ELEVEN

 After the aborted pigeon-shooting expedition, Nick Mostert limped into the Grosvenor Hotel bar.

    The place was unusually quiet for a Saturday afternoon. Apart from the barman, Mostert could make out two other bodies, one on either side of a booth in the far corner. Pondo Harrington and Alf Apple seemed to be having their post-liquid-lunch nap.

    The barman was called Baldy, although he had a substantial mop of hair. He was happy to be known by an abbreviation of his surname which was Baldwin. That was not surprising, considering his first name was Alistair.

    ‘Where’s everyone?’ Mostert asked him.

    ‘Everyone who?’ said Baldy.

    ‘Well, Gerald Wilson and George Trebble.’

    ‘Gerald had to go to Mount Frere,’ said Baldy, ‘to deliver some cattle dip. And George doesn’t come in until a bit later. He’s on duty most of the day, Saturdays, across at the club. But they’ll both be along soon.’

   Nick Mostert turned and was about to leave when Pondo Harrington called out, ‘Hey, Mr Mostert! Come and give us a bit of talk here.’

    Harrington’s dark hair fell to the collar of the omnipresent school blazer. But the stubble on his chin was less pronounced than the last time Mostert had seen it.

    Mostert had yet to meet either of the odd couple. He walked around to their corner of the bar.

    ‘Let me buy you a drink,’ said Harrington. ‘Or vice versa.’

    He ordered a double brandy, and while Mostert was rummaging for the change to pay for that and his own beer, Pondo added, ‘Tell us about your prang. That’s what you air force chaps call it? A prang?’

    The feet of Alf Apple, as he lay on the bench, were pointed directly at Mostert’s beer glass. Harrington kicked at one sole, which was as gnarled as the bark on an ancient tree.

    ‘Hey, Alf!’ he shouted. ‘We’re just about to hear some real stories about the war!’

    Mostert shook his head. ‘I’d rather not talk about the war,’ he said.

    ‘Come on,’ said Pondo. ‘ We’ve been told you’re a hero. You were brave under enemy fire and all that. No need to be modest. We don’t get too many first-hand reports in this one-horse town about what’s going on out there.’

    ‘There’s not much to tell,’ said Mostert. ‘Just something that happened. I wasn’t the only one. It happened to other pilots too.’ He took a sip of his beer. His brow creased and he lifted his eyes strangely, as though trying to read something inside of his head.

    ‘What do you mean?’ said Pondo Harrington.

    ‘Well, Twelve Squadron is stuck with these Boston bombers. We call them “Flying Incendiaries”. The fuel, and so a lot of the weight, is carried in the wings. If a wing gets hit, the plane goes into a spin and the wings get torn off. We’ve lost maybe a dozen Bostons already that way.’

    Mostert gave a wry smile and added, ‘I was lucky. The ack-ack blast hit the fuselage, behind the cockpit, and took out my two mates. But I managed to get control before the plane started spinning and got it back to base. I just broke my leg landing, that was all.’

    ‘Did you actually get to see any Germans?’ Alf asked.

    ‘More to the point, did you kill any Krauts?’ The second question came from Ginger Southwood, who had just walked in.

    Mostert turned to face the mechanic and lifted a hand in greeting. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you have to fly high to avoid the ack-ack, then drop your load and get the hell out of there. So you don’t really see what happens on the ground.

    ‘But just before I left, the intelligence chaps said we were giving Rommel blazes.’

    Ginger Southwood asked him, ‘Did you come in to see the Quiz Master? Old Gerry Wilson?’

    ‘Not really.’

    ‘I saw him giving you his routine when you walked in the other day,’ said Southwood. ‘Don’t feel special. He does that to all the strangers who come in here, when he gets pickled.’

    ‘In fact,’ Mostert said, ‘I was hoping someone could tell me how to find the Town Clerk. What’s his name? Perry?’

    ‘Harry Perry,’ said Pondo. ‘My old school chum. Grew up together. We used to share a fag behind the drill hall at break. Now he doesn’t greet me. Go up the main stairs in the town hall and turn right.’

    ‘Left,’ said Ginger Southwood.

    ‘Okay, left then. I don’t have cause to go up there these days. And Harry wouldn’t come in here in a month of Sundays. We’ve gone our different ways, him up and me mostly down. Harry’s office probably classes me as a person of no fixed abode.’

   ‘Then I’d have to be your next door neighbour,’ said Alf Apple and laughed uproariously.

   ‘What do you want Harry Perry for?’ Southwood asked Mostert. ‘You planning to put down some roots? What about the war?’

    ‘There’s a piece of property I’m interested in,’ Mostert said. ‘Along the river towards the police camp.’

   ‘That would be the old Jacobs place. They had chickens but they couldn’t make a go of it. Lazy, just like all coolies,’ said Southwood. ‘Didn’t like getting up early in the morning.’

    ‘Actually,’ Pondo Harrington said, suddenly vehement, ‘their place was flooded, a couple of summers ago, and most of the fowls drowned. Flooding’s a problem along that river area, so the rental may be way down now.’

    He thought for a moment. ‘If you got the place, would you consider a couple of lodgers?’

    ‘You mean a couple of dodgers. Freeloaders,’ said Southwood roughly. ‘Why? Has Mike Strachan finally thrown you out of his disused chicken run?’

    ‘Let’s just say we’re between accommodations,’ Harrington said.

    ‘No,’ said Mostert. ‘No lodgers. Sorry, but I prefer to be on my own.’

    He excused himself and went to the men’s room.When he got back to the bar, Gerald Wilson and George Trebble were in their usual places.

    ‘So, you’re thinking of putting in a bid for the old Jacobs dump,’ Wilson said.

    ‘Maybe,’ said Mostert. ‘It’s just one of my options.’

ONE

Of all the years of Daniel O’Brien’s early childhood, the sixth was the first to make a substantial deposit in his memory bank.

For one thing, it was the time of a total eclipse of the sun.

On that day, his family piled into his father’s almost brand-new Ford V8 and drove out to Glendon Halt.

Glendon Halt was just a whistle-stop about five miles out of town, where the railway line to East London passed close to the national road going in the same direction. A few more miles distant, the landscape gave way to mud-hut villages and kraals built on the hills that rolled towards the Bashee depression and the Great Kei River.

Glendon Halt was flat enough eventually to become Umtata’s first aerodrome. But in 1940 it was a nothing place, an open stretch of veld with the train line cutting through it, though for some reason it had become a favourite destination among the white population for Sunday afternoon drives.

Fathers would park their cars facing the road. People would open their doors, greet one another, and simply sit back and watch. Some would take along their Sunday afternoon tea.

What did they watch? Well, the alleged object of the exercise was to observe out-of-town traffic going either west towards East London or back into Umtata and thus possibly on to Durban. So starved for entertainment was the community. Or so it seemed to Danny at the time.

Years later, however, it struck him that these curious afternoon excursions may have been no more than a device by wives to keep their husbands out of the Umtata Club which, with the golf club, had the only bar open on a Sunday.

But the day of the eclipse was exciting. Most families had brought picnic baskets. The sun, as yet, was warm. Earlier that week, father Jim O’Brien, Digger to his friends, had exposed a black-and-white film to the sun and taken it to Dangerfield’s the chemist to be developed. Now he distributed lengths of it among the family and any others without protection for their eyes.

One of these was Billy Miller, who had arrived from town on an oversized bike with a pair of field glasses around his neck.

‘Whoa, Billy!’ said Digger. ‘Where d’you think you’re going with those?’

‘I brought them to see the ak-lipse, Mr O’Brien,’ said Billy.

‘Then it would be the last thing you would see,’ Digger said, prising the binoculars from the lad’s grasp. ‘The sun would burn your eyes to little bits of coal. Here you go, take one of these strips. Make sure you look through it. And does your mom know you’ve got your dad’s glasses?’

Billy’s expression told him she didn’t.

‘Okay then,’ said Danny’s father, ‘I’ll keep them in our car and drop them off at your home later.’

Billy Miller was Danny’s oldest friend. The two had been born within days of each other, in the same nursing home. Townsfolk said of Billy’s father, Dougie, that he was his own man, meaning that in most things his actions were unpredictable. If that was so, Billy Miller was his own boy and it did not help that his father was not around then to exert discipline, eccentric though that brand could be. A few weeks earlier, in an unusual act of conformity, Dougie Miller had joined the Kaffrarian Rifles and was swiftly posted to North Africa.

Just before the total eclipse, the birds fell silent and dogs that had accompanied their owners began to howl. The darkness that followed was not the blackness of night but was tinged with a green iridescence. And from out of that darkness, a strong wind arose. Some of the younger children wailed. Young Danny was imbued with a feeling he had never experienced, nor could understand. It was as though his personal galaxy had begun shifting.

An inner sense said, if the routine that night should follow day could be thrown off course, what else could be in store for a boy starting out in the world? Particularly since that world was already beset by war.

For war was the overwhelming concern.  Although hostilities had begun in the last part of the previous year, their impact was really felt with the beginning of a local recruitment drive and the launch of a War Fund.

Hundreds of young white Transkeians responded and soon disappeared to the nearest call-up centres, leaving behind relatives proud but anguished. Neville White, who lived in the O’Briens’ street, returned on a weekend furlough before being posted Up North.

While waiting for a train back to Pretoria, Neville was persuaded by the Owen Street youngsters to parade in full regalia. He stood in his bedroom, straight as a poker in khaki uniform and heavy brown boots, red tabs on his shoulders to show he was prepared to fight, not only for South Africa but for the entire realm of King George.

Neville was just turned eighteen. It was the last time the children saw him.

July 25 of that year was Digger O’Brien’s forty-eighth birthday. Danny and his mother went to the post office at the top of York Road to collect a parcel from his father’s brother in Devon.

Railway buses usually left from outside the station. But this time one was parked right outside the post office, encircled by a small crowd of onlookers, mostly black. A pile of leather suitcases stood alongside the luggage compartment.

Several policemen pushed their way through the crowd with six young men in tow. The men were pale and fair but wore dark suits and grim expressions. Three had dog collars like Dean Stewart.

Their demeanour was as grey as the day, for clouds had covered the sun like a lesser eclipse. When they climbed the steps at the front door of the bus, all turned and gave a stiff salute with their right hand.

Inside the bus, they began to sing, stridently, in a foreign language

‘What’s happening, mom?’ Danny asked loudly.

‘Shush, my boy!’ his mother said. ‘It’s just some people being sent away.’

‘Why?’

‘Because they’re Germans.’

‘What have they done?’

‘I don’t know,’ said his mother. ‘But we can’t have them here. Not while the war’s on.’

Digger O’Brien, whose office was barely a block away, heard the singing and told Danny later it was the Horst Wessel Lied, the traditional marching song of the Nazi Party. He explained that people who were Germans were being rounded up around the country. Those priests and young novices, who came from a Lutheran seminary, would be kept in a camp near Pretoria until the war was over.

‘But why can’t they just stay where they are?’ Danny asked.

‘Because,’ his father said, ‘we don’t know what they’d do there. It’s better to have them somewhere where we can keep an eye on them.’

Danny rushed off to tell his brother, Patrick, and their friend, Howard Langton. The two were kicking a rugby ball around the O’Briens’ back lawn.

Howard, who was a Catholic, had heard the news already.

‘Anyhow, they’re letting Father Roganmauser stay,’ he said. ‘Even though he speaks German too.’

‘Why?’ Danny asked.

‘Because he’s Swiss, so he’s not a real German. And he’s a man of God.’

‘But aren’t those other priests men of God too?’

‘Not if they salute bloody Hitler,’ Patrick said.

It was very confusing. Another neighbour, just up the road, was Fritz Buhl, who ran the Ford garage. Although he had a South African wife, the boys knew he had been born in Germany because he had told them so and had the accent to prove it.

Fritz Buhl was overseas just then but Danny wondered what would happen to him when he came back to Umtata. Would they send him to the camp in Pretoria too? And what about his wife, Margaret?

Howard and Patrick said there were tons of other Germans around the Transkei, though they and their fathers, and maybe their grandfathers, had never set foot in Germany. The older boys had learned about these Germans in their history lessons. Almost a century before, after the Crimean War, several thousand German volunteers had been given land in British Kaffraria as a reward for serving with the British Army. Many of these settlers had trekked into the Transkei.

Their descendants were families like the Weisses, the Deutschmans, Pucherts, Snellings, Schultzs, Schneiders. Patrick and Howard reeled off the names. So what would happen to all of those people now?

Herman Weisse was another of Danny’s friends. He ran the hardware store his father had opened in York Road a long time before. He gave Danny nails and off-cuts of wood and sometimes let him help behind the counter.

Herman was a cheerful man who joked a lot. What would he think about being sent to a camp in Pretoria? What sort of camp was it, anyway? Quite a few people had what they called “camps” on the Wild Coast, mainly huts like the blacks lived in or shacks without electricity or running water. Was the camp in Pretoria like one of those?

No, said Howard. Most likely it would be a whole lot of tents, or maybe the government had taken over a jail for the Germans.

Danny would have liked to ask Dean Stewart what he thought of priests being sent away like criminals, or giving Nazi salutes. The dean was always easy to talk to. Not much taller than a nine-year-old, he was a hunchback who looked like the person on the Punch magazine covers or a gnome in a book of fairy tales.

But Dean Stewart was not an easy man to find. His parish extended through almost the whole of the Transkei and he was often away.

Danny would have asked the same question of his father but then he recalled that his father had a thing about Father Roganmauser. Perhaps it was because Father Roganmauser was German-speaking, but he called him Father Roman-Noser. It was all very strange.

Before supper, Danny went down to the river with Billy Miller.

It was mid-winter and the water was low, the willows and sneezewood trees brown and bent. With their catapults, the boys shot stones at a can drifting down to the bridge.

Danny asked Billy what he thought about the German priests. Billy took aim with such ferocity that his stone thudded deep into the mud of the other bank. ‘My dad,’ he declared, ‘says the only good Jerry is a dead Jerry.’

Later, lying in bed in the front room he shared with his brother, Danny studied as he did every evening the figures and faces formed by the knots and annual rings in the pine ceiling. The largest looked like one of Oliver Cromwell’s Roundheads; another, further along, like a Cavalier. Still another had ears like Mickey Mouse and a nose like Goofy.

But that night, all of them were solemn and forbidding.

As the African national Congress continues to splinter, and our Laughing Death president and his Gupta mates fight for control of the Treasury, the race card is being played more and more often. Not only by the ANC but also by the Economic Freedom Front.

This week, a spokesman for the governing party claimed that, after 22 years since the democratic elections, white companies still dominated the economy. This was disputed immediately by Moaletsi Mbeki – a Harvard-trained economist– who provided evidence to the contrary. With the spread of Black Economic Empowerment companies and the rise in the number of young black entrepreneurs, it was no longer true. Nor was the myth that there were still more middle-class whites than blacks.

Mbeki, younger brother of former president Thabo Mbeki, commented that the race card was about the only one the ANC had left.

The EFF got into the act by attacking the “white” Democratic Alliance government in the Western Cape for not providing enough low-cost housing for blacks.

Again, the truth has been ignored. Up until March, 2013, the Cape Town-based administration had created 94 000 housing units and sites at a cost of almost R5 billion and estimated that it would have to spent R2 billion a year fromthen on to cater for the growing number of squatters.

The influx of new inhabitants in the Western Cape, mostly from the Transkei and Ciskei, had been a problem since the start of the New South Africa. Many hundeds of Transkeians and Ciskeians, told by the ANC that there was a new life awaiting them in the Western Cape, were bussed in and dumped. They were to be voting fodder for the ANC.

Many ended up in unlikely places like Hout Bay where the only industry, fishing, had for years been the preserve of the local Coloured population.

The Cape Town municipality had no option but to designate an area for them on the slopes of Hout Bay, an almost jobless domain that has grown hugely since then.

Cape Town experienced a similar influx. By 1996, the population of Khayelitsha – the biggest black township – had mushroomed to 250 000. The census of 2011 revealed that the figure had expanded to 400 000. And the squatter perimeter has spread substantially since.

In 1996, my friend Patrick Lawrence went to speak to some of the newcomers. Most didn’t even have the fare to get into Cape Town to look for work. Even today, a vast number of people living in Cape Town’s townships and squatter camps do not have jobs.

Effectively, they have become migrants in their own country.

Of course, the root of the problem continues to be the lack of jobs in the Eastern Cape, the Transkei and Ciskei particularly.

Awful though the motives were behind the old Bantustans – to entice as many blacks as possible back to their homelands – they might have left one beneficial effect. Local industrialisation. And thus job opportunities.

That, indeed, was part of the Nationalist government’s plan. At the time of self-government for the Transkei and Ciskei, foreign investors and developers were offered attractive incentives. A ready and cheap labour market.  Relaxed labour laws. Low taxes.

The plan worked for a while. But then corruption came to the fore.

In 1970, seven years into self-government, I interviewed the Transkeian chief minister’s brother, George Matanzima. I asked him how the economy was doing.

“Well,” he said. “Do you know that Umtata (the capital) now has the biggest manual telephone exchange in Southern Africa?” Manual exchange.

I said I didn’t but asked how the proposed hydro-electric scheme on the Umzimvubu River was proceeding. Kaiser Matanzima had proposed the project as a matter of priority and the Nat government had thrown millions of rands at it.

George Matanzima admitted that the scheme hadn’t yet got off the ground. And it never has.

A year after the first democratic election, I drove down to the Transkei. The entire economy was a wreck. Emergency aid of R8 million was being pumped into 28 Transkeian municipalities to save them from total collapse. One of the biggest industries, the Magwa Tea Corporation, had lost R30 million over the years and needed R25 million more just to keep going.

In Umtata, my home town, only two factories seemed to be in operation. One produced barbed wire. Manually, like the old telephone exchange. One man held a length of wire while another man cut a thinner gauge wire into small pieces to create the barbs.

In September, 1987, the South African government had appointed a commission of inquiry to investigate allegations of serious corruption by the Transkei leaders. The commission found that, after dealings of doubtful legality, the Transkei government had lost R45 million through money transfers abroad. It blamed George Matanzima, then chief minister, and the president, Tudor Ndamase.

South African auditors I spoke to in Umtata, who were going through the territory’s accounts, had even more damning information. More than a billion rands in treasury bills issued to the Transkei government appeared to be missing. They simple could not be found.

That was the bad debt baggage that accompanied the Transkei when it became part of the new Eastern Cape. The Ciskei’s contribution was somewhat better. But both are still millstones around the neck of what used to be the Eastern Province and Border.

And yet the potential in the two territories that the apartheid government once tried to exploit for its own devious purposes still exists. Outside of droughts, the area has a fair rainfall; labour is there for the training; and there is easy access to two of South Africa’s ports, Port Elizabeth and East London.

Had the Umzimvubu hydro-electric scheme not fallen foul of misspending and theft, there would have been more than adequate electricity.

The laws that apply to foreign investors would have to be relaxed as indeed they should right around the country. But substantial economic growth is not only possible in these former Bantustans. It is vitally necessary.

And soon.

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.

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