Alex Duval Smith in Zambezi, western Zambia
In the darkness of the mud-brick hut, the glint in the man’s eye was as piercing as the flashes of light from the half-dozen diamonds in his palm. “They will cost you 1,6-million kwatcha [R4 800]. At the moment, I can also sell you emeralds, gold dust and six tusks of ivory,” he said.
We were in Sambongo (“son of money”), a Zambian farming village in an area of the Zambezi floodplain where the economy is controlled by Unita – the Angolan rebel movement which never went out of business despite the end of apartheid and the cold war.
Now, amid rumours that Angolan President Jos Eduardo dos Santos is ill, Unita is thought by observers to be preparing to resume the bloody civil war which raged for 20 years until the Lusaka peace agreement in 1994.
Last week, the United Nations envoy to Angola, Malian diplomat Alioune Blondin Beye, warned he would quit unless Unita abided by the timetable of its demilitarisation pledge, closed down its Voice of the Black Cockerel radio station, and handed over territory it controls.
In effect, the Maoist-style group led by Jonas Savimbi -originally one of three nationalist movements, made powerful by apartheid South Africa and former president Ronald Reagan’s United States – controls nearly two-thirds of the vast Angolan territory. Unita’s share – the north and east – contains all the diamond wealth in the underpopulated country.
The diamond dealer and his flunkies – who include a missionary from a US church and a senior Zambian police officer – are in effect acting for Unita. A United Nations air and arms embargo has been in force against the rebel movement since last October. But diamonds buy dollars which, in turn, buy arms, fuel and food. We are in Zambia but, to all intents and purposes, we may as well be in Unita-held eastern Angola.
“They walk for a month to get here with their uncut diamonds and they leave with dollars,” said the Zambian dealer. “The diamonds are in the north, all the roads in eastern Angola were destroyed by the war so they have no option but to come by foot.”
Last month, the Angolan ambassador to Zambia, Manuel Augusto, accused the authorities here of turning a blind eye to a South African arms trade with Unita which he said had increased since the rebel movement lost its allies in the two Congos, Mobutu Sese Seko and Pascal Lissouba.
The Zambian government responded by fining one South African company, Metex International, for violating its airspace.
But on the Zambian side of the border, where outward appearances are all of fishermen punting across the picturesque Zambezi in canoes hollowed out of tree trunks, everyone denies there is an arms trade.
Wilfred Mbilishi, manager of the Zambezi motel, confirms that Angolans come here to sell diamonds but argues that the sandy Zambezi floodplain, thick bush and lack of roads make the landscape impassable for large arms shipments. “We see the diamonds being sold and food being bought, but no guns. We have seen planes overhead, flying to Angola, but they are really high up in the sky.”
Angolan observers say Unita’s diamond wealth is such that it need not bother with cumbersome cloak-and-dagger arms shipments through the Zambian bush.
The rebel movement quite simply buys arms from China and former eastern bloc countries, and these are flown in directly.
But there is a trade through the Zambian bush, and it is crucial to Unita’s continued survival. The dollars the rebel movement gets from diamond sales in Zambia and elsewhere are used to buy South African mining equipment and spares, medical supplies, fuel and trucks.
Last month, a private DC-4 aircraft, carrying eight South Africans and mining equipment, was forced down by an Angolan MiG fighter. At around the same time, in the dead of night, five Mercedes lorries with Namibian number plates came through Zambezi town, crossed the river by pontoon and disappeared into the Angolan bush.
“The Zambian police saw the trucks but never searched them. Everyone here is trading with the people across the border. As far as we are concerned it is just trade, not international politics. We have soap and vegetables to sell and they want to buy them,” said Mbilishi.
“The people across the border are our cousins: Angolan children cross over to come to school in Zambia, people marry, and we are from the same tribe. No one here has very much, so you cannot blame them for wanting to trade,” he said.
The logbook at Lingelengenda, the border post north of Zambezi town, officially records that the last time a vehicle crossed into Angola was in 1980. But every day, Zambians like Deris Chilemu brave the border landmines on foot to cross into Angola through scrubland.
He has three batches of gold dust to sell – contained in 750ml cooking-oil bottles. “I buy them from people who have been digging in the Moxico district, just over the border. There is also silver there. The Angolans give me the stuff and I pay them after the sale. The purity varies, so that is the arrangement,” said Chilemu.
The buyers, he said, are mainly Zambian businesspeople and white Southern Africans who travel to Zambezi town – an uncomfortable two-day drive from the capital, Lusaka -when agents like Chilemu phone them to say they have enough gold, silver, emeralds, diamonds or ivory to justify a trip.
Electronic testing is done by a missionary at the Christian Mission in Many Lands – a 160-year-old US fundamentalist group, also known as the Plymouth Brethren, which believes Satan governs business, detests technology and which, in Britain, campaigns against HIV education in schools.
It is a surreal Wild West where you might find a peasant farmer on a donkey cart, carrying a stash of uncut diamonds, wrapped in newspaper. It is the lifeblood of Unita but no one here talks politics.