A Measure of Danger by Michael Nicholson

Author:Michael Nicholson [Nicholson, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: apostrophe books, michael nicholson, war correspondent, war reporter, autobiography, newreader, memoirs, falklands war, british, michael nicholson obe, gulf war, biafra
Publisher: Apostrophe Books
Published: 2013-01-21T00:00:00+00:00

Inscription, eastern gate, British military garrison, Gibraltar. Plus ça change.

CHAPTER 7

Angola, 1975-78

‘The Land at the End of the Earth’

SOUTH AFRICA was now my home and southern Africa my beat. With my family I lived in Johannesburg.

I first went to Angola in 1975, at the time of that country’s independence or, more accurately, its abandonment by the Portuguese after four hundred-plus years of colonial rule. In the struggle for independence, three separate factions had uneasily fought together, but after the hysterical flight of their colonial overlords the three armies began to fight one another. The Marxist MPLA, under a poet-academic president dying of cancer, grabbed power through the barrel of a gun, leaving the FNLA, led by a former taxi-cab owner-cum-gangster called Holden Roberto, and Dr Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA to fight against it.

The Americans preferred the taxicab man to the doctor, whose credentials, one might have thought, would give him the edge. Savimbi was, after all, the leader of the Ovimbundi, the largest single tribe in southern Angola, which provided him with such a powerful constituency that, given a free democratic election, he would have been swept to power. Dr Savimbi is a highly intelligent and persuasive man with a doctorate in philosophy from Lausanne University. He had an impressive curriculum vitae, but the CIA decided that he was not to be trusted, because although the doctor insisted he was anti-communist, a devout nationalist, a proven political and economic pluralist and sympathetic to the West, the CIA knew he had been trained in guerrilla and psychological warfare in Cairo, Moscow and China. That of course made him a red, and better a hoodlum taxi-driver than a red.

I remember the night of Angola’s independence celebrations in April 1975. We were in Huambo, a large centre-of-country city on the famous Benguela railway which, in better times, had taken Angola’s wealth to its Atlantic ports. The football stadium was bedecked in all the flags of Africa to honour representatives who never bothered to turn up. All the beer and whisky they never drank was consumed instead by the thousands of UNITA soldiers. On that Independence Day, I listened to the screams of kid goats having their throats cut on the stairs outside my hotel bedroom in readiness for the feast that no one except UNITA attended. The plane that brought us in from Lusaka (it belonged to Tiny Rowland) was shot up by wild and drunken soldiers as it prepared to take off again, and by evening they were roaming the city, looting, raping and killing. In the football stadium Dr Savimbi, shouting into the microphone above the din, pulled out his revolver and held it high, saying that he would personally shoot dead anyone caught on the rampage. We filmed what we could and then wisely kept to our rooms. The booze ran out and soldiers began to gather around our small hotel, looking for more. They began shooting at the street lights; but stone-cold sober and with the best telescopic sights they would not have hit them.

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