Mid-afternoon on a hot summer day with thunderclouds threatening.  Curry making time.

Daughter, 5, a vegetarian. Son, 7, an omnivore. Wife agnostic eater.

Time for an experiment. Put BBC on podcast, extract sharpest knife.

Start brown rice with lentils boiling. Chop red onion, garlic, ginger, red and yellow peppers. Gently fry in olive oil, add two teaspoons curry paste. Stop Luc dragging Madeline around lounge.

Dice free range chicken fillets. Throw into centre of that cast iron pot with the now golden onion, garlic etc. Go check on wife, who is editing pics and text on deadline. Make stupid comment. Leave before being attacked.

Chicken looking well-seared. Add Korma paste. Add lemon rind (fresh), add juice one big fat lemon. Add one tin chopped Italian tomatos.

Finely chop and swiftly add two fresh apricots add. Tell no-one. Look for the litchis. Damn, kids have eaten them all. Oh well.

Simmer a decent while, add salt and wife’s homemade mango chutney. Mmm. Send kids to get lots of coriander leaves. Discover we have a pomegranate shrub in yard! Yay. And how have we not noticed in 5 years?

Anyway, grind dry coriandre seeds and toss a teasoon full in.

Simmer another 30 min. Rice ready.

Dish up, extract chicken from daughter;s plate, add to son’s.

Serve sitting on front steps as clouds disappear.

“How is it?”

“Delicious!” from two mouths.  Silence from office, wife plate empty.

Viva summer fruits.

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In October of 1994 I drove my old Kombi camper the length of Mozambique to record their upcoming election. The goal was to get to the far north in time for the vote. 1994. South Africa had just had its first democratic elections and the end of the Apartheid regime meant that Mozambique could also have peace.

The anti-liberation movement monster that had been created by Rhodesia and later supported by South Africa – the Renamo rebels, led by Afonso Dhlakama – were now a registered party and the main potential threat to the ruling Frelimo party. As I meandered along deserted roads that should have been the main thoroughfares, the surprising extent of Renamo’s support became clear to me.

I, personally, was not happy with Renamo. The kombi suffered the injustice of the trenches dug by them across the roads at irregular intervals. The trenches were to stop the government forces getting to them, but also destroyed the road for my poor kombi …  okay enough on the car stuff. And what about the damn landmines?  Stopping to sleep along the deserted road when night approached was scary – the knotted strands of grass that I took to indicate the presence of mines, or was it an absence of mines? I would reverse the kombi in to a selected spot, hoping the engine block would save me from the blast. (kombi, rear mount engine, fyi)

A decade before, when I was doing my military service as an unwilling conscript, my unit had been awaken late at night by our military intelligence commander. Why was a socialist and lefty in military intelligence? Don’t you know I speak Russian? I don’t really, but do speak Yugoslav and could fool the army into putting me in a translation unit. Thank god for dictionaries. Anyway, I was doing my best to be subversive while getting through my two years and so when we were trucked to a military railway siding somewhere in Pretoria my sleepy brain became a bit alert.

We were asked to unload wood crates from one set of railway freight cars to another. The boxes were marked ‘Farm Implements, product of Nigeria.’ Right. I kept trying to pry a box open, but these damn Nigerians made good containers. I managed to convince a soldier that I knew how to handle a forklift (had never even sat in one, actually,) and began to unload the very heavy boxes onto the siding. As the Colonel moved away, I rammed the forks into a box and lifted, the box splintered and it was open.

The noise attracted the Colonels attention, but by the time he had reached me, I had already seen that they did not contain farm implements. No, the box was packed with new, folding butt AK47s, covered in industrial grease. I swore my silence and conspiracy as the Colonel hurried to cover the hole. Did I ever share with you what a good liar I am?  The railway cars we were loading the boxes into pointed east. In 1984, that meant the boxes were surely destined for Mozambique. 1984. That was when South Africa signed the Nkomati Accord to stop arming Renamo. Seems I was not the only accomplished liar in Pretoria.

Anyway, what was I to do with this info. I tried to feed it to a couple of newspapers, but it was the word of one troopie who could not go public (treason charges, etc etc). The knowledge stayed hidden.

Anyway, I felt Mozambique and I had history. The trip up north was a great journey of discovery, and some of the places I stopped in looked like the isolated garrisons had not heard of the end of the war just yet. Fell in love with Beira, the main central city along the Indian Ocean. This despite the zoo being home to displaced people instead of animals, and the fanciest hotel/casino being a multi floor camp for those fleeing the war in the countryside.

I made it to Nampula in the far north for election day, but the poor kombi had had enough. The engine died. I spent a week watching a very calm Muslim mechanic take it apart on a dirt floor and put it together. He had no parts. The kombi never ran again and is now, I believe, a chicken coop. I should have gotten it out, but it all seemed too much hassle. Sorry dear kombi, RIP.

Voting day, Mulio village, outside Nampula

Renamo supporters, Beira airport

T-shirt manna. Maxixe

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The prison in Kigali was, I suspect, much like any other overcrowded, sordid, smelly and downright scary jail in Africa. But this one was filled, overfilled, with those accused of participating in the genocide of almost a million Tutsis and Hutu moderates.

Many among the prisoners were young boys. Boys with a look of either sorrow or contempt. And those mothers? With their infants in jail with them? What had they done? Who am I to judge people I do not know, but my imagination had been fueled by having seen mass graves, spoken to survivors …. it was difficult not to have an opinion.

Yet surely the worst of the perpetrators had fled to Zaire ahead of the RPF? Who were these people, men women and children, who had decided to stay in the villages and towns where they had taken part in genocide?

Were they so sure of the extermination of their enemies that they thought they were safe from retribution?

More images t http://gregmarinovich.photoshelter.com/gallery/Kigali-Genocidaires/G0000qDqDf0VhvGs

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On the yellowing AP Leafax transmission envelope from May 9, 1995, next to Subject I had simply written “Gatonde reburial. Outs.”
That meant that these were my outtakes, or images I would not transmit.
The envelope was thick, a least a three rolls of processed colour negative film strips were within.
As I pulled them out, a flood of memory came back to me. Following a group of men carrying hoes into the mountains. A pair of dogs snarled at them and tried to bite them; the group  laughed. It was like men heading off to clear a field in the steep hills of Rwanda. Yet it was not, they were trying to find where their relatives and friends had been dumped in shallow graves during the previous year’s genocide.
I was the only outsider among them. I don’t recall how I found out about the exhumations, but for the people of Gatonde it was an important day. A survivor pointed out a seemingly innocuous spot and the men began to dig. Soon they were carefully pulling out bits of skeleton, clumps of hair, clothing. It was quite horrific, and as I followed them to where the burial of the victims would take place, it became clear that there were dozens of groups like mine labouring across the verdant hills.
The burial sites were incredibly common. Even along the dirt road I had driven in on, the gulleys alongside proved to hold more horrors.
The scale of the killings by neighbour against neighbour became clear.
I remember being told by a Tutsi from the capital Kigali who had, against the odds, survived. One of his best friends was a Hutu, they lived in neighbouring houses, and they played soccer for the same amateur team. Yet it was this man who walked the death squads to his home, and even took part in the killings. The fact that his teammate had initiated the killing of his entire family was what he kept returning to as he told me his story.
The man was, in the aftermath, known as a ‘plafond’. Someone who had survived by hiding in the ceiling.
Back in Gatonde, a deep and long mass grave had been dug, and groups of people emerged silently from the trees and fields, bearing grass mats or woven baskets with their dead. Some had only banana leaves to carry their loved ones. I recall it being very silent. No-one was crying. The people of Rwanda were beyond tears.
Some of my images from the set here look strange. I somehow overdeveloped the negatives and then proceeded to damage them further trying to dry them fast enough to transmit for deadlines. The negatives of – of course – my best images are heavy, stained gnarled and curled. So excuse the weirdness of the scans, but they are important images. Full set http://gregmarinovich.photoshelter.com/gallery/Gatonde-Rwanda-1995/G0000k.jE.VZe1B0

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Last night I attended a talk by Dr Charles Mironko at Johannesburg’s Vega college. Moronko is a Rwandan anthropologist who specializes in genocide.
In the dim auditorium, his spectacle rims reflecting the light off the screen that awaited his presentation, his voice rose above the air con:
“We are all capable of killing. We are all potentially killers. It is what triggers you. When love becomes hate. I met a woman who killed her own kids.”
Mironko sees genocide as a clearly defined process, with distinct stages. He has studied various examples of genocide, and sees a pattern. He amplifies how states follow steps that will, inevitably, lead to genocide.
Quite simply, he says, “It starts with bullying and name-calling at school.”
I have two children starting on the ladder of school, and it was a chilling thought. The cruelty of children is not going unnoticed in our world.
Mironko says that stage one is CLASSIFICATION. Us and them. Prejudice. Bipolar societies are easy to divide. In Rwanda and Burundi, the classifications were Hutu, Tutsi and Twa. That is followed by DEHUMANIZATION (remember the ‘cockroaches’?) and then by ORGANISATION, with the formation of militia, who act with impunity. Genocide is always organised by the state, planning, lists. POLARIZATION follows, there is no middle ground, you are with us or against us.
Mironko referred us to the Hutu Ten Commandments:
1. Every Hutu should know that a Tutsi woman, whoever she is, works for the interest of her Tutsi ethnic group. As a result, we shall consider a traitor any Hutu who
marries a Tutsi woman
befriends a Tutsi woman
employs a Tutsi woman as a secretary or a concubine.
2. Every Hutu should know that our Hutu daughters are more suitable and conscientious in their role as woman, wife and mother of the family. Are they not beautiful, good secretaries and more honest?
3. Hutu women, be vigilant and try to bring your husbands, brothers and sons back to reason.
4. Every Hutu should know that every Tutsi is dishonest in business. His only aim is the supremacy of his ethnic group. As a result, any Hutu who does the following is a traitor:
makes a partnership with Tutsi in business
invests his money or the government’s money in a Tutsi enterprise
lends or borrows money from a Tutsi
gives favours to Tutsi in business (obtaining import licenses, bank loans, construction sites, public markets, etc.).
5. All strategic positions, political, administrative, economic, military and security should be entrusted only to Hutu.
6. The education sector (school pupils, students, teachers) must be majority Hutu.
7. The Rwandan Armed Forces should be exclusively Hutu. The experience of the October 1990 war has taught us a lesson. No member of the military shall marry a Tutsi.
8. The Hutu should stop having mercy on the Tutsi.
9. The Hutu, wherever they are, must have unity and solidarity and be concerned with the fate of their Hutu brothers.
The Hutu inside and outside Rwanda must constantly look for friends and allies for the Hutu cause, starting with their Hutu brothers.
They must constantly counteract Tutsi propaganda.
The Hutu must be firm and vigilant against their common Tutsi enemy.
10. The Social Revolution of 1959, the Referendum of 1961, and the Hutu Ideology, must be taught to every Hutu at every level. Every Hutu must spread this ideology widely. Any Hutu who persecutes his brother Hutu for having read, spread, and taught this ideology is a traitor. (Wikipedia)

Anyone recognising this kind of stuff yet?
“So you think this can’t happen in South Africa?” Mironko asked.
He suggested we write our histories down. There must be multiplicity of voices. PREPARATION. Victims are identified and separated. The USA was asked to block the extremist broadcasts but they refused. Freedom of speech,they said. Moderates are eliminated.
EXTERMINATION. Once it starts it becomes the norm. This is then genocide.
This is followed by DENIAL. Justification, blame the victims. Eliminate the survivors who might be witnesses.
I went to Rwanda and eastern Zaire in the wake of the genocide of 1994. It was a horror beyond imagination. The suffering. Yet the majority of the suffering I was seeing was that of the perpetrators of the genocide. I have scanned and included a set of images from the choleric suffering of the hutus who fled the Rwandan Patriotic Front liberation of the country from the genocidaires. A Francophone doctor walked through the crowd of dead and dying people “This is an act of God!” he shouted and laughed and laughed. This while the French military were stopping the Tutsi rebel army entering areas where extremist Hutus were still killing Tutsi civilians.
The pile of confiscated weaponry at Zairean immigration was a still life of death. The world hastened to assist these refugees, mobilizing vast resources. Yet the same world and United Nations, despite being in place, had failed to stop the carnage, only assisting European citizens escape the mayhem. Countries did not even name the killings for what they were – genocide – as this would have compelled them top act. It was a shameful time to be a human. Some weeks later I would go to Rwanda itself, and watch the cost of the genocide within the country. The orphanage dedicated to the children of rape. The psychiatric hospital for those who lost their minds. The prison, overflowing with killers, including children.
The talk moved and disturbed me. Unfortunately I had to leave before I heard of the possible ways to prevent genocide and it was just that classification and prejudice should be challenged, tolerance and understanding must transcend classification.
The search for common ground is vital to early prevention. Mironko hoped that perhaps one hundred of us would leave the talk and try to prevent the seeds of genocide, wherever we can.
“Use whatever you can to stop the killings. Good people must not keep silent,” he said.

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Disclaimer: This is a blog I have not wanted to write, hoping instead to have made a hard-hitting and widely watched documentary, or had the feature film script I wrote hit the big screens, but sadly this has not happened.

I am stung by guilt whenever I think of Eritrea. This is a story about my friends; friends who have been locked up, exiled and tortured. My only weapon to try and help them is publicity, yet I have failed spectacularly in using this to assist them.

I hope that the story you will read here will prompt some action, some movement.

The Silver Halide Martyrs:
Eritrean warrior-photographers, 1963-2011

From revolutionary conformity to political dictatorship – a tale of propaganda, courage & martyrdom.

For 30 years, Eritreans fought for independence from Ethiopia in a single-minded and disciplined way. Uniquely for any liberation movement, they diverted scarce resources to document and promote their struggle. But after freedom was won, the revolutionary leadership found it increasingly difficult to be accountable, or fully democratic, a mistake in a nation willing to sacrifice all for freedom. Or so it seemed, at first.

I first went to Eritrea in what was the bloom of its newfound independence, 1997. I became infatuated with this tiny country, it’s people and it’s history. I loved the Art Deco capital of Asmara, with its vintage Fiats and antique Gaggia coffee machines. That infatuation grew into love when I found out that there were over 500,000 negatives and 20,000 hours of footage from their struggle.

While searching through folder after folder of black & white negatives, apparently taken by suicidally brave men and women, I came across an image I feel is the best war photograph I have ever seen. It was in 1990, during the Ethiopian criminal aerial bombing of the Red Sea port city of Massawa after it had fallen to the guerrillas. Solomon Abraha’s simple, shocking image saws more about war and civilians than I could ever imagine.

Uniquely, the Eritrean revolutionaries fighting for independence from Ethiopia made a decision in the ’Sixties to assign fighters – both male and female – to record the war. They wanted to be in a position to write their own history, and not have their epic struggle distorted by the outside world. They also had to use propaganda to unite the diverse peoples of Eritrea against Ethiopia. The warrior-photographers brief was to be both soldier and reporter, and to decide when to shoot with the camera or with the gun.

The archive chronicles the full tapestry of the Eritrean struggle: the early rebellion; the famine of the ’Eighties that Emperor Haile Selassie exacerbated in an attempt to starve the revolution into submission and the ten long years when the Eritrean guerillas were living in underground bunkers, besieged by the massive Ethiopian army.

Many of the documentarists died, others survived: former photographer Russom Fesahaye, recounts how it began:

“At first we were all guerillas, in the field. All I wanted to do was to fight. But later it was realized that we had to document the battles. I had worked in a photo lab in Asmara before I joined up. The Eritrean People’s Liberation Force gave me a Zenith (camera). Gun in one hand, camera in the other.
“It is so good that we did this because the pictures are our history and they will always stay. When you are writing you can say anything but for the pictures you actually have to be there. Fighting was always the main thing. Photographing was something you did when you had time.
“With a gun you can hide, not with a camera. You have to be right in the front line with the small ammunition.”

As a former conflict photographer I thought it appropriate that I should take my new bride, Leonie to Eritrea on honeymoon. Leonie fell in love with the country too, but not yet the photographer she is now, found my endless questioning of the veterans on her very first honeymoon tedious and irritating. She spent hours watching Eritrean television and was dismayed by the crass propaganda that glorified the ‘victorious’ second war against Ethiopia, that Eritrea had actually recently lost. As our honeymoon progressed, we also discovered that one of the world’s darling revolutions is quietly slipping into a dictatorship.

My rather naïve enthusiasm for the photographs was tarnished by a gradual understanding that many pictures have been set up, and scenes re-created for the camera, from my diary:
“It was an heroic endeavor – something I as a photojournalist can only stand in awe of. The thousands of negative contact sheets (the single sheet of photographic paper onto which all the pictures from a roll of film are printed, in the sequence in which they were shot) began to tickle my mind. Yes, there were in that collection some of the best and most honest war photographs I have ever seen, but there was more to it than that.

“To me, contact sheets are the windows into the photographer’s mind, his sub-conscious. The contact sheets of the Eritrean photographers were a journey into a world unexplored. I asked myself why were there so many pictures of Eritrean fighters vaulting the dead bodies of Ethiopian soldiers. Some, at least, had to be set up, a lie in black & white. Suddenly you are excruciatingly aware that these brave journalists are also propagandists.”

The Eritrean warrior-photographers were portraying their own conflict – does one expectthem to adhere to the ‘objective’ standards of journalism taught at Western schools, or even want them to?

How did the individuals choose when to play each of their various roles – photographer, fighter, patriot, comrade, propagandist? The interviews with some of the warrior-documentarists explain their motivation: they worked within a collective, and their sensitivities were attuned to the success of that collective endeavor – The Struggle.

The interviews were conducted in early 2001 – a precarious time, when Eritrea’s civil society was on the edge of an explosion following a catastrophic and mysterious war against Ethiopia (1997-2000). I had been shooting on the Ethiopian side in 1999, though severely restricted by that government too. This war – likened to the trench warfare of the First World War – followed an ecstatic liberation and six years of peace. The only feasible explanation for its origin is that the presidents of Ethiopia and Eritrea, former allies and allegedly cousins had lived out a growing personal animosity through the nations they led.

The interviews with some of the warrior-photographers are frustrating, as if no one understands the moral dilemmas of the act of photographing death, nor propaganda being a lie. “It was our duty,” is the most common answer. Surprisingly, the venerated co-founder of the ruling party and then Minister for Trade and Industry Haile Weldensae proved to be frank and critical. He questions the failure of his government to make the transition to a true democracy:

“We have to suffer from what we have done before. In following one line of thought, one school of thought, there are costs that one has to pay.
“That ideology was a very motivating thing and the people were very committed. That is why, in the liberation struggle period, the photographers – the propagandists – had an important role in the society.
“But it is not without a cost and it is particularly after independence that you start realising the cost.
“The Eritrean people need much more room for democracy… it is not something that has to be granted. This is already what had been struggled for. Almost every family has paid its dear sons and daughters to the struggle for 30 years. And now, in the last two and half years war with Ethiopia, families who had lost all their sons and daughters except one, have contributed this only remaining son or daughter to this defense of the country. Who has the right to air opinion more than this family? They have the right. It’s not a privilege, it’s not something that a government … should grant to them.”

Like most westerners that come to Eritrea, the romance of the plucky and resourceful Eritrean’s liberation struggle ensured Leonie and I were pro-Eritrean. But not all was well in this supposedly Utopian society: there were ominous signs of disquiet among senior politicians and fighters who do not find the ruling clique’s rationale for the latest bloody war convincing.

One of the highlights of our time there was to meet and interview the most famous of Eritrean war journalists, the cameraman and film-maker Seyoum Tsehaye. As a child, he dreamed of being a journalist, but instead he volunteered to fight for liberation. While on the frontline against the Ethiopians he received orders to report for training as a cameraman. It was inevitable that his work would stand out from the rest. His frankness in speaking of the stress that accompanied his work was also a far cry from the stony and duty-bound answers of his colleagues. His life became a living nightmare of torn morality and conscience:

“You feel guilty when you take all these pictures. It is different for somebody who is helping these people, than (it is) for somebody who is taking pictures, just standing over someone who is dying or bleeding.
“You suffer the video, and you know the rule: you cannot cut it in a fraction. You have to stay longer and the more you stay with the agony, with the crime, with the suffering, the more you suffer.”

Seyoum’s duty as a soldier was to follow his orders: to record an endless series of war crimes against his people. Inside, he says, he died a little every time he had to film his compatriots bleeding.

“For about a month, I couldn’t sleep, all these people come in the night in front of me like a video, you know, all of them.”

It was the courage of this great patriot – patriot in the true sense, as opposed to that which is the refuge of scoundrels – that first alerted us to the real troubles in Eritrea. His outspoken criticism of the futility of the recent border wars was unusual in a land blanketed by fear of dissent

On the other hand, Solomon Abraha, protégé and friend to Seyoum, was unquestioning of his role. He was clear of his duty as a warrior-photographer during the war, and even now is a cameraman with the Ministry of Information. He is the author of perhaps the most powerful anti-war photograph ever taken (Boy after air raids, Massawa 1990).

A journalist with the state English language newspaper whom I had befriended on an earlier assignment in 1997, Paulos Zaid, was assigned as our translator and fixer, actually he was meant to be our minder. On our last night in Eritrea, he whispered that he had been told that he might be in danger because of his views about freedom of expression. Anonymous friends had warned him that he might be forcibly conscripted or jailed.

What followed in the weeks after our departure was a merciless crackdown on dissenters ahead of the proposed first multi-party election in this single party state. Paulos disappeared, and repeated calls, emails and faxes could not raise him. None of his colleagues could say where he was. His best friend, Kidane Yibrah also disappeared. Seyoum could not be reached either. We feared the worst.

It emerged that the Trade and Industry Minister Haile Weldensae had been arrested, along with other leading figures who opposed the President Isaias Aferwerke’s increasingly authoritarian rule. The silence around the fate of the Eritreans became oppressive, and even the Committee to Protect Journalists could not discover what had befallen them.

Then, after months of silence, an email arrived from Paulos Zaid:

“It is now my 6th month since I left Eritrea on foot with only my sandals, single trousers and a shirt. This is to say that I left your address in my wallet, which I deliberately discarded at the jungle while I was crossing the mine-infested border with Ethiopia.
“At the moment, I do not have good news to tell you. If you remember my discussion with both of you at your hotel’s parking lot the night before you left, I was losing hope about and confidence in the much-talked politics of Eritrea. However, I did not realize that things would be falling apart at such speed as they have been doing in the past six months. Worse, the fire that is consuming many innocent Eritreans was to come to me if I did not flee on time. A couple of weeks after you left, I was picked up by three agents on my way home who just told me that I was frequently seen with ferenjis (White people).”
“Seyoum Tsehaye was also detained after I left. I really do not know on what charges he was detained. But I am sure it is not because of the dinner you hosted. Maybe Leonie cursed him for terrifying her about the lasagna she had that night. I very much suspect ..xx.. to have a role in all this plot. God, forgive me if I am wrong and sinning.
“Now I am contacting the CPJ to help me acquire a political asylum. Until recently I did not have freedom of movement. Now the situation is improving and I may contact the UNHCR and western embassies. I expect your advice in this case. I also need you to contact the CPJ people to put pressure on the matter. I wish I were exiled in Mars. If not in USA, Switzerland or Australia respectively. Am I demanding too much?
“Initially, I was very much disturbed and for some time suffered from insomnia. Now my health is improving. Internet service is very expensive here – 0.75 cents per minute. I have so far sacrificed 10 cigarettes to write to you. If I am able to acquire a visa for South Africa my first and major task will be to uncover the theft of your Volkswagen.
“(Under a distressful situation, humor serves as best medicine humankind could cheat themselves, Paulos Zaid, Fleeing Experience, Detention camp Press, 2099)
“Before I forget it let me tell you this: Kidane, the dark guy in a military uniform you saw in Asmara, has also cooperated with me in fleeing. Reason: (a) He fears death in a combat, (b) he was also considered as my accomplice in my “crime” of spying for a superpower. (c) he feared no one would accompany him in prison if I left alone.”

Kidane Yibrah was ostensibly a sports journalist seconded from national military service. Now safe in exile, Kidane revealed that he had led a secret life: he was one of the founders of an underground newspaper. Newly plugged into this journalistic diaspora, we discover that Seyoum Tsehaye had beens arrested, and that Haile Weldensae may have been killed while in detention.

Eventually, both Paulos and Kidane managed to get to the US, and were they were granted asylum, with the help of the CPJ.

While many have made lives outside of Eritrea, Seyoum is still in jail. Reports from a prison guard who escaped the country say that Seyoum has been held in solitary since his arrest He is frequently tortured, yet he remains unbowed.

The government remains as resolute, refusing to budge, in fact turning the entire country into a giant prison. In 1999, Time magazine writer Johanna McGeary and I spent a little time with the president Isaias Afwerki, and he did not seem insane. Yet now, I am sure he and his inner circle should be in an insane asylum.

A few contact sheets from my trip in 1997. Massawa, Eritrea.

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Mogadishu was like no other place I had ever been. I finally understood what ‘anarchic’ meant. Violence drifted through the muggy air like a malignant smoke. The only way to travel was to hire a pick-up truck overflowing with militia – nomads with automatic weapons.

Everyone chewed the narcotic of choice – Khat. Their cheeks bulging with the foul leave, teeth stained a deep reddish-brown.

My team of hired guns included a twelve year old boy in flip flops carrying a fifty caliber machine gun, replete with bandoliers. It also had the unarmed person among them – the translator. Always a melancholic university graduate whose life had – like everyone else’s – turned to hell in the clan warfare following the ouster of dictator Siad Barre.

I have to admit, I liked it.

Until, that is, we reached the tiny town of Baidoa, set in the non-descript Somali bush. That was simply hell. The reek of death was everywhere, and children’s eyes lost the fight to live before your very eyes.

As the idiotic greed of Somalia’s clans ensures the war continued until once again, nineteen years later, the disaster is repeated. There is no Siad Barre,l but instead gutless and greedy pols and a bunch of ‘looterers’  pretending to represent the will of their god.

I might, should I find the emotional energy, write in some depth about my experiences there in 1992, 1993 and 1994.  Until then, here are some images .

The room in Baidoa where kids were left to die. 1992

A father closes the eyes of his daughter who had just died while awaiting help at an NGO station, Baidoa. He walked off into the distance.

People desperate for water, Baidoa. There was never enough to go around.

Somalis outside a distribution point hoping they will get a chance for water and food

Fallen grain is eaten raw after a delivery of food aid, Baidoa.

A woman leads a line of starving children to get food. Berdale.

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A couple of months ago, I started a list of books I wanted my kids to read when they approached adulthood. While I am no literary buff and basically uneducated, as witnessed by my skirting of  the classics, these novels are among the ones that opened my mind.

Since I have the world’s worst memory, there are a probably a hundred more that should be here, but have slipped through the cracks of my brain.

Gunter Grass. The Flounder. The Tin Drum. etc.

Thomas Pynchon.  V. Mason & Dixon. and so on.

Jim Dodge. FUP.

Joseph Heller. Catch 22.

Naguib Mahfouz. Midaq Alley

Joseph Conrad. Heart of Darkness.

Herman Hess.  Siddartha.

William Boyd. The Destiny of Nathalie X.

Graham Green - all and anything by him

Douglas Adams. Hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy.

Ken Kesey. One flew over the Cuckoos Nest.

Gabriel Garcia Marques. Love in the time of cholera. 100 Years of Solitude.

Ante Andric.  Bridge over the river Drina.

Ben Okri. The famished road.

Moses Isegawa. The Abyssinian Chronicles.

Tim Robbins.   Still life with Woodpecker

John Steinbeck. Of Mice and Men.

Cormac McCarthy. Border Trilogy

Evelyn Waugh. Scoop.

Albert Camus. The Stranger

Franz Kafka. The Trial

JRR Tolkien. Lord of the Rings.

Richard Adams. Watership Down.

John Updike.   take your pick.

John Irving. The World According to Garp.

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Under shady trees, I pass close by a security gate. A deep-throated bark stirs my adrenal gland.

A dog in a Springbok jersey, number 14. Boerboel, muscular, cut. Ray Mordt, I thought without hesitation.

Overgrown sidewalk, man in sunglasses and lumber jacket walking towards me, his hands are in his pockets.

As he nears to within touching distance, I say “Eyta.”

He says ‘Howzit.’

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Four countries meet at Impalila Island, Namibia. This tiny island is forged by the meeting of two great rivers – the Chobe and the Zambezi. The rivers are strident and powerful, each current wanting to rush ahead, to the great plunge that is the Smoke that Thunders – the Victoria Falls.

When I first ventured into the northern Botswana wilderness in September of 1986 e,  I was on the lam from extended military service in Apartheid South Africa, and the South African military had just struck at refugees/liberation fighters/exiles in Gabarone.

A young white male from over the border was viewed with great suspicion. That I was riding a bicycle did ameliorate some fears that I was there to kill and maim.  When I stopped at the desolate Dudkwe refugee camp to try and find South African exiles, people I felt I could befriend – the Batswana police guarding it decided to have a bit of fun with me before sending me on my way. They told me that South African President PW Botha, die Groot Krokodil, had died. It was amazing news that might affect my self-imposed ‘exile’, as he was the guiding hand behind South Africa’s ‘kragdadigheid’ and ‘Rooi Gevaar’ policies. Perhaps my half-insane country would retreat from regional conflicts.

We toasted his death with Coca Cola before I pedaled off with a light heart and a heavy bike. It was weeks before I realized that far from dead, PW was leading my people with a lively belligerence.

The tar road arrowed north, and so did I, at a snail’s pace. The thick Kalahari sands to the West and the attractions of the Okavango Swamps were not ideal for my overladen butcher boy bike. It was thus that I ended up on the border of the place I had been trying to avoid – occupied South West Africa. I set up my hammock on the banks of the wide Chobe River and gazed across at a country that seemed to be rather peacefully at war.

My extended military service (‘camps’) should have seen me sent to The Border, as South Africans called the war zone between Angola and South West Africa, and as a vaguely Marxist, vehemently atheist and militantly anti Racist young man, I felt it beholden on me not end up in a brown bush uniform with a rifle in my hands.

Chobe was, and is, a wildlife paradise, but it also abutted a war zone and so I can only assume there was an endless stream of spies and spooks in that geographically sensitive area, and that many viewed me as one.

Nonetheless, after several months of hanging out in villages, I was approached by guerillas of the Caprivi African National Union, or CANU (later merged with/subsumed into SWAPO) was a organisation seeking independence for the Caprivi from South African controlled SWA. The man who approached me was short and strongly built, with low-lidded eyes and a slow, determined way about him. His name was Ernst Likando. After a couple of meetings, he invited me to cross with him into SWA, by dug-out canoe. It was a test. Apparently I passed, because some weeks later, when I crossed more conventionally by car at the border post, I was welcomed back at Impalila Island by my new friend Ernst, and a cell of CANU activists, some of whom looked like they had just fallen out of a Seventies fashion catalogue.

At a clandestine meeting observed by just a few dozen villagers, I was asked to supply them with information on SA troop movements, and more importantly, to try and get publicity for their movement.  I agreed to try, but doubted I would have much luck. Within a couple of hours after the meeting, as Ernst and I sat with our feet dangling in the Chobe Rivers rapids, sipping warm beer, a helicopter flew low overhead.
“That’s for you,” intoned Ernst, his face impassive, as he stared into the waters.
“Me?” I responded, surprised.

Sure enough, soon a message arrived that I was to come to the village – the Security Branch wished to have a chat with me. There were two white South Africans. One fully bearded and the other clean shaven. The bearded one never spoke, but the other was a Sgt Basson, and he let it be known they knew all about my illegal visits, and that I had overstayed my Botswana visa (hence the need to cross in the Caprivi Strip).

In fact, he knew a lot more about who i met and what I did than I was comfortable with. He threatened to have me deported whenever he chose. Then he switched tack, and commented on how expensive it must be, this traveling and all. Perhaps he could assist me meet those costs. All he wanted in return was for me to let them know when something happened that would endanger innocent lives, or the lives of my countrymen. They wanted to know when terrorists crossed into SWA.

I was walking a tightrope. I had to convince him that of course I would, but also that I did not want to endanger the research I was doing. Did I mention that I was doing research? Ah, yes, that was my cover – anthropological research on the effects of the border on the culture of the BaSubiya people. And yes, I was doing just that, except that I had not even passed the first year at university and the research was well … really something I could hold onto in the exquisite boredom of hanging out in Botswana, the Switzerland of Africa.

The chopper took off, and no-one in the village would meet my eye. I went back to Ernst and told him about the conversation. He laughed and said, “We can give you information to feed them. It will be useful.” And so began my short and uneventful life as a double agent. Very short and very uneventful. And since I refused the Security Branch’s money, it was not even lucrative, silly me.

After my third relaying of imaginary information at the SB headquarters at Katimo Muliolo, Sgt Basson grew angry. The previous nonsense they had accepted so eagerly had probably led to a lot of confusion. It was time to retreat back to Botswana. As I write this now, I realize that I could/can be considered a traitor. Technically speaking, of course. I think I can live with that.

By then, I had in reality, made an anthropological breakthrough. I had established a relationship with the most powerful and sought after Basubiya spirit medium healer in the area: Shakanda. I was able to attend his Morupas or drumming ceremonies in both Botswana and the much more culturally conservative Caprivi Strip, where he hailed from.

Years later, when I passed through Caprivi in 1999, I sought him out and he invited me to yet another all-night ceremony. After a long and tiring night, as he slumped in a chair, facing the rising sun, he asked “So, you like my new act?”

Copyright Greg Marinovich 2011
more images can be seen at http://gregmarinovich.photoshelter.com/gallery/Caprivi-Strip-Chobe-1985-6/G0000CsAhJVZ08nE

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