‘Headquarters is where the president happens to be’

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.

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