We reach across the two-metre border fence to clink our enamel mugs of whiskey, toasting our arrival in Angola, though only three of our party of nine are properly in the country. The rest are locked in the no-man’s-land between Angola and Namibia at the middle-of-nowhere Katwitwi border post.
Getting all the passports stamped was easy. The problem is with the border guards, who will not let our second vehicle through the gate without a photocopy of its registration papers. The only photocopier in town is locked up for the night. I go with our tour leader, Umkhonto weSizwe (MK) veteran Patrick Ricketts (“Blah” to his friends), to seek out every official in town.
“That guy at the border is a bit wrong in the head,” another policeman says apologetically.
It is dark. We have taken five days to get here from Johannesburg, and our arrival in Cuito Cuanavale is going to be delayed by another day. The plan is to drive to the site of the last battle fought by the old South African Defence Force (SADF) against Angola. Under the auspices of the Ex-Combatants’ Association (ECA), Ricketts and other veterans plan to promote tourism to Cuito Cuanavale to commemorate the battle and to raise development funds.
“The mission was correct — we are going to help those who helped us,” says Linus Dhlamini, a founder member of MK, referring to the MPLA government’s support for African National Congress exiles.
But Blah has had enough. “Fuck this, we’re going back to South Africa. You try to do something with the comrades and this is how they treat you.”
The other veterans intervene. “These are not the comrades we fought with,” says former political commissar Jerry Matsitle. “Remember, there are Unita people here now.”
Blah is still not going to let them leave Dhlamini behind the gate. “This man spent 18 years on Robben Island with Mandela for you to treat him like a dog,” he fumes at the guards. I translate this into Portuguese while a guard waves his AK around.
We also have a hitchhiker, an elderly veteran of 32 Battalion: the Angolan soldiers from the FNLA liberation movement who were press-ganged into the SADF after the FNLA was defeated by MPLA and Cuban forces in 1976. He is returning home at last, and has a different ideological slant on the border mess. “It’s because of communism. If they had democracy in Angola, it wouldn’t be like this.”
By now, Blah has become more resigned. “Imagine we were here with a party of tourists …” Indeed.
Next day, photocopies done, we are on our way. Chalky dust envelops the 32 Battalion vet and me as the Land Rover stumbles along the track. I ask him how he feels about returning to an Angola still ruled by the MPLA he opposed. “We were fighting against communism, against Russia. We didn’t want communism to come to Angola.”
Have things changed, I wonder. “There is still cassava and sweet potatoes. This is a rich country. It has diamonds and gold and mercury. There’s fresh water, sweet water.”
It takes until midnight to cover the 240km to Menongue, the provincial capital. Blah has a friend at the hospital, so we camp in an almost-empty room with a mouse scurrying around. It is an average Angolan hospital: the people sleeping in the corridors, the sharp smell of day-old urine in one corner; a woman wailing in the morning when she returns to find her child has died in the night.
“You see what I was saying about Angola?” Dhlamini says. “The situation is terrible. They were helping us, now we are trying to help them.”
I ask Matsitle how what we have seen squares with his memories of the Angola that hosted MK. He replies in his measured tones. “There was the war with Unita, with the FNLA and with South Africa which overshadowed everything. In those days, if one was corrupt, he would be forgiven because he fought for independence.”
In the morning, we pay a courtesy call to the provincial governor. His deputy says the governor will see us later, so we wait around town. A stage and spotlights are being erected outside the government building for the launch ceremony of the cellphone network. The president’s daughter has a substantial stake in the phone company. A military truck delivers the paint for the cellphone shop.
We return for the meeting, but the vice-governor tells us the Angolan Constitution forbids the wearing of shorts in the presence of a governor. We change our travel-stained pants in the car park. Another hour goes by. Only 150km — an eight-hour drive — from Cuito Cuanavale, I am starting to wonder whether we will get to see the place at all. But the governor appears, we exchange polite words, and we are on our way.
Blah puts on his MPLA baseball cap: his tour guide hat. “This is the Road of Death. From henceforth every hole you see in this road is from a mine. Many Angolan and Cuban youth died here. They died not only in defence of Angola, but for the end of apartheid. Just for a moment, imagine the emotion, imagine the passion.”
I wonder whether the pissed-upon hospital in Menongue and a constitutionally imposed dress code were worth dying for. But either way, the Road of Death would excite military historians and scrap merchants equally: tanks, mortar shells, cartridges, rusting into the sand; helmets that mark the passing of human lives as the South African Air Force attempted to cut off Cuito Cuanavale from the rest of Angola.
Night falls, and under a faint moon two tanks loom at the end of a rattling bridge in which I can barely discern holes bigger than my foot. In the water below, something splashes that might be a crocodile. It’s not a place where you want to hang around for too long after dark.
Dawn breaks over a queue of rusting trucks and petrol tankers that stretches out of sight: a convoy strafed to pieces in 1988. We crest a hill, and Cuito Cuanavale spreads in front of us.
We had been planning to go further, to where the bodies of SADF troops supposedly still lie — but it appears that the go-ahead we earned by putting on our trousers for the governor was not communicated to the authorities in Cuito Cuanavale. They trust us, they tell us in their dingy and windowless office. But they don’t have authorisation. So we get as far as the Cuito River bridge, the battlefront, where laundry is drying over another rusting tank.
“The Unita forward observers came down there,” Blah says, pointing ahead. He turns to the left. “And over there is the Tumpu triangle, where the SADF were.”
Ricketts and the ECA aim to honour the town as the place where PW Botha’s Total Strategy was stopped in its tracks by the Angolan army and its Cuban supporters. The history of the battle is still a work in progress: The SADF never took Cuito Cuanavale, but never admitted defeat either.
For Angolans themselves, memories of foreign aggression in the 1980s have been overshadowed by the internal conflict between the government and Unita that continued for a decade after the South Africans and Cubans left. “I can’t say what the consequence of the battle was. We don’t know yet,” says Fernando Francisco, former MPLA soldier and administrative secretary of Cuito Cuanavale.
His reticence is echoed by Américo Dala, a former Unita soldier who now also has an administrative job. “I can’t give you a perspective on the battle. What’s important for Angolans is peace. When the Cubans left and the South Africans left, Angolans solved their own problems.”
It’s Dhlamini — the only one of us whose CV includes being the founder of an army — who states the one unambiguous truth: “War is a terrible thing. Most of those who died were civilians, children.”
On the way back, we see the children of post-war Angola bathing among the water lilies at a river crossing. The dead tanks still tower above them.
The ECA plans to launch the Cuito Cuanavale tour commercially in about April. Contact Patrick Ricketts on 082 789 0829 or e-mail [email protected]<.a>