.~~~~ . ..... .~~~~ . ..... ~~ T 4 ..... ..' N E W ,Sø m I II 0111 =PU 5%, ,2 jj mfåIJ Hki MHt mi iiil NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY LIBRARY EVANSTON, ILLINOIS SPSAHARA L65ERJA ølI LI BY/ 'E c SFNECAL--, UP ER ~ E PORTU LIES~',' ---GORTUGESEGEY f OT i* j.-I~CENTRAL - IVORy.,-. ArRICANREP. LIBERIA IHN\ 7060, CAMEROOWJ PAHOMEy 4 or cONG0 R ,4LNINO~~ RIOMUNI RE~gP OF THE GONGO CASJND-.- (ZA IR F) AN60LA PORTUGUESE GUINEA ZE ~~ Pirada cÅIqueiil Notii NAMIBIA ÆjSShl Gba ~rneo. BOTSWAN Texira Pinto A ilbi4 Sø..l JATAL~~ ~ifl~IL iiaadina Dandun '~ LST CAREL RA4OZA l. BoiaSOUTH CAAEL$? f~~~*.'AFRICA^ A 5 1 ^ cA-&AB IA N SEA IMOZAM BIQU Ej INDIAN OCEAN SUDAN plcs The Bush Rebels Barbara Cornwall THE BUSH REBELS A PERSONAL ACCOUNT OF BLACK REVOLT IN AFRICA Holt, Rinehart and Winston New York Chicago San Francisco For My Husband and for Those Inside "The Country" Unless specifically noted, all photographs are courtesy of Barbara Cornwall. Copyright © 1972 by Barbara Cornwall Lvssarides All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form. Published simultaneously in Canada by Holt, Rinehart and Winston of Canada, Limited. ISBN: 0-03-091346-2 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 77-181490 First Edition Designer: Bob Antler Printed in the United States of America Prologue AN AFRICAN GUERRILLA WAR, LIKE ANY OTHER, IS expensive, dangerous, and inconvenient. The glory is in retrospect, and the romance is for outsiders like me who come and go and remember only the good. All of the essentials necessary to the newcomer's image of the guerrilla experience are there, certainly-the long marches across neck-high savanna, the armed band drifting through the forest villages by moonlight, the rough camaraderie after the sweaty ambush. But the first casualty is always the glamour seemingly inherent in the revolutionary situation. The long marches, which are unavoidable because there are no other means of transport, can be carried out under heat so intense as to trigger a hysterical urge to shriek at the cadre ahead because he cannot possibly be so miserable as you; the enemy may well be lying in wait for the phantom rebel beyond the village waterhole; and a successful guerrilla operation needs skilled planning and the endurance of an Olympic runner should anything suddenly go wrong. What emerges, therefore, is not the bearded band swing- ing along to war, but a cautious, highly disciplined unit heavily dependent for survival upon its reconnaissance men and on each other. A well-conducted revolution in Africa is made up not only of guerrillas and, later, the army in the field, but of watchful accountants, logistics experts, political mobilizers, first- aiders, and rice-fed elders willing to haul heavy equipment on their backs and heads over dirt tracks for hundreds of miles through the bush. It is made up of lonely women with children who spend long years in their straw villages waiting for brief visits from their rebel husbands while the task of childrearing falls solely upon themselves, another form of heroism and one barely marked. "Above all," recalling the words of a cadre friend, "it is made up of ordinary people. We are not born revolutionaries, just people who could no longer support a situation. You get caught up in a revolution and then you see it through." A revolution is a way of life and in time it is the only life that a seasoned rebel remembers. He is uneasy in another environment for his vision has changed and, with time, his priorities have subtly altered. He has no home and no belongings except what he carries in his pack. His only compensation for his rootlessness is the unique form of friendship and mutual aid within the guerrilla unit which springs from shared and seemingly endless hardship and which years of living across the street from one another in normal circumstances might never bring During short stays for briefing or reassignment at his organization's exterior base in a friendly country across the border-if there is a friendly country across the border-the African insurgent is a transient in his own billet. He sleeps with twenty others in a small rented house, eight to a room; the verandas pulsate with snoring bodies and the bathroom plumbing is faulty. Soon he longs for his return to the interior, to "the country" where the issues are sharp and the im- pact from his own masses tangible and instant. Better the war and discomfort of bush life than the crowded safety of the guerrilla foyer. In the confines of a town one realizes how much like ordinary people these revolutionaries are-they quarrel over who broke the communal iron, hopefully hang wet laundry out in the tropical humidity, and guard small innocent possessions. An almost visible transformation occurs when the rebel steps back into the bush-a new sureness, a restored balance, even gaiety. He is home. I was to share this home for three months while living with black guerrillas in Mozambique in East Africa, and in Portuguese Guinea in West Africa. Both are colonies of Portugal and there, as in Angola, a vicious but little-known war is being fought daily between black insurgents and a combined force of 160,000 Portuguese troops who are charged with holding African territories that have been the property of the white motherland, in one form or another, for 500 years, down through the centuries of the slave trade, and long before the European "scramble" for Africa was begun. Their black opponents, armed and numbering several thousand, are equally determined to winkle them out. Their object: independence. This is no regular war and there are no front lines-only mile after mile of mountains, green valleys, swamp, savanna, and rivers, a vast and potentially fertile land which is known in Africa as "the bush." It is in this hostile wilderness that Portugal is fighting her African wars, for the insurgents do not yet hold any major ports or towns. Instead, in a combined politico-military operation against great odds and vastly superior arms, black mobile guerrilla units have wrested from the Portuguese sizable chunks of territory throughout the countryside where the majority of black civilians traditionally live. These lands are referred to as "liberated zones" and as they have expanded with the war, the old Portuguese administrative system with its isolated chefes do posto, backwoods mission stations and trading centers dominated by walled forts and surrounding black settlements, has fallen away. The resulting vacuum is being filled with new administrative structures introduced by the liberation movements themselves; they have also inherited the hundreds of thousands of impoverished or displaced African civilians who were bombed out of their villages by rebel-hunting jets or flushed out by the hazards of war and famine. The government in Lisbon refers to these disputed lands as "integral parts of the motherland," and her troops dispatched to fight the bush wars are told that their opponents are the Chinese, the Communists, the black bush rebels, or all three. In fact, they are black nationalists indigenous to the country. The Portuguese have modern weapons, helicopters, jet fighters, and bomber support. The Africans, less well-armed and often shoeless, can strike hard and run fast. They have the added advantage of civilian support in the liberated zones and the detailed knowledge of their own terrain that comes from a lifetime of treading its length and breadth. They also have little to lose. After 500 years of the Portuguese presence, the black population is 97 percent illiterate and the average life span is 35 years. Half of the black children are dead of disease by the age of five. In the interior, during one Portuguese administration, there were only a limited number of missionary schools, few doctors or nurses, no roads except dirt tracks linking one fort with another, no piped water, electricity, or telephones, and no shops except the small trading posts run generally by foreigners. The missionary schools still function in Portuguese-held areas, but not in those under guerrilla control. In many areas, the Portuguese troops now being told literally to "hold the forts" are in fact sealed up within and can be supplied only by helicopter or by river craft with gunboat support. They are subject to lethal raids by guerrilla shock troops and venturing on foot beyond the boundaries of their forts can mean death on an ambush track. In turn they mount punitive raids by helicopter and jet on civilian villages in rebel-held zones, burn the food plantations, and mortar the peasants in the cornfields. Their object is to force withdrawal of civilian support to the guerrillas. hunt for arms dumps, and pin down armed stragglers. To check the rising desertion rate which has reached embarrassing proportions within the Portuguese army, the men are told that capture by the "bush bandits" in these jungles means death in the cooking pot, a notion that undoubtedly stiffens the fighting spirit of the less enthusiastic among them. Who are these bush rebels? How do they think? What do they believe in? How do they live? What do they eat and say and value? Can they fight, and if so, by what rules and why? What of the civilians under their control in the liberated zones? With these guerrillas in Mozambique and Portuguese Guinea I trekked through villages so impoverished and lost in time that their inhabitants don't know what a wooden plow looks like. I attended their political rallies, visited their military camps far inside the country, accompanied them on a raid against a Portuguese fort, and crawled gratefully into an African hut at sundown after a long day's march.