Cinema and Unconventional Warfare in the Twentieth Century by Paul B. Rich

Author:Paul B. Rich
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

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.

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