The One Week War signaled the end of the colonial era in Southern Africa, and the end of Apartheid with it. At the end of the first part of the story, a largely white revolution against the decision by the new Portuguese government to hand Mozambique to Frelimo is brewing. Wilf Nussey continues his eye witness account of the events that could easily have led to a bloodbath. The photographs are ones that he and his team took at the time.
Sunday, September 8, saw the
haphazard rebellion begin to jell. A collection of right-wingers formed the
Movement of Free Mozambique (MFM) and produced their own flag, a concoction of
Mozambican and Portuguese symbols.
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| MFM at Radio Clube |
They seized the large Radio
Clube de Moçambique building in the city centre and made it their headquarters, broadcasting
a stream of appeals in Portuguese, English and African languages for support. Volunteers
armed with a motley assortment of guns self-importantly stood sentry at doors
and windows and on the roof.
It was another day of noisy
parades and motorcades. Samora Machel warned that if the Portuguese did not
squash the MFM Frelimo would resume the guerilla war.
The Portuguese took the threat
seriously. They sent heavily armed military police into Beira to disperse
2 000 mainly white demonstrators with teargas. A black policeman was
seriously hurt when a grenade exploded on his chest.
In LM happy crowds celebrated
outside the Radio Clube. I went in and found a bedlam of waving arms and loud
voices as dozens of politicians fought, pleaded and argued for places in power.
Taking pictures was banned - nobody wanted to be identified later.
In the tin shanties and grass
huts of the bairros on the city outskirts the black population were ominously
quiet early on Sunday. We tried to go in but, perhaps fortunately, it was not
possible because the Portuguese police and troops were not cooperative.
The airport route was
passable, however. Travellers had been driving the few kilometres between
airport and city through the Xipamanine/Lagoa area, known as “Grasstown”. We
had trekked back and forth several times to send film to Johannesburg.
Tom and I hired one of the few
taxis still doing business and asked the driver to go by a familiar back route
through a small industrial area parallel to the main airport road. He was a
fat, phlegmatic middle-aged Portuguese wearing the usual floppy peaked cap.
The back route was strangely
still. Not a soul in sight. All the warehouses and workshops were closed. Half
a dozen overturned trucks and cars lay beside the street, some burned out. It
looked abandoned, quieter than it should be even on a Sunday. Our driver became
nervous and heaved a sigh of relief when we reached the airport, which was busy
with activity because a plane was about to leave.
In the parking area a convoy
was forming up, a motley collection of cars, bakkies and trucks. Civilians
armed with an assortment of firearms from pistols to rifles and shotguns rode on
the truck platforms.
Nobody could tell me what was
going on, only that the convoy was heading for the city.
Why now, suddenly?
Shrugs.
Our cabbie was getting more
nervous and Tom was looking anxious. He had not yet experienced much urban
violence and the atmosphere was ominous.
There was nothing we could do.
The choice was to stay at the airport for God knows how long or join the convoy
into town. We tagged on with one or two cars behind us. Just in front of us was
a large truck with high side walls. A dozen or more men stood there.
We moved off at the slow pace
set by the lead vehicle, forcing our driver to travel in second or third gear.
Outside the car park the tarred road narrowed and the reed-and-thatch huts and
palms of Grasstown jostled close.
At first there were few signs
of life but as we moved deeper into Grasstown more and more black people began
to appear on both sides twenty to thirty metres away - men, women and children,
all shouting and waving fists at the convoy. Men on the trucks waved flags and
shouted insults back.
A few stones sailed through
the air towards us.
The men on the lorry ahead
reacted instantly. Long barrels suddenly appeared above the side walls. We
heard the sharp crackle of rifle fire and the deep thuds of shotgun blasts. The
blacks melted away into the long grass and narrow gaps between their huts.
Our cabbie went into panic
mode. He began yelling and gesticulating in anger. He glared back at us
accusingly, face pale with fear. He pounded the steering wheel but there was not
a thing he could do. He dared not leave the convoy, which was occupying the
centre of the road. Tom, too, looked as if he wanted to get the hell out of
there right now. I saw his eyes widen like saucers at something ahead and
looked up.
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| A Portuguese motorist met his end on the airport road |
A couple of corpses lay at the
roadside, one a man lying flat on his back, the toes of his shoes pointing
skywards, arms at his sides, his head pulped to mush by chunks of concrete
lying beside him, blood spreading in a large pool. The other was equally
battered.
As we slowly passed about two
metres away I ignored the driver screaming Portuguese imprecations and
photographed the bodies.
The journey could not have
lasted more than ten to 15 minutes. With the adrenalin rush it seemed to zoom
by in seconds. When we reached the end, a small police post where the Grasstown
ended and the city began, our cab jerked to a stop. The cabbie flung open the
rear doors and shouted “Go! Go!”
He did not wait for his money.
The old taxi clattered away probably faster than it had ever travelled before.
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| Portuguese soldier |
The convoy was of over-exuberant
rebels driving celebratory cavalcades between airport and city and picking off
blacks like shooting pigeons. It was like poking a stick into a hornets’ nest.
Blacks erupted from the huts
and shanties and fell upon one passing parade. They pelted the vehicles with a
hail of stones, dragged out some drivers and beat them up, killing three,
including those I saw.
Back at the Polana it was so
peaceful it felt surreal writing about the day’s happenings. Next day, Monday,
September 9, the airport route was made safe by soldiers.
At that point it was anybody’s
guess how long this uprising would last although it was patently doomed to
fail. Frelimo was hugely supported in the LM region although it did not yet
have military muscle there.
In South Africa hard-core
Nationalists were urging the government to support the rebels and so fulfil the
old Transvaal Republic’s ambition of controlling LM. Rumours were widespread
that Defence Minister P W Botha had moved army units close to the border.
After another day at the
frontline we trekked back through time to sup on grilled prawns in hot
piri-piri sauce, crayfish and superb steaks washed down with fine Portuguese
wines. With all tourists gone the service was overwhelming.
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| Demonstration at Radio Clube |
Tuesday, September 10: the
Radio Clube had become the main gathering place for rebel supporters. The street
outside was filled by up to 10 000 cheering men, women and children.
Rumours were flying around
that the air force would send Fiat jets to rocket the building.
A Colonel Tavares, commander
of the uniformed civil police, drove up to the Radio Clube. The crowd welcomed him,
assuming he was coming to support them.
Then came the crunch: a
broadcast by the MFM announcing they were handing over the Radio Clube to the
civil police.
As the stunning news poured
from radios the mood outside changed to anger. When Tavares emerged they
focused on him. They rocked his car and he had to put his foot down hard to
escape.
Minutes later paratroops
backed by armoured vehicles moved slowly up the street. They were stopped by a
mob of people yelling insults and calls of “Traitor!” A sky-shouter plane
circled low telling people to go home.
Tom and I were watching when suddenly
several thunderous blasts shook the air, almost deafening us. They were
percussion bombs – thunderflashes – dropped by paratroops from the building to
scare away the crowd.
It worked. Most fled like
water downhill, urged on by a flurry of shots fired into the air from automatic
weapons.
They almost bowled us over and
we fled too, just around the corner.
The MFM began leaving the
building. Women wept. Most went unobtrusively through a back door. They
abandoned an assortment of hastily acquired weapons from shotguns to heavy
machine-guns and grenades.
“This is not the end, my
friend, it is only the beginning,” an MFM chief told me as he departed.
He was half right. The
violence was spreading.
The tension was almost
tangible and the danger of a backlash very real. Luckily the army kept their
cool. Had just one shot been fired then, by troops or the MFM, the scene could
have turned into a bloodbath.
Because it was impossible to
get into the black areas without the probability of getting killed we could not
personally check conditions there. But there was action aplenty.
Portuguese Air Force men under
a Colonel Cardoso led a charge by 300 men from their base on the other side of
the airport runway to recapture the terminal and control tower. There was some
gunfire in which an MFM man was hit and an unfortunate passenger was shot
accidentally as he arrived from Beira. He died in hospital.
All commercial flights to and
from South Africa were stopped. Blacks in the bairros blocked the airport road
with tree trunks and stones but let African buses through.
Word trickled in about vigilantes
hunting blacks in the bairros.
Crazily, in much of downtown
LM life began to look almost normal. Some shops, sidewalk cafes and restaurants
had reopened.
But then it was a crazy week.
We rushed around gathering information, getting near to hotspots, interviewing
rebels and Frelimos. After the rush we relaxed at a sidewalk cafe with coffee and
with brandy. Some evenings we dined in the Polana, others at a tiny restaurant
which served a delicious dish of prawns piri-piri on yellow rice.
It was a comfortable little
war.
It peaked on the Tuesday night
and early Wednesday amid a flurry of alarms, the beginnings of a panicky flight
of civilians from the city and the first grim tally of casualties.
An official announcement said
about a hundred people had been killed or wounded. The total was certainly
higher: more than a hundred wounded had been treated at the city hospital
alone.
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| Frelimo soldier |
Soldiers chased us away when
we tried to get into the hospital, where wounded were lying on the floor
because all beds were occupied. A doctor said the hospital morgue was crammed.
Troops were struggling to
contain mobs of Africans rampaging through the outer suburbs and threatening to
spill into the city centre. The city shut up shop again when rumours spread
that blacks were planning a mass march of about 2 500 into the centre.
White anxiety ran high. Strong forces of police and army backed by armoured
cars sealed off the entrances to shanty towns.
Sporadic rifle fire,
machine-gun bursts and heavy explosions came from inside the townships but
there was still no way we could go in.
Escaping traders said all the
schools and shops had been ransacked and destroyed and houses and vehicles
burned. Some had lost all they owned. Troops had fired shots in the air to
scare off looters. Debris and the hulks of cars and trucks littered the roads.
An army major said the
violence was not political: “They are just in a wild mood and completely out of
hand.”
I wondered what made the
borderline between “wild” and “political” in Africa.
A band of black people marched
towards the posh Polana suburb after a vigilante shot dead a black woman.
Police and troops supported by an armoured car blocked the road. They warned
white onlookers to go away or risk being shot.
I sent Deon in our Peugeot to
check. He took with him an Associated Press reporter and a photographer.
They found the marchers and
security forces gone. The road blocks of heavy stones had been dismantled. Deon
drove on. A little further a crowd of blacks materialised from nowhere. Deon
stopped.
A young black offered to
escort them in exchange for cigarettes. He warned: “If you see a crowd, give
the one-finger Frelimo salute. A two-fingered salute will mean trouble.”
One finger meant one
government for Mozambique: Frelimo. Two meant you supported two governments,
Frelimo and the rebels, and invited death.
A little further a much larger
crowd barred the road. One man brandished an axe. They milled around the car as
it was searched. Their leader warned them not to go on, they would be dead
already had they been Portuguese, he said.
They turned around in a hurry
and then came the shock: all the dismantled roadblocks had been rebuilt. If
they had been forced to flee they would have been trapped.
Not a soul was in sight, no
troops, no blacks.
Deon, a strong man, hastily
got out of the car and heaved aside enough boulders for them to drive through.
Nobody appeared, nobody tried to stop them. They could feel the hair rising on
the backs of their necks.
That night Joaquim Chissano,
deputy to Machel, broadcast an appeal for calm, aimed especially at blacks. He added
a warning to Portuguese hotheads that they were outnumbered.
Next day, September 11, the
violence continued. A senior police officer emerged from the townships, still
shaking from shock and fatigue, to announce that the toll of killed, stabbed
and beaten had risen to two hundred.
Three other events marked that
day. One was the arrival of the first Portuguese High Commissioner, Rear
Admiral Victor Crespo. Few diplomats have begun their assignments in more
difficult circumstances.
The second was the arrival in
two frigates and by plane of Portuguese troops. By now the army was pretty much
in control of most of the city. Casualty figures fluctuated wildly. No-one will
ever know how many bodies were left in unmarked graves in the urban jungle.
The third event was a trick
borrowed by the authorities from the old guard dictators: censorship. They cut
all telecommunication links from LM to the world. Phones were dead. Telexes could
not link with any others. The city became an information island.
It sent the large force of
foreign correspondents into a major flap. How could they justify their
existence, and their expenses, if they could not feed the hungry readers? They
debated all sorts of plans and in the end several decided that one of them
would carry all their copy to South Africa and there file it to the various
destinations. It was a long and dangerous trip followed by the tedious business
of dictating copy by phone or laboriously punching it on to telex.
We too went into shock when we
found ourselves with deaf and dumb telex machines. Hoping the blackout was
temporary we punched up our copy on telex tapes to run them through the moment
the lines opened. We waited and waited, becoming more agitated with each
minute.
And then the inimitable staffer
running the Salisbury bureau, John, came to the rescue. Our telex suddenly
clattered into life with a message from him. We could file our copy via a link
he had set up with the post office in Beira.
The link, I learned later, was
a girl in the post office there, one of his amorous conquests. When he heard of
the blackout he contacted her by phone because Beira had not been cut off
entirely. Never have so many owed so much to one screw.
We fed our tapes into our
machine and the copy was relayed straight through Beira to Salisbury to our
South African papers in time for deadlines.
It was something of a scoop
and they emblazoned our reports on the front pages. We were way ahead of
everybody; our opposition carried hardly a word.
It was a tough day. We slaved
to meet edition after edition. After sunset we prowled the murky Indian market
to exchange our rands for six to eight times more than the official rate to
keep our operation going.
It was dark when Tom, Deon and
I drove back to the Polana thirsting for a beer or three and supper. As we
walked through the foyer past the porter’s desk and into the huge main lounge, several
score frustrated newsmen rose to their feet and descended on us. They had heard
our reports being quoted by South African radio, how did we get the news out?
Deon and Tom on either side of
me looked at each other and grinned. They broke into a soft-shoe shuffle, side
to side, arms akimbo, and burst into song.
“We are the boys of the ANS,
“The ANS boys are we,
“We are the boys of the ANS,
“We all work for Wilf Nussey!”
The news mob dissolved in
laughter. It as a great moment for me.
The next day tension began to
ease as both sides ran out of steam. Hunger and the Portuguese forces tightened
their grip. The authorities lifted the censorship and our phone and direct
telex lines came back to life.
By Friday, September 13, the
One Week War was all over bar the shouting. Remonstration replaced
demonstration. To put the final nail in the coffin of rebel hopes an East
African Airways plane arrived from Nairobi with 70 Frelimo troops - the first
tangible, visible mark of the Frelimo takeover. Soon after them came another
Portuguese frigate loaded this time with Frelimos, making 200 in all. They
carried well-worn AK-47s.
Here was the nightmare of most
Mozambican whites come to life: the hated, despised and feared Frelimo
guerillas, the perpetrators of atrocities, the vanguard of black nationalism,
taking over their country and property.
The guerillas obviously were under
strict orders to behave and not to provoke. They appeared in the streets,
diplomatically outside the city centre used mostly by whites, followed by small
bands of hero-worshipping black children.
Admiral Crespo held his first
news conference. There would be no reprisals, he promised. Combined Frelimo and
Portuguese patrols were keeping the peace.
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| Portuguese exodus to South Africa |
But the mass exodus of whites
had begun. It was led by seven leading former secret police officers and their
families who were flown back to Portugal from Beira in an air force transport.
At least one never made it: Francisco “Frank the Ugly” Langa, “The Butcher of
Machava” and one of the most feared interrogators, was caught and killed by
rioters.
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| Welcome rally for Samora Machel |
There were some quirky final
touches. Daniel Roxo, the militant spokesman for the MFM, blew himself up with
a hand grenade. Carlos “Ginger Joe” Rocha, the criminal who escaped, gave
himself up. Life on the run in the new Mozambique was not quite as nice as in
prison, he said.
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| Machel delightedly greets the Chinese delegation |
Thereafter it was just bits
and pieces for us. A last feature summed it up: “One young soldier angrily
swinging the buckle on the end of his army belt has triggered an explosion of
violence, hate and fear that has changed Mozambique forever and drawn open the
curtains on a blindingly uncertain future.
“The old, easy-going
Mozambique of wine and sun and prawns piri-piri in an antiquated Portuguese
colonial atmosphere has been eradicated by a dramatic week.”
Nothing had changed at the
Polana hotel yet, except its guests. Seated at the next table at our last lunch
were a large, fat, dark-complexioned man in a badly cut, three-piece black suit
that looked bullet-proof, a large, fat, dark-complexioned woman in a similar
suit and a six o-clock shadow matching her husband’s, and two children who could
have been cloned from them. They said little and we could not understand a
word.
They were Bulgarians. The
Soviet bloc had sent him to teach the Mozambicans how to grow, of all things,
mealies.
Wilf Nussey
