A couple of weeks ago I predicted that the Chechen thugs Putin had sent to Ukraine would probably lead to atrocities. I knew there would be some, atrocities and ill-disciplined poorly trained troops are partners in war. They are always found together. I did not however realise that Putin would use the Chechens against his own troops to keep them on the front line. Now, instead of a victory speech on the 9th of May, it is predicted that Putin may announce that the war will no longer be called a ‘special operation’, rather it will be declared a ‘war.’ When is a war not a war? That will in all likelihood mean further conscription along with all reserves being called up under a leadership eroded both by the enemy and the Kremlin. It will see the same command and logistical problems compounded which can only lead to many more casualties and poor troop morale. These impressed guys will surely become cannon fodder. I think Putin may find the new youth of Russia will have little stomach for this and as he has not got Stalin’s ruthless power structure to enforce them to march to their death, he may encounter problems closer to home. There is just not enough Chenchen militia for this brutal task. Let's hope there is a coup in Russia so this madness can end as this canker will surely spread if unchecked or allowed to stagnate.
The weather here in Portugal cannot make up its mind if it is spring or summer. Every day brings a different climate. Hot and sunny one day, overcast and cold the next. Despite this, the garden is growing with many of the summer flowers including the roses coming into bloom. The daffodils, tulips and crocuses have decided summer is here and have long disappeared. I have included a couple of pictures of Rozanne and I gardening. I am cutting ivy from the wall which invades us from the neighbour's side while Rozanne burnt all our spring prunings. Like her sister but not as bad she has some pyromania in her nature. We are also having our tiled roof cleaned.
As a subject this week in this open section I thought I would talk about friends. What a broad subject it is. Thinking about it in my mind there are many categories of friends. At my age along with my earlier gregarious life, I have collected many friendships over the years. Unfortunately at my age, death is now eroding more close friends than new ones.
I cannot think why a friend cannot be a family member or a life partner. For myself I would include them, if I was not friendly with my wife, life would be hell.
“Time doesn’t take away from friendship, nor does separation.” - Tennessee Williams
The more you think about it there are many layers of friends. There are close lifetime friends where geography and time do not change their status while many friends of a period or location come and go fading in time. These would include school friends, childhood friends, college friends, even in my case merchant navy friends, farming friends including neighbours and ex-employees, army friends, business friends and social friends, sometimes the last two combined. You will notice I have not mentioned girlfriends. Funnily enough, some of my best friends are women. From all these friendships, there are always a few that become close friends. My definition of a close friend;
“Someone you have close empathy with despite your present circumstances or location. There are no age or gender divides.” - Peter McSporran
I will start with childhood friends. Many people say their father and or their mothers were their best friends. I am afraid I cannot say that as my mother passed away before I reached an age where I could recognise her as a friend, while my father, whom I admired, I would not term as a friend. He was a mentor in my early farming days but preferred to be obeyed rather than share intimate times or even show sympathy. The best times with him were always tending the sheep and cattle or attending sales or shows. We never went fishing, played sports together or had a beer together.
On the Isle of Mull in my early life I had few friends, on Mull there was only one other boy present at school most of the time, he being Lachie McPhail from Knock Estate where his father was a ghillie and stockman. There were six girls but at that age, they were to be avoided. Lachie’s parents often had me stay over during my mother's illness but once he set off to senior school and with me being sent to Cambeltown, that was the end of that friendship. The only other real friend I had on Mull was Jimmy McRae, one of our shepherds' sons who came to work on the estate after I left the local school. It was not a close friendship, one rather brought about by location and solitude. We were the only boys on the estate of equal age. He loved football and was good at it. So while we would meet for the company I did not enjoy my time being the permanent goalie. My younger brother also used to coerce me into kicking a ball, even at an early age excelling in comparison to my efforts. I liked fishing and later rugby. At that time on Mull, I do not think they knew what a rugby ball was and fishing was a solitary pastime.
“Childhood friends are playmates, not necessarily future substantive soul mates. Young people can change, adults seldom do.” - Peter McSporran
In Cambebetown I made friends with local boys who actually did not go to the same school as me. This friendship was built around roaming the streets in the evenings, rain or shine playing once again, soccer or ‘kick the can’. One chap, Jim McPhee, remained a friend as he also attended senior school at Keil. That particular private school, despite the winds of change, still had a majority of overseas children, mostly sons of military personnel, diplomats and civil servants in the foreign service. Boarding school; you have friends but for me when I left, I left their friendship behind, therefore could they really be called friends? For me, holidays were delightful as I could get home to work or play on the farm where the farmworkers were tolerant and accommodating, they were not friends. On occasion, I did bring friends home but as they did not find farm work fun, rarely twice.
So in thinking back, it is obvious to me that other than Jim McPhee, I never really had any close friends in my childhood, most of my spare time being with adults trying to do adult chores on the farm or in the evening, fishing which, unlike sea fishing was very much a solitary pastime on the river. For the first time, I am asking myself; do I feel I missed out on childhood friendship? No, I do not think so. Childhood friends are what I would call playmates, normally in my case anyone available. Unlike many, my childhood friendships did not survive adulthood.
I Did Not Volunteer For This
Call-ups as I said, were now coming more frequently in 1976. In my case, this was brought about partly due to my boss not applying for exemption even at busy times on the farm. Exemptions were at times granted to farmers and farm managers at critical periods of the farming year. Up until then most of our call-ups were spent in the Northeast which we now knew very well from Mukumbura in the North to the Ruenya River, South of Nyamapanda in the East. I must tell you an anecdote about Nyamapanda.
One time on arriving there before deployment into a rather hot area of Kotwa Tribal Trust Land, we found ourselves having to overnight at the police post there. This post was heavily protected with an earth embankment perimeter and barbed wire concertina fencing, further protected with mines and claymores. There were bunkers for protection from mortars along with protected sleeper firing positions. It was built within sight of the now enemy border post on the Mozambican side manned by allies of our enemy, Frelimo. Both sides had visibility of each other especially if you were on the walls on sentry duty. Most days a sort of informal truce existed as officially we were not at war with Mozambique although ZANLA CTs freely mixed with the Frelimo cadres. On occasion, someone on one or the other side would start a fracas by letting off a round at the other for amusement. This would bring an immediate response developing into a heavy exchange of fire between both sides, including mortars and RPGs. At that time this police station was being run by one of my erstwhile Gwebi College friends, Dave Bradshaw. He had been banished to the operational area from a law and order role in Maradellas town for shooting out the ceramic conductors on the electrical power lines blackening out the whole town. He was in the police, as now not only was the army using territorials but also the police and internal affairs. The police, if you could wangle it, was a much cushier number than the army.
As he was a good friend I thought he may give me a bed in his quarters rather than sleeping on the ground. On my request for amusement, he told me to, “F@3k off and find your own possie!”. Which I did after having a beer with him. Anyway, you were expected to be with your troops as he knew. As fate would have it, someone set off a fracas that night and we were soon exchanging fire including receiving incoming mortars. Suffering no casualties on our side, I went off to have a coffee with Bradshaw the next morning to find a mortar round had come through his roof exploding in the room I may well have slept in. I of course hosed myself and felt justified in saying he got what he deserved for his lack of charity. At a later date in the same area we had, that is our company, the largest contact of the war. This I will recount later.
On returning to Salisbury in May 1976 from call-up we were told rather than disembark from the trucks we were to head off to Fort Victoria, in the Southeast of the country. I should mention our transport was much improved now with both Mercedes 45s and Unimogs now our troop carriers. Speedier on roads and more reliable in the bush than the old RL Bedfords. On arriving at Fort Victoria later that night we were billeted in the cattle lines at the showgrounds where we were informed that this was a new
operational area, to be known as Repulse with a brigader by the name of Bert Barnard in charge. We were also told we were now on indefinite service. That is call-ups would only be broken by a ten-day R&R break between operational deployments. From that day I never liked Bertie Barnard even after the war when he became the CEO of the Zimbabwe Tobacco Association. And I had to liaise with him. He certainly was not a friend and he compounded our dislike for him shortly thereafter arriving at our camp at Nyala Siding after a tough trip across the border telling us we were scruffy and needed to smarten up including a shave. Two things, we only had water to drink in our water bottles while patrolling in the bush which was muddy soup taken from wildlife pans when we came across them and secondly the last thing you should do was wash or use soap. If you washed, the CTs could smell the scent of the soap over a large distance. They would have smelled us before we would have seen them. We all thought he was a complete idiot. He further compounded our lack of respect for him by saying we would clean up the whole of the Southeast in our deployment, despite by then heavily outnumbered with huge daily incursions taking place. Even us dumb troopies on the ground knew that was not going to happen. With the news of indefinite (we called it continuous) call-up on returning to Salisbury for our first R&R under this regime, many of my fellow territorials and their families got in their cars and headed to South Africa or hopped on an aircraft to take them further afield to safe havens such as Australia. The real exodus of the white population from Rhodesia had begun.
Of note on going out for a drink that night with our 2I/C Quentin Haarhoff and CSM Dickie Parker; to our astonishment after finishing his last pint, Quentin then ate a large part of his glass. A feat I have never seen repeated. If I remember correctly the hotel was called The Chevron, a favourite watering hole for those on their way to South Africa by road.
Return from Quelimane in 2011
In fact what I am about to recount about the area in question actually took place over a couple of trips. To save revisiting the area I have included these trips as an amalgamated recount.
On the way up to Quelimane, we stayed at a lodge north of the Zambezi in sight of the new bridge which was very average, to say the least. Although we knew about it, we made the mistake of not stopping over on the south side at M’phingwe Lodge in the Catapu Forest Concession. This hospitality business runs in conjunction with a safari camp, a forest harvesting and reforestation business integrated with various projects such as beekeeping to support the local community and promote conservation. The founder and owner was, and probably still is, Ant White famed for being a founder member of the Rhodesian Special Forces unit known as the Selous Scouts. Many myths and legends are told about this unit including Ant himself. One of these was the claim by a South African security hitman on his trial that Ant had assassinated Olaf Palme, the Swedish Prime Minister. This was found to be untrue but just added to the mysticism around a very nice humble guy when you meet him. Unlike the Chinese who are plundering Mozambique and many other African countries’ forests, Ant runs a massive reforestation program, the envy of many conservationists. For what it is worth, his lodge is an excellent place to stop over, remember the temperatures in that area can commonly reach 40°C so a good meal and an ice-cold beer are very welcome.
The project that Han and I were keen to visit was a sugar greenfield development sponsored by Tata, the large Indian conglomerate. This was being run by what you can only call a pioneer in the form of Rademan Janse van Rensburg. Rademan had given up a successful horticultural enterprise in South Africa to seek his fortune in trying to develop an organic sugar farm on the banks of the Zambezi at a place called Chemba, some hundred kilometres west of the Caia Zambezi Bridge. Admittedly that gravel road to the project was superior to the main north-south highway. I was to visit this area a number of times and actually after Tata abandoned the project, AgDevCo helped fund the start-up of a new organic sugar project, sponsored by Rademan. AgDevCo is no longer involved.
You can either hate or admire Rademan, he is one of these people who have a determination only matched by their focus to succeed. Not the easiest type of person to work with or work for, but he gets things done. His idea was to produce organic sugar from the manure of a large herd of cattle to be run on the surrounding savannah. In that area, nothing can grow without water other than scrub and Baobabs. Of course, there is wildlife present including predators so cattle management along with disease challenges is not the easiest occupation. The temperatures that prevail are too high for traditional cereals including maize so locals rely on fish, wild flora and fauna supplemented by millets. Millets also provide the raw material for alcohol enjoyed with marijuana making the locals fairly laid back, to say the least.
The other trouble I had with Rademan was that he lived on a diet of lentils. While he seemed to flourish on this after a few days my stomach would give up. Following one trip to his new project a number of years later myself, Han and Wigle Vondling, a Dutch friend working for BancoTerra set off for home stopping at Ant Whites lodge for the night. Later that night my stomach virtually exploded up and down. I put it down to Rademan's lentils and homemade mozzarella rather than anything I had eaten for dinner at the lodge. By the time we got back to Chimoio, I was seriously ill and treated myself for malaria. Unfortunately, it got worse and if it had not been for Mona Moorcroft and Michele von Memerty’s excellent nursing, including dragging me along for a professional doctor's advice and further, more drastic, treatment for malaria, I could have seen an early death. When I say professional, it is in the Mozambican context as the doctor was Cuban and claimed his speciality was ‘boob jobs’. I ask you, why in Chimoio in central Mozambique? We live in a droll world, do not let anyone tell you otherwise
Disclaimer: Copyright Peter McSporran. The content in this blog represents my personal views and does not reflect corporate entities.
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