Daniel O’Brien beat the Woods to the draw by inviting them to dinner at Mac’s.

Colin McMillan’s grand house came with three domestic workers – a cook, a maid and a gardener. Since he had arrived, Daniel had tried to give them as little additional work as possible.

This evening, he did the cooking himself. The main course was a spicy Moroccan lamb casserole. It was a recipe he’d got from the news agency’s correspondent in Tangier.

Mark’s wife, Lorna, was a petite woman with large eyes. The Woods told Daniel they had two sons at Selborne College in East London.

‘Is that a reflection on the standard of education at Umtata High?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ said Mark. ‘I’d have to say so. The local principal is a good man and he tries hard. As do most of the teachers. But the pupil-to-teacher ratio is well over forty. We felt we had to send the boys away.’

The oven clock pinged. Daniel went out and checked the stove.

The meal and small talk over, Daniel asked how they thought the Transkei would progress under the new disposition.

‘It can only get better,’ said Lorna. ‘But the tragic thing about the Transkei is the amount of money that’s been pumped into it. To very little effect. And that’s been going on for nearly twenty years.’

‘That’s pretty much it,’ said Mark. ‘As you know, we’re soon to become part of a new province, the Eastern Cape. That will incorporate the old Eastern Province and the Border as well.

‘The Transkei’s contribution to that new province will be a load of bad debts, no goodwill, and an aggravation of every problem that existed before it became independent in 1976.’

‘So you think things should only improve now,’ said Daniel.

‘I don’t know,’ Mark Wood said. ‘Do you? You’ve had experience all around Africa. What do you expect will happen?’

‘Well, you can’t deprive people of political power for generations and then expect them not to get drunk on that power when you eventually hand it to them,’ Daniel said. ‘That’s what happened in this territory. It’s bound to happen nationally in South Africa now. To what extent, we’ll just have to see.’

Mark Wood asked, ‘What actually are you doing here, Daniel?’

‘It’s something that goes back a long time,’ he said. ‘I almost feel foolish talking about it.’

‘Why?’ asked Mark.

‘Because it’s so airy-fairy. So far in the past. And in the time I’ve been here, I’m fast reaching the conclusion that maybe there will be no conclusion.’

‘Tell us about it,’ Lorna said.

Daniel paused, then asked Mark Wood a question. ‘Did your father ever talk about the war?’

‘No, not really,’ said Wood.

‘Why not?’

‘Well, it was history long before I was born. At school, we were taught the bare details.’

‘Didn’t your dad tell you how he lost the index finger on his left hand?’

‘So you know about that?’ Wood said. ‘No, not exactly. He said it happened in an accident.’

‘An accident with a live three-oh-three bullet,’ said Daniel, and smiled. ‘And that was during the war. On Fridays, the hostel boarders’ afternoon out, a bunch of us would go out to the quarry on the Engcobo road and look for doppies, spent cartridges. We knew the NRV chaps usually had rifle practice there on Thursday afternoons.

‘We’d make water pistols out of the doppies. If you took out the old percussion cap, by banging the cartridge at the firing end, you’d find two small holes. Then we’d wrap a piece of cloth around a six-inch nail, insert it into the cartridge, and we had a water pistol.’

Daniel added, ‘This has got nothing to do with my story. It’s just something that came to mind, thinking about that time. Well. One day, out there in the quarry, your father found a live round. He took it back to the school, stuck it in a vice in the woodwork shop, got a hammer and a nail and hit the end to see what would happen.

‘The bullet ricocheted off the walls and came right back and took off his finger. He was quite a celebrity for a while but he got an awful caning when he got out of hospital.’

‘Well,’ said Mark Wood. “Maybe that explains why he didn’t talk too much about the war.’

‘So he wouldn’t have told you about the spy?’

‘Spy? A spy in the Transkei?’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Daniel. ‘In fact, at one stage it seemed that there might have been two of them.’

‘What on earth was there to spy on?’ Lorna Wood asked.

‘Well, the Wild Coast was a great hunting ground for U-boats, with all the convoys that passed around the Cape. And those subs obviously were looking for remote bays or harbours to re-provision.

‘One even tried to sail right up the estuary at Port St Johns. There was a signal from the shore and it turned around. That’s when it first became clear that there was a spy, a traitor, setting up these landings.’

‘Why wasn’t the spy nabbed right then?’

‘The person with the torch was some way away and there were only a few civilians around. But the police and my father came down the next day and found tyre tracks. That started a witch-hunt that went on for months.’

“Why was your father involved?’ asked Lorna Wood.

‘He was head of the NRV, the National Reserve Volunteers,’ O’Brien explained. ‘After that he became very involved in the hunt. Which is why I came to know all about it.’

‘Was the traitor caught?’ Mark asked.

‘Identified, after one of the locals died. But never caught. My father saw it as a failure on his part. If wasn’t, of course, but it bothered him for years. It bothered him that the person could have just got away like that. Disappeared into thin air.

‘So that’s what I’m doing here,’ said Daniel. ‘Trying to solve a mystery for my father. With a name from the past, a pretty common one at that, and nothing much else.’

From Spy Story.

Somewhere in Mozambique.

 Eventually, we arrive at the meeting place after a long walk in full moonlight and an illegal border crossing. His Excellency, the warlord, is not yet there.

Afonso Dhlakama, we are told, is on the last stage of a more mammoth trip from Gorongosa, Renamo’s headquarters in the central area of the country. He will have been motorcycling and then walking for some days, they say, which makes our expedition a jog in the park.

The original plan was to have met in Gorongosa itself, but it seems the war has destroyed that arrangement. So the mountain is coming to Mohammed.

By moonlight, two tents loom out of the darkness. They are to be our accommodation. Beyond are the shapes of several thatch-and-bamboo huts, around a central mess. Adjacent are a kitchen, a bucket shower enclosure and even a user-friendly long-drop.

We admire the neatness and the craftsmanship – intertwined bamboo, poles from indigenous trees cut to length. Thatch precisely atop.

Ah, but the camp, says a Dhlakama aide, has been created especially and speedily for our meeting. Once His Excellency realised the Gorongosa venue for out, he sent a small force of guerrillas ahead to build this place.

Incredibly, it took them only three days.

After coffee from an insulated urn, we retire to foam mattresses, sheets and blankets. Dhlakama is still walking, or has reached a night stop across the hill. We will see him tomorrow.

In the morning there is warm water and soap in the shower enclosure and toilet paper in the long-drop shack. Two young women, alike as book-ends in uniform and girth, serve chicken, vetkoek and potatoes for breakfast. They would not diminish the aggregate weight of a provincial rugby scrum.

The aide says the women, Agnes and Jolalilia, have also arrived from Gorongosa but without the benefit of a motorcycle for the first leg. One can only marvel that they managed to retain their shape.

We take stock of the camp by daylight. One of the huts has its own little porch, overlooking a stream, and a raised bedstead. Out from another steps a third woman with striking features, a svelte figure in cool muslin. It appears she is Lucy, Afonso Dhlakama’s personal assistant.

Just before noon, the Renamo president himself emerges from the bush in the company of four bodyguards. Dhlakama is dressed in US army camouflage with four stars on epaulettes and beret. He looks remarkably fresh after his ordeal by foot.

The bodyguards have AK-47s and sidearms. One carries a briefcase. Dhlakama has no weapon.

He greets us affably, a rotund man with a smile to match. He is ready at once to answer any questions and makes an informal speech as soon as he is given a chair.

The president’s Portuguese is fluent. Occasionally, he feels confident enough to break into English. But mainly one of his aides interprets.

Dhlakama wishes to put the record straight on Renamo. It is not a bunch of armed bandits, as the Frelimo government continually suggests in its propaganda, but a movement aimed at bringing democracy and justice to Mozambique.

The stories of the butchering of children, the bayoneting of pregnant women. All untrue, all lies. But unhappily the world accepts Frelimo’s propaganda stories because Renamo up to now has not bothered to deny them. That is going to change.

We question Dhlakama anyway about the atrocities that have been blamed on Renamo. How could victims we have interviewed ourselves in refugee camps be wrong about who the perpetrators were?

‘We don’t kill the people,’ the president says. ‘If we were killing the people, we would have lost the war.’

It is a known fact that no guerrilla movement has ever won a war without the support of the people. Renamo has been able to resist, to control ‘all of Mozambique’ because of such support.

The truth is that it is Frelimo who is killing the people. And now the Zimbabweans too – ‘bombing and bombing with their helicopters and warplanes’.

He wishes we could have gone to Gorongosa, to see for ourselves the lifestyle there, his relationship with the people. Next time, however, we will have a good landing by plane right in Gorongosa and good talks there instead of in a deserted place like this.

He wants to tell the world that Renamo is ready to have peace in Mozambique but not while the Zimbabweans remain. Frelimo and Renamo must be left to sort out their own differences. That is the only way to peace.

Dusk interrupts the interview. Afonso Dhlakama bids us goodnight. Tomorrow he will be back for more talks and pictures with some of his soldiers. “Maybe we can get ten or twenty here,’ he says with a dry laugh. ‘In Gorongosa, you could have had many hundreds, thousands.’

He departs with his bodyguards for wherever he spent the previous night.

Over supper of beans and rice, we ask an aide about Gorongosa. Is the headquarters a structured town?

‘It is several places, several camps,’ he says. ‘When the enemy comes, we can move from one to another. Headquarters is where His Excellency, the president, happens to be.’

Next morning the same aide asks where we would like to photograph the soldiers. Where else but right here, we say. No, there is a better place up on the hill, more level, better for marching.

We follow the man up a worn track. Past what is clearly a radio shack, with one soldier tuning the set while another cranks the generator. Past what is plainly a clinic, red crosses on the curtain over the entrance, and past a dozen and more other huts previously unseen.

Then the penny begins to drop. It falls all the way when Afonso Dhlakama, who should never have been here before in his life, makes the journey up the hill with easy familiarity to direct his troops.

The huts are new, but twenty of them cannot possibly be a few days new. More likely, three or six months. And the established radio shack and clinic, the well-trodden clearing around the mess centre. The path to an area where the troops must often have marched.

Agnes And Jolalilia, the bookends, and the weight they didn’t lose on the long haul from Gorongosa. Lucy, the assistant, in cocktail muslin. Dhlakama himself, cool and physically substantial after ‘walking for some days’.

The hut with the verandah, perched above the stream, a hut among huts, fit for a rebel leader.

   Headquarters is where the president happens to be. It is here, and obviously has been for some time.

But why the attempt to deceive? The answer can only lie in the situation back in Gorongosa, the ‘bombing and bombing’ by the Zimbabwean warplanes and the need for the Renamo president to be seen to be missing only temporarily from there.

We remember something else he said yesterday during his presentation. ‘Samora Machel lived in exile in Tanzania, Sam Nujoma in Angola, Robert Mugabe here in Mozambique.

‘I am the only rebel leader who lives with the people. Right here in the country.’

With a border a relative hop and a skip away, that may not be true for much longer.

From One Man’s Africa.

i

Changes wrought by the war affected conditions at Danny’s school.

They began with the introduction that summer of an “early morning” session, whereby pupils had two periods before breakfast and four after, finishing the school day two hours sooner than normal.

Mainly, the change was intended to give “grass widow” teachers whose husbands had enlisted more time to do their chores in the afternoon. Umtata, however, had few of those.

Miss Hornby, fresh from the teacher’s training college in Grahamstown, was one of several women teachers imported to replace males who had joined up. She was tall and thin and spinster prim. She did not believe it was proper for children to ask if they could go to the toilet. They had to ask to “leave the room”.

A boy in Danny’s class, painfully shy, forgot the proper question one day and Billy Miller, who sat next to him, had to tell the teacher, ‘Miss Hornby, Stanley’s left the room in his trousers!’

Jocky, Patrick’s Scotch terrier, was the only dog allowed in the school grounds. The headmaster, Frank “Bok” Baker, knew that Jocky had a fine appreciation of school discipline. He would follow Patrick to his desk and stay at his feet until the bell rang for break. More, he had a fine appreciation of school hours.

From Monday to Friday, Jocky would leave the house early and wait outside the Metro Theatre for the O’Brien boys to come up on their way to school. But on Saturdays and Sundays, he would lie in with the rest of the family.

The national campaign aimed at recruiting young men suddenly began, in an indirect way, to erode the size of classes in the upper standards.

Almost half the pupils at the Umtata High School and its satellite, the Umtata Primary School, were the sons and daughters of Transkei traders.

Trading stations outside towns and villages were required by law to be more than five miles distant from one another. Those closest to the outer boundaries of the Transkei were a long way from the education authority and remote from its insistence on compulsory white schooling.

Trading was very much a family occupation. Only wealthy traders could afford to hire managers. The rest expected that, at some stage, they should be able to rely on the labour of their children.

So some parents sent their children to school in relays. One year, Benjamin would appear in class, to be replaced the following year by his younger brother, Alfred. Then Alfred would have a sabbatical behind the counter of the family store and Benjamin would return, often unwillingly, to school.

The upshot of this arrangement was that some of the matriculation class boys were in the twenties, if they reached that level of education at all.

The chance to “join up” aggravated the situation. Traders’ sons who recently had left school clamoured to join the army. Thus they created vacancies at home, into which their brothers and sisters at school inevitably were drawn.

The problem revealed itself early in 1941. Bok Baker remarked on it to the whole school one morning, stressing the importance of an adequate education. But he himself was compromised, having served with the Royal Flying Corps in the First World War and still being young enough to enlist. He was waiting to hear where he was to report and for which regiment.

The principal therefore ended up making a speech in which he praised old boys of the school for their eagerness to go out and fight the Nazis.

That need, to fight, to move into a higher gear of aggression, caused Miss Gibson to suggest to the principal that the boys should learn some form of self-defence. ‘Right,’ said Bok Baker. ‘Do it.’

Miss Gibson taught English. She would not have been able to tell ju-jitsu from barn-dancing, or a boxing glove from a cricket pad. Bok ended up appealing to his students. So it happened that an instruction manual on “the gentle art of self-defence” by Canada’s world champion, Tommy Burns, which Digger O’Brien had brought back from Britain, became the text book for PT classes in the Drill Hall.

After studying it, Miss Gibson felt confident enough to demonstrate the value of the classic left jab, and how to follow it with a right cross to the jaw. Most of the boys copied her assiduously, jabbing and moving in their one-on-one bouts. But Billy Miller made nonsense of it all, attacking his opponents with a flurry of blows so intense that nobody in the junior school would go against him.

Early morning school also altered the nature of breakfast. Several of the O’Briens’ class mates who lived across the river would not have been able to go home for a meal, in the time the new arrangement allowed, so Iris O’Brien invited them to have breakfast with the family.

The O’Brien kitchen came to look like a refectory. Among those tucking in to porridge, bacon and eggs was another friend of Danny’s, Steyn Mostert, who lived way off on the other side of town.

As a teenager, Steyn’s father had fought for the Boers against the British. One of his proudest possessions was a Mauser rifle he kept in a cabinet in the sitting room. It was a finely tooled German weapon, light and portable. The carved wooden holster slotted into grooves behind the trigger guard, and thus could serve as the butt.

Sometimes, when Danny went around to Steyn’s house, the two would persuade Mr Mostert to let them handle the small-bore rifle while he told them how it was used.

Mr Mostert would demonstrate the weapon’s quick-loading magazine and show how the Boer commandos had fired the gun from the saddle, like a pistol but with much greater accuracy.

A sparkle would enter his eye as he told in Afrikaans of British troops, with their unwieldy single-shot Martini Henrys, being forced to scatter under the rapid Mauser fire.

Late in the same year, 1941, the Mostert family acquired a guest. Nick Mostert was a distant relative from the Western Transvaal where his father, Mr Mostert’s third cousin, had a smallholding.

Although fairly tall, Nick Mostert was slimmer than most Afrikaners Danny had met. He had dark hair, closely cropped, and a moustache the width of his lip.

His right leg was in a plaster cast and he walked with a crutch, made from a broomstick. Steyn took Danny aside. ‘He was in the war,’ he whispered. ‘He was a pilot in North Africa, but he had an accident.’

‘Then why isn’t he still in uniform?’ asked Danny.

‘He says it’s dangerous, if you’re in uniform, in the Transvaal. Especially if you’re an Afrikaner. Those OBs beat you up all the time.’

OBs were members of the Ossewa-Brandwag, an anti-war faction. It had the support of nearly half a million Afrikaners, many of whose relatives had opposed the British in the two Boer Wars of 1899 and 1901. They could not abide the thought that the South African government – under a former Boer commander, Jan Smuts, moreover – was now prepared to fight alongside Britain against Germany and Italy.

Nick Mostert spoke freely about the accident. The Boston bomber he was flying over the enemy positions, he said, was badly hit by ack-ack, anti-aircraft fire, from the ground. The other two crew members had been killed in the attack. Nick said he was forced to crash-land the aircraft on his return to base. The impact had broken his leg in two places.

‘I wanted to go right back and fly with this thing on,’ he added, tapping the cast. ‘I told them it was like falling off a horse. You must get up in the saddle again as soon as possible. But the group captain said the ankle had to heal properly. He said I must be patient.’

So he had come to Umtata to visit a part of his family he had never seen before. He said his brother, Jan, was already in the Tank Corps and waiting to be shipped Up North.

‘Man, he’s damn lucky,’ Nick Mostert said. ‘I can’t wait to go back there.’

Steyn’s mother, much younger than her husband, taught biology at the junior school. Mr Mostert had been a small farmer but no longer worked. Now, he and his nephew several times removed seemed to spend most of their days on the front verandah of the Mostert home, while Nick Mostert explained the finer points of flying bombers to his senior relative and Mr Mostert talked about the Boer War.

Danny noticed that Nick Mostert seemed to be extremely interested in details about that war. He was also interested in the Mauser and asked many questions about the weapon. What was its muzzle velocity? Its range? How many rounds a minute could it fire?

Some of the questions Steyn’s father was able to answer. But he shook his head at others.

As the weeks went by Danny also noticed that Mrs Mostert, who usually had a smile for everyone, began to look stern whenever Nick was in her company. Sometimes she would walk out when he entered a room.

At first, Danny thought it might be because she was afraid her husband’s relative might be damaging her polished floors with the rough crutch. But her attitude continued after Dr Ian Ross removed the plaster cast and Nick Mostert abandoned the broomstick, although he still walked with a prominent limp.

From John Ryan’s Spy story