Читать книгу A Just Defiance - Peter Harris - Страница 20

HOJE YA HENDA CAMP, MALANJE PROVINCE, ANGOLA

It had been a Cuban camp and was well fortified with three anti-aircraft batteries. During the 1980s it became one of MK’s major training camps. It was here that Joseph Makhura received his training.

Joseph Makhura: ‘There was a big fight between MK and Unita in eastern Malanje Province near a town called Cacuso. I was sent there along with a friend called Jeff, who had been with me in the Swapo camp. He was a nice guy from Rockville in Soweto. When we got to Cacuso, Jeff stayed there and I moved to a village called Musafa, about fifty kilometres away. There was nothing but jungle between the two villages which were connected by a gravel road. Musafa was deserted. The war had driven out the locals a long time ago.

‘We were about fifty or sixty MK at Musafa, an outpost really. Our mission was to stop Unita from taking the area. We lived in some destroyed houses and I was the medic there. It was a strange place. The villages around us had been destroyed by Unita and were deserted, but the people had to live and to eat and so they returned during the day and tended their land. At night they disappeared. They would tell us if Unita was in the area and we would hunt them down. There were frequent firefights.

‘To get supplies, we had to go to Cacuso. The MK commander there was a man by the name of Bra T – T for Timothy, I think. He had a reputation for bravery. I admired him because whenever there was trouble he would be there, which you couldn’t say for some other commanders. Chris Hani and Bra T were always there for us.

‘Unfortunately, Cacuso was a mess. The people robbed the stores, stole supplies to buy liquor, there was no discipline. The worst thing was the journey to and from Cacuso. Often on our way back to Musafa, we would find that the road had been mined by Unita. Once a tractor driven by a farmer was blown up and locals were also sometimes shot by Unita. We tried to help them, but usually it was no use, their injuries were too severe.

‘There was a lot of complaining on that eastern front. We wanted to fight at home, not in Angola. In late 1983, Chris Hani and Bra T came to listen to our complaints. There was a lot of talk about the guys in London and in the diplomatic missions in Europe while we were in the camps fighting a war against Unita in Angola. Personally, I was not happy, but I knew I had volunteered. It was my decision to join and so I had to take what was given.

‘But it was very bad. Once, when we were travelling back to our camp, we came across bodies on the road, poor villagers who had surprised Unita laying a landmine. Unita shot them, just like that. When we got there people were crying and removing the bodies from the road. It was terrible. And then I knew that I must get out of this place. This wasn’t why I’d left South Africa. This wasn’t my war.

‘Driving on from there to Musafa was one of the worst drives of my life, not knowing whether Unita had chosen another place to plant their mines. Every bump we went over, every jolt of the truck, which was filled with supplies, could have set off a landmine. I was tense. The sweat poured off us in the heat. The road itself was bumpy and potholed, some of them easily big enough to put a few mines in. We drove slowly looking for signs of freshly dug earth, not even checking the bush next to the road for an ambush.

‘I’ll take my chances in an ambush, I was thinking. But with a landmine there was no second chance.

‘Eventually we got to Musafa. My uniform was wet right through. I pulled up in a clearing in the village and my MK comrades came out firing their AK-47s in the air in celebration that the truck had arrived with supplies. I went to my medical room and waited there until it was quiet. I didn’t want to be shot by mistake by my own men. That place was wild, anything could happen.

‘On the day after Christmas, 26 December 1983, we got word that Unita had ambushed and killed a large MK unit near the Kwanza River in the south. We took a platoon from Musafa and teamed up with another two platoons from Cacuso. We moved to the ambush point in six large Russian trucks, called Urals. It took us about two hours to get to the river and by then it was already dark. We found a lot of MK bodies and also soldiers from the Angolan army. The Angolan army in the area was not well trained, we called them People’s Militia or “Odepe”.

‘The Odepe were undisciplined, always complaining. We had to rely on them because they knew the terrain but in a skirmish they just shot randomly and wildly. When you asked them why they were firing like that, they said they were scaring the enemy. Hell, they scared us and we were their allies! Shame, we used to treat them badly and tell them to carry our heavy stuff, like the RPG with the rockets in the backpack. But we stopped this practice because in the first few contacts they would shoot those RPG rockets off like fireworks, hitting trees and rocks, very dangerous, crazy I tell you. We even stopped telling them to carry our ammo as they would shoot it off on any excuse, just so they wouldn’t have to carry it. Actually, maybe they weren’t so stupid after all, although when you got into a real firefight and needed it, the ammo was all used up.

‘The good Angolan soldiers were fighting the South Africans on the Namibian border. Besides the Urals, we had with us an even larger truck, a huge thing, which we filled with the bodies of our comrades. It was terrible. They had been surprised and slaughtered. We worked right through the night and into the next day. The flies and the stench from the bodies made us sick. It was swampy ground and thick bush with mosquitoes that ate us alive.

‘While searching for the wounded in the bush, I found my friend Jeff. He had crawled under a small bush but was in a very bad way, shot in the stomach and his right leg was broken. I tried to help him, but it was no use. He could barely speak. He said he could hear us moving in the night but did not have the strength to cry out. He died half an hour later. I was holding him in my arms as he died. I picked him up and carried him to the truck, gently laid him down on the great pile of bodies. Other bodies soon covered him. We climbed on the trucks and left that killing ground.

‘It just went on and on, from camp to camp. February 1984 I was back in Viana Camp near Luanda. While I was there, Bra T approached me and asked if I wanted to fight in South Africa. I said yes. Later, in September 1984, I went to Pango Camp in the north of Angola for specialised training in explosives and assassination. I enjoyed the training, but my instructor almost killed me there.

‘We were being trained in how to use and throw the F-1 hand grenade. You would pull the pin, the lever arm popped off in your hand and you had to wait until the instructor told you to throw the grenade. It was nerve-racking. The instructor was close to you but protected by a thick shield, so he was okay. On this one occasion I pulled the pin, the arm popped off and my instructor waited . . . and waited . . . and waited . . . until in a panic I threw the grenade, which exploded very close to us. I yelled at the instructor that he had nearly killed me. I think he forgot what was happening. Maybe he was thinking of something else, dreaming.

‘I was at Pango Camp for a full year, training and training, thinking that I would never go home. In September 1985, I got called to Lusaka where I met Jabu, Neo, Rufus and Justice. I was finally going home, almost six years after I had left.’