Some call it South Africa’s Siberia, a dumping ground for the unwanted, but those condemned to live in Pomfret lament that some of them were wanted — as warriors.
Marooned on the dust-blown fringe of the Kalahari desert in South Africa’s Limpopo province, Pomfret is a village of 3 000 outcasts eking out existence in cracked houses with no running water.
Two decades ago they lived in Angola where the apartheid regime enlisted the men into a black foreign legion, 32 Battalion, to fight against liberation movements in Namibia and their native Angola.
They lost the wars and moved to South Africa but here, too, a liberation movement took power. It allowed the Angolan soldiers and their families to stay at their former army base in Pomfret but regarded them as race traitors.
Stranded on an asbestos-poisoned wasteland 160km from the nearest town, this was the price of fighting for the white man.
Earlier this year, former members of 32 Battalion repeated that folly for a Briton and his backers whose lifestyles are at the opposite end of the wealth spectrum. This time they took orders not from Afrikaner generals, but from a British mercenary, Simon Mann, who allegedly dangled a monthly pay cheque of £4 200 (about R49 000), a fortune here.
Now the village is counting the cost of accepting his offer in absent husbands and fathers. The same court in Zimbabwe that last week jailed Mann for seven years, jailed his foot soldiers for 12 months.
For relatives it was a disaster: while their men languish in Harare’s fetid Chikurubi prison they will struggle for food, clothes and medicine.
”We are all suffering. We have nothing to pay for anything,” wept Bibiana Tchimuichi, whose husband, Eduardo, was one of dozens of Angolans who formed the bulk of the 67 men jailed with Mann.
Before leaving for school, her son Pita (14) showed a picture of his father in apartheid-era uniform.
”Every day I miss him. It doesn’t seem fair he’s not around.”
The Angolans were arrested in March when a Boeing 727 chartered by Mann, an Old Etonian, landed at Harare to refuel and collect weapons. Though convicted only of immigration offences, it is alleged the Angolans were on their way to the West African state of Equatorial Guinea to topple an oil-rich dictatorship for the benefit of Mann’s alleged British backers, including Sir Mark Thatcher.
”It is a lie. My husband is not a mercenary. He is a security guard,” said Lucia Baka (40), whose husband, Manuel, quit a security job in Pretoria to follow Mann.
Like other wives, she claimed the Angolans were told they would guard mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a lucrative, legitimate, low-risk job. Under interrogation in Zimbabwe their husbands have stuck to that story.
Analysts wonder whether the Angolans really believed that was their job but Lucia Baka insisted they would not have boarded the plane knowing the real mission was to depose President Teodoro Obiang and install a ruler who would enrich the coup plotters.
Whether naive dupes or complicit mercenaries, there is no doubting the gulf between the foot soldiers’ personal circumstances and the plot’s alleged investors.
Ely Calil is a Lebanese millionaire with a mansion in Chelsea. Greg Wales, Lord Archer, David Tremain and Thatcher are all wealthy businessmen who, it is claimed, hoped to become richer. All deny links to the coup.
None are known to have visited Pomfret, a sprawl of brick bungalows with broken windows, patchy electricity, no flushing toilets and soil too sandy to grow anything but a few vegetables.
Asbestos danger
A former asbestos mine, the site was not rehabilitated.
”Don’t stay a minute longer than you must. It’s dangerous here,” said a municipal worker.
Some former 32 Battalion members who could speak English found security work in cities, boosting family incomes otherwise entirely dependent on pensions and social grants.
Now that lifeline has been cut, said relatives, because of the coup plotters’ greed. They relished Thatcher’s upcoming trial in Cape Town on coup-related charges, which could put him behind bars for 15 years.
The ire of Cristina Fernando (38) was directed at Mann, who she claimed duped her husband, Augusto: ”He lied to us.”
At least nine families in Pomfret have men in Chikurubi.
Lawyers for Mann said he sold his private plane to raise funds for his co-accused and that it is not his fault the money has been held up.
But that did not appease Aida Tchimuichi (20). She wanted the former SAS officer to serve more than seven years.
”He put my father at risk.”
The South African authorities have hinted that the Angolans could be charged under the Foreign Military Assistance Act when they return, the same charge facing Thatcher.
To be caught again on the wrong side of a white man’s fight is a grim twist. Two decades ago they were lionised by apartheid generals for feats against left-wing guerrillas in Angola and Namibia.
Enemies called them Os Terriveis, the Terrible Ones, and accused them of atrocities. In apartheid’s last years they were granted South African citizenship but never received decent housing, jobs or training for civilian life.
”I have tremendous guilt because the promises made to them were broken,” said the battalion’s founding commander, Colonel Jan Breytenbach. ”The only thing they knew was fighting.”
For Joao dos Santos (46), home is a derelict clinic in Pomfret smelling of urine. Paralysed from the waist down, he had no chance of boarding a plane to Zimbabwe.
”I’m getting old in a wheelchair. There is no future for us. We can’t go back to Angola and the South Africans accuse us of helping the whites.”
Dos Santos comforts himself with historical revisionism. By resisting Soviet-backed forces in Southern Africa, he said, 32 Battalion helped defeat communism and bring democracy to South Africa.
”It’s like we built a house but we have to sleep outside.” — Guardian Unlimited Â