short speech. After rolling back the rebels from the gates of Freetown in May 1995, EO's forces had turned their attentions to Kono, which was funding the rebels' war effort. With their overwhelming firepower they swiftly drove the rebels into the bush and repulsed three counter-attacks at the cost of hundreds of rebel lives. Since then South African music had become Kono's unofficial anthem and could be heard blaring from tinny battery powered ghetto-blasters along the main street. People waved and cheered as the colonel's jeeps rumbled past.

  A few hours before my visit Van Heerden had been due to stand down as chairman of the Kono Community Committee, the unofficial town council, but in a public gathering chiefs, business men and hundreds of residents had begged him to stay. In his taciturn way he was clearly pleased to be hailed for once as a saviour. 'They say we are fellow Africans who have come to save them - it is good to be putting something into our continent.'

  It is right to be cynical about Van Heerden's hazy idea of post-apartheid redemption and his vision of a 'new African order' as was glossily trumpeted on EO brochures in its Pretoria headquarters. He and his kind do what they do best: fighting dirty bush wars. Scores, maybe hundreds, of civilians were killed in their helicopter attacks on the rebels' bush positions. All that matters is mon
ey, or rather minerals. EO's operations in Angola secured oil concessions for Heritage Oil and Gas, a British owned company with close links to the South Africans. In Sierra Leone the beneficiary was Branch Energy, a Hampshire-based affiliate of Heritage. The firm regularly denied links with the mercenaries but its vehicles drove around Kono escorted by EO soldiers. Van Heerden readily conceded that Branch Energy was their partner.

  Sierra Leone is a classic case of a state being run as a business. King Leopold of Belgium patented the idea with the Congo. Now the pattern is re-emerging in West Africa, where governments are making ruthless calculations about the net worth of its people. EO's humanitarianism in Sierra Leone stopped abruptly at the fringe of the mineral areas. Even as the diamond mines churned out stones in Kono, the rebels were continuing to terrorize villages twenty miles away. 'It was a pact with the devil,' an anthropologist in Freetown explained to me. 'Every one prospered bar the ordinary Sierra Leoneans.'

  As for the South Africans' pious claims that they only work with 'legitimate' leaders, such talk is meaningless in Africa, where many governments are legitimate in nothing but name. Van Heerden was one of the key figures in a mercenary rescue package which was drawn up to prop up Mobutu in his last days by turning back Kabila's forces from the gates of Kinshasa. A week before Mobutu fled, a contact in his entourage tipped me off that a South African advance party was on its way, but they were wrong footed by the speed of Kabila's advance and never deployed.