Here are two videos from our recent trip to Namibia. The first one covers a safari from Livingstone, through the Caprivi Strip, Etosha, Dune 45, Swakopmund, and Windhoek. The second one covers a route in a 4×4 Landcruiser through Kaokoland, in the remote northwest of Namibia, featuring Epupa Falls, the Van Zyl’s Pass, Etambura, Huanib River elephants, and more.
The SADF in the Border War 1966-1989, by Leopold Scholtz
Leopold Scholtz is a historian rather than a militarist. I was impressed by his statements in the Introduction to The SADF in the Border War 1966-1989 where he writes, “This book is not the final word on the Border War; it is anything but that.” and soon after, “There is yet another thing this book is emphatically not. It is not politically correct. To put my cards on the table: I come from a conservative Afrikaner family who sternly believed in God and the National Party. I served in the old SADF Citizen Force and in the new SANDF Reserve Force. However, I have left apartheid behind me and therefore do not feel the urge to defend either the National Party government’s ideology or its actions. At the same time, I have no desire to pander to left-wing pressure to interpret in the worst possible light everything done by the previous government and the SADF.” I found it refreshing that he laid his cards on the table so early in the book.
The SADF in the Border War 1966-1989 is primarily a military rather than political history, although politics do feature from time to time, and an understanding of the politics involved is important if you want to fully comprehend the conflict. In fact, Scholtz explains quite a lot about the political situation, which was complex and involved not only many factions within Angola, but also South Africa, Cuba, USA, Russia, the UK, and for a while China.
However, when it comes down to detail, Scholtz can’t hide his allegiance. A FAPLA (People’s Armed Forces of Liberation of Angola) leader “had no spine” and didn’t advance, while the SADF “stormed forward on foot, while bullets buzzed like angry bees around their heads”. He gets quite agitated when describing aerial dogfights. This doesn’t matter too much, though.
We are given fairly detailed accounts of numerous battles – Cassinga, Xangongo, Ongiva – and SADF operations – Sceptic, Protea, Daisy, and Askari, Modular, Hooper, Paker, etc. Due to available records, we follow the SADF advances more than SWAPO (South West Africa People’s Organisation) manoeuvers. The basic objective of all the SADF cross-border operations was to prevent PLAN (People’s Liberation Army of Namibia) from using Angolan territory as a springboard for infiltrating SWA (South West Africa). In this, the SADF was quite successful, and PLAN activity reduced over the years.
Scholtz also gives an account of the tribulations within SWAPO, with details of many people who voiced objections to the hard-line official policy being absconded and/or tortured. Despite this, various international organisations continued to support SWAPO. Eventually, in the 1980s, SADF come into direct hostile contact with those who were supporting SWAPO in Angola – FAPLA, the Cuban army sent by Castro, and USSR advisers, and the conflict escalated until neither side could progress.
By 1988 both sides were manoeuvering for a strong position at the negotiating table. The Cubans, in particular, built up considerable forces (up to 50,000) and these were often integrated with SWAPO forces, so that in operations the SADF could not isolate SWAPO. It looked at one time as if Cuba was threatening to invade South West Africa, but this would have been unlikely.
Eventually, peace talks resulted in a settlement signed in December 1988. SWAPO almost immediately broke the agreement and in March 1989 several hundred SWAPO insurgents infiltrated into SWA. Fighting lasted several days, resulting in 25 South African dead (20 Koevoet and 5 Army) and 282 SWAPO dead. At the November election, there was intimidation on both sides. SWAPO won 92% of the votes in Ovamboland, 50% or more in Tsumeb and Kavango, and 40% in the Caprivi. SWAPO subsequently negotiated for the drafting of a new constitution for the newly named Namibia which became independent in March 1990.
The final chapter tries to answer the question of whether anyone won the so-called Border War, a surprisingly difficult question to answer.
Eden’s Exiles: One Soldier’s Fight for Paradise, by Jan Breytenbach
I know of Jan Breytenbach from reading books about the war in Angola in which South Africa was involved from 1966 to 1989. South Africans usually refer to their involvement in the conflict as The Border War. Most things about those conflicts are still contentious, including how one refers to them.
Jan Breytenbach was, or rather is, as he is still alive (he’s now 90 years of age), a very hard nut. They rarely get tougher, in terms of character and military experience. He was the first commander of the South African Reccies (1 Reconnaissance Commando) special forces later known as the 32 Battalion (also known as the “Buffalo Battalion”) and saw action during, among other operations, Operation Savannah, and the Battle of Cassinga. How one refers to the Cassinga battle is also still controversial. There is still much disagreement about what happened at Cassinga. I won’t go into any of these issues.
I read his book Eden’s Exiles because it is set in the Caprivi Strip in northern Namibia, and as I will be travelling through that region in September I wanted to do some prep. As well as running a training camp and operational launch pad for special forces in Fort Doppies, which was in the eastern part of the Caprivi Strip, Breytenbach was involved in wildlife conservation work in the area. He took care of various orphaned lions and a leopard, and was outspoken about the destruction of wildlife in the Cuando Cubango province of Angola as a result of the war. UNITA forces regularly shot game for food, and later on even the South African Military Intelligence was involved in the illegal wildlife trade, which Breytenbach tried to expose. Tsetse fly eradication operations also didn’t help, as they encouraged farming encroachment into what had until recently been a natural and very well-stocked garden of Eden.
I didn’t take to Breytenbach’s barracks-humour writing style. He is overly fond of relating how various cooks, visiting military personnel, and others were terrified of his lions who were allowed to roam around his camps. Otherwise, this book gave me some useful information about the Caprivi Strip.
This is the final one of four videos from our trip to Morocco in April of this year. North Morocco Adventure – it covers a group tour with Intrepid Travel, taking in Marrakech, Casablanca, Rabat, Meknes, Moulay Idriss, Volubilis, Fez, Chefchaouen, and Tangier with lots of travel by train. Fez is missing, as I had a tummy bug there and couldn’t leave the hotel.
Affluence Without Abundance, by James Suzman
After reading about the Bushmen mentioned in Paul Theroux’s book, Last Train to Zona Verde, I wanted to know more, so I ordered Affluence Without Abundance, by James Suzman. The subtitle of Affluence Without Abundance is, “What we can learn from the world’s most successful civilisation“. And yes, it is about the Bushmen, or Khoisan, or Ju/’hoansi as they may also be known. There are differences of opinion over what the original inhabitants of the Kalahari Basin should be called. I’ll just refer to them as Bushmen.
James Suzman has written a very clever book. For example, the subtitle, What we can learn from the world’s most successful civilisation – well, one wouldn’t normally consider the Bushmen to have created the most successful civilisation in the world, because for the most part Bushmen today live rather poorly in often run-down, marginalised habitations on the edge of the desert in Namibia, Botswana, and Angola, but the hunter-gatherer Bushmen were until quite recently the oldest largely unchanged continuous culture on Earth. For much of the last 150,000 years, the Bushmen were the largest population of biologically modern humans. That is a very big statement and a great concept, which Suzman explains with aplomb. Their society during this period was relatively stable and they appear not to have suffered periodic declines comparable to human populations elsewhere. It is only in the last 20,000 years that other human populations grew and expanded, through the development of agriculture. Meanwhile, the Bushmen continued to live as they had done, by hunting and gathering. In continuity terms at least, therefore, they were the world’s most successful civilisation.
In relatively modern times, when other populations spread into the region they tended to go no further than the edges of the Kalahari, and so the Bushmen of the desert remained largely undisturbed. It is only in the last few generations that Bushmen society has been transformed through the encroachment of the modern world. Until then, it was successful and continuous.
And here’s the rub – the Bushmen didn’t even have to work hard to keep their traditional society together. Because they knew where to find food, they could get by on less than twenty hours’ effort a week, according to anthropologists.
Suzman tells us a lot about the life and society of the Bushmen he lived with for many years in the 1980s and 90s including their diet, their philosophies, their thinking, and their issues with government once their traditional lands had been taken from them. It isn’t always a happy story, as the Bushmen have seen their way of life completely change in the past century. They used to be excellent trackers and had a deep understanding of their surroundings. “Like poetry, [animal] tracks have a grammar, a meter, and a vocabulary. But also like poetry, interpreting them is far more complex than simply reading sequences of letters and following where they go.” Now, unemployment amongst them is high, many survive on government handouts, and they often occupy some of the worst shantytowns. It has been quite a comedown.
In 1987 Lindsey and I climbed Jebel Toubkal, in the High Atlas Mountains of Morocco. At 13,671 ft (4,167 metres), Toubkal is the highest peak in North Africa. This year, in April 2022, we revisited the area and spent five days walking in the valleys and over passes around Imlil, the gateway village to Toubkal. We stayed in the Kasbah du Toubkal, a lovely trekking lodge in Imlil, and also in the remote trekking lodge run by the Kasbah in the Azaden valley, a few miles from Imlil.
This video shows pictures of our 1987 trip and then follows our treks this year.
Angola: Promises and Lies, by Karl Maier
My copy of Angola: Promises and Lies, by Karl Maier is the 2007 edition of the book first published in 1996. According to Maier, the subject line that I chose for this blog post, “The MPLA steals, UNITA kills” originated from graffiti written on walls during the election in Angola in 1992. The election in 1992 saw a break in the civil war in Angola which had started in 1975, but the conflict flared up again after the election and finally ended only in 2002 after the death of Jonas Savimbi. A terrible war that had a profound effect on Angola, and in fact the graffiti “The MPLA steals, UNITA kills” turned out to be pretty accurate.
I covered some of this topic in my most recent post about Paul Theroux’s book The Last Train to Zona Verde. Maier’s book goes into the war years in more detail, and I will come to that in a moment or two, but in the meantime, I’d just like to mention a series of YouTube videos I found that show travel in Angola a couple of years after Theroux’s trip. They are by Andrew S White, and you can watch them here. White travels by 4×4 and his experiences are different from those of Theroux who was alone and without a vehicle.
After a brief interlude for elections, the civil war resumed when UNITA declared the election results were rigged.
The number of dangerous situations that Maier gets into is unbelievable, but he seems immune from fear. He frequently flies, or drives, into towns under attack or siege, so that he can report on the situation. The most distressing place he describes is Malange, in September 1993, where an estimated 100 people per day were dying of starvation.
His conclusion is that neither side was fighting for principles, freedom or democracy, but merely for power. No wonder Angola, even in peace, turned out to be such a corrupt and badly governed country. This is a remarkable book that reveals a great deal about Angola.
Aït Bouguemez is a remote valley in the High Atlas mountains, near Ighil M’Goun, the third highest peak in Morocco. It is also known as Morocco’s ‘Happy Valley’ because the people there are so friendly and welcoming. Many of the inhabitants are said to live to a ripe old age because their lifestyle is healthy and there is little pollution. Despite its beauty, not many tourists go there, as it’s not on the list of destinations offered by most travel companies. Lindsey and I were fortunate to go there for a few days in April of this year, 2022. This is the video I made of our trip to this magical valley.
The Last Train to Zona Verde: Overland from Cape Town to Angola, by Paul Theroux
I’ve read a few books recently that I felt were not really worth reviewing in this blog, and sometimes I even wonder why certain books have been published in the first place. The Last Train to Zona Verde, by Paul Theroux is quite different. I couldn’t put it down, I enjoyed just about every paragraph and learned a lot from it. Theroux can be a masterful writer and I’ve written reviews of several of his books in this blog, always being positive about them. He’s been quite prolific, yet the quality of his work is always very high.
The Last Train to Zona Verde was published in 2013, when Theroux was seventy-two. Travelling in countries like Angola can take a lot out of you, especially when you’re alone, the only European in sight and also the only ‘tourist’ in town (very few tourists go to Angola), and it was not completely surprising to find that Theroux originally planned to go further north than Angola, but felt that enough was enough after a difficult period of time in Luanda and elsewhere in the country. Over the years Theroux has spent considerable time in Africa, firstly in Malawi in 1963 as a teacher, later in Uganda where he taught English, and on various travels and journeys. His knowledge of some parts of the continent is considerable and I always value his opinions.
Near the beginning of The Last Train to Zona Verde he describes some time spent in Cape Town, where he revisits a squatter camp he had seen ten years previously, and finds continued squalor and hardship, but also that a little progress had been made in the interim period to improve the lives of the inhabitants. There were now some shops, and a school, and public transport had been provided. He is mildly uplifted, but knows that shanty towns are constantly growing throughout the region, as more and more people move from the countryside to towns. Of course, being Theroux, he analyses why he has made such visits, and questions whether or not there are elements of ‘poverty porn’.
Next, he’s off north to Namibia, on the night bus. Namibia is twice the size of California, yet has a population of only 2.5 million, with most living in either the capital Windhoek, or the far north of the country. I am aiming to visit Namibia later in 2022 so was very interested in what Theroux would make of it.
He attends a boozy rugby party where the Namibians are cheering for the All Blacks and the whites for France, and writes, “The Namibians were not uniformly black, nor were the whites uniformly white. They were so mixed, from such obviously different racial groups, that they were unclassifiable, and because of such differences they could not make any racial assumptions. This made them easygoing, nonconfrontational, somewhat friendly, and mild-tempered.”
He finds much of Namibia generally very orderly, and in this respect unlike many other parts of Africa, but outside the incredibly well-maintained Swakopmund he goes to a bleak and poor black township called Mondesa, and then on to a slightly more upmarket colored township called Tamariskia. He then goes right across the country to Tsumkwe in the east near the border with Botswana, to speak at an “earnest, high-minded, well-funded, foreign-sponsored event – the sort I always either avoided or mocked…”
There, he is impressed with the local children who have been invited to attend, and discusses various aspects of the lives of the Ju/’hoansi (more widely known as Bushmen). He also watches some films made by John Marshall in the 1950s to the 1970s. These films (here’s an example) are important anthropological records, and Theroux is fascinated by the reactions of the young Ju/’hoansi to them. Naturally, he references Laurens van der Post (who wrote The Lost World of the Kalahari) and is at his most caustic when he explains that when the two had met in 1975, he found van der Post vain and humourless, with the imperious tone of a headmaster, and that he regarded him as a posturing fantasist and fake mystic.
After further interesting excursions, Theroux arrives at Ondangwa near the border with Angola. “Ondangwa was a blight of shacks, old cars, and empty shops, of skinny dogs chewing at heaps of trash, of crowds of people, some staring, some casually quarreling. The people had the air of temporariness you see in the desperate poor…There were no trees, it was a town without shade; its people dressed in castoff clothes; nothing worked…It was not a destination; it was a place to expire in, or leave quickly. And it was on the way to nowhere.” Theroux suffered an expensive credit card fraud during his trip, and he suspects that it happened in Ondangwa, though he only found out about it weeks later when his credit card was refused. Nevertheless, Ondangwa was nothing compaired to the chaos, mysery and abject poverty he saw in Angola.
Angola has a violent history. Many hundreds of thousands of slaves were taken from Angola to the Portuguese colony of Brazil. According to Wikipedia, “Portuguese rule remained characterized by deep-seated racism, mass forced labour, and an almost complete failure to modernize the country”. Soon after independence, a civil war started in 1975, and continued on and off (mostly on) until 2002. As well as having ideological and tribal elements, it was also a proxy war for the superpowers. The MPLA, who had been backed by Cuba and the Soviet Union, emerged as victors after the death of Savimba, the UNITA leader. Since then, due to its oil, diamond and gold exports, Angola should have become a prosperous nation, but it is riddled with corruption and bad government. Theroux finds the worst slums he has ever experienced in Angola, and an extremely unequal society, with a few very rich people and a mass of very poor people. The last 100 pages of The Last Train to Zona Verde cover his time there, until the point when he decides enough is enough.
Getting lost in the underground car park of the Gatwick Premier Inn a couple of hours before my flight to San José wasn’t the most auspicious start to the trip, but given the layout of the hotel, it must be a fairly frequent occurrence.
The hotel reception is on level 2, and the entrance on level 1 is just a lobby giving access to lifts that take you to all floors. I’d noted this fact when I arrived, and the next day after a good night’s rest before the early flight and in need of some fresh air for a few minutes I took the stairs down from my room because the elevators were all either busy, or going up. I went down a few flights, and down again from the reception level, and exited through a door expecting to find myself in the lobby on level 1. However, I quickly saw that, instead, I was in an underground car park. No problem, I thought, I’ll just go back up one flight. But the door I’d just walked through which had closed behind me had no handle, and instead, there was a notice saying “No access to Premier Inn”.
No problem, I thought, how difficult can it be to get out of a car park? Quite difficult, it turned out. The car park was vast, with various down and up ramps, and no sign of an exit. It was completely disorientating. After several minutes of walking around, down and then up, and feeling increasingly stupid, in the distance I noticed an open door and through it two maids who were having a ciggie break. I walked over and asked how to get to the Premier Inn entrance. “Out here, turn right, go round and along, then round again to the left, and then along the road for a hundred yards and it will be on your right”.
Half an hour later when it was time to check out from the hotel I made sure I took the lift to reception, which was very busy. These places are very efficient, and soon there was a queue of people wanting to leave, at the two elevators. The next problem, however, was that the elevators only seemed to be going up, rather than down to the lobby. This went on for some time – the doors opening, the up arrow flashing, and then the doors closing. Then, there was a ‘ping’ but no door opened. Then another ‘ping’. I looked over to my right to see that through a partition was a third elevator, which had just descended. The two main elevators continued to arrive and continue upwards, as I hummed the Eagles song Hotel California, “You can check out any time you like / But you can never leave!”
Eventually, I found my way out of the hotel and over to Gatwick North Terminal. Instead of paying quite a lot for breakfast at the Premier Inn I’d taken a chewy bar with me, and standing in line waiting to check-in I unwrapped it and got stuck in. Almost immediately I felt something wrong inside my mouth. A large filling had fallen out and I’d just swallowed it. Maybe this was why I kept setting the alarm off later, at airport security.
It was also, probably, the reason that I bit my tongue badly during the meal on the plane. It swelled up, but I didn’t really notice until a couple of hours later when I reached my hotel in San José and asked the boy at reception where to get a local sim card, and all that came out was “Vla, bla, sla, la, cla”.
Later on that first day in San José the company through which I’d booked the trip sent me an email saying “Dear Mr Macleod. Now that you are back home we hope you had a wonderful trip and we would appreciate it if you could spare two minutes to tell us about your holiday”. This didn’t exactly fill me with confidence for the various arrangements that had been made for the coming weeks.
It looked very much as if this trip to Costa Rica was going to be yet another of my disastrous attempts at travel.
In the event, however, the trip was excellent, and I invite you to watch the video above which describes the many things I got up to.
Roddy Macleod's Blog 