There was a nasty battle at the dusty Angolan village of Savate. I first passed through here in 2012 and paid
it little attention, except to take a photograph of some political graffiti on
the wall of a ruined house from the colonial era. “Viva the People of Cuba!” it shouted across the decades, its anger diluted
by the years. I had fought some distance
from here in 1987, to the south and east of Cuito Cuanavale, and on my previous
trip I was in a hurry to get back there.
Three years later I am passing through again. Today we’ve driven from
Rundu in Namibia, and by the time we’ve endured the tedious Angolan border
procedures, Savate, at 75 kilometres from the border, is a good place to stop
for the night.
This time I see the town differently because I have since met a man
whose brother was killed here. He was a
white conscript fighting with 32 Battalion and became another small tragedy in
a whole desert of sadness.
32 Battalion, called The Terrible Ones by their enemies, was a unit of
Angolans originally drawn from the beleaguered liberation movement the National
Liberation Front of Angola, when rival liberation armies turned on each other
after the Portuguese shrugged off their colony in the ‘70s. 32 Battalion was led by mainly white South African
officers and was based on the Kavango River in Caprivi area of Namibia.
The expedition I’m on is an embodiment of an attempt at
peace-making. Our Land Rover carries
some former Umkhonto we Sizwe members.
We are supporting a group of former SADF conscripts on motorcycles. The
convoy is heading north from the Namibian border post of Katwitwi towards
Menongue and then to Cuito Cuanavale, which, in 1987, was the scene of the biggest
land battle fought in Africa since the Second World War.
Beaten by darkness, we find the local police compound at Savate. The commander is a friendly, quiet spoken man
who invites us to spend the night within the walls of his post. He shows us to the rooms at the back of the
station where there are bunk beds for us to use. Like most villages in Angola
there is no electricity once the compound generator is switched off. Water
comes from a tank in the ground; a bucket is lowered to collect it.
Some of us decide to forego the snoring of the dorms and opt to sleep
under the stars. The lack of electric light means that the Milky Way sprays
across the night sky as an unfathomable cosmic cloud. Before I turn in, I join
some of the group across the road in a small family run restaurant.
It’s an informal affair in a simple corrugated iron structure with a
dim, bare lightbulb and a concrete floor. I’ve eaten from my own supplies but I
keep a couple of the others company by drinking Cuca Lager while they eat. We
smile occasionally at the two Angolan truckers who join us at the long table. The
only language we all understand is the sucking of grease and gravy from
fingers. They report that the chicken is good.
The next morning the expedition leader and former MK member, Patrick,
has some minor repairs to do to the Land Rover. The motorcyclists have
disappeared up the road towards Caiundo. I walk around the village trying to
get a feel of the place. It doesn’t seem like somewhere men fought for their
lives. Chickens scratch in the dust and a few people go about their business
outside the mud or concrete-brick homes. Once there was a FAPLA unit garrisoned
here and it acted as a lightning rod for their enemy, the SADF.
They called it Operation Tiro Tiro.
On the 21st of May 1980, 32 Battalion arrived along the
Kuvango River and the two armies battled. Young people died. Today there are no
soldiers in the village and people work their fields and draw water from the
river. A long way away in South Africa a family remembers a son and brother who
died in a place they have never seen. No doubt other families closer to Savate
remember lost sons too.
Children have taken an interest in me. They request a photograph and
group together to peer into the lens. One isn’t looking at the camera;
something across the way has attracted her. I press the shutter button. I’m
about to shoot another frame when a man, who has been standing close by, steps
into the group of children and turns the wayward child’s head towards me as I
take the next picture. It makes for a slightly comical pair of photographs.
Another man arrives on a new, clean, 150cc Chinese motorcycle. He’s
wearing a blue checked shirt, pressed black trousers and smart shoes. In this
scruffy, dusty town with so many poor people in ragged clothes, he stands out.
Perhaps he is a local government official or maybe he works in the big town of
Menongue, more than two hundred kilometres away. We don’t have a mutual language so, perhaps
to break the thickening ice, he gestures for me to take a photograph of him. He
stands in front of his bike, slightly side on, a self-conscious pose as he
looks beyond the camera and into the distance.
The rough gravel road stretches south to the border with Namibia and
north to Caiundo where the tar eventually begins. It has given our
motorcyclists some difficulty. They will have fallen a few times before they
make the smooth black-top. Here in the village the home-made houses are linked
by sandy tracks. Next to the police compound there are some new houses. They
look like they have been built for government officials and the police
officers. A new tarred street, lined with incongruous kerbstones, runs past
their front doors.
I want to take the man who lost his brother something from Savate, something
that will show the town in peacetime so that he will have an image in his mind
other than his mental reconstruction of a dirty fight next to a river. When
Patrick has finished tinkering with the Land Rover, we six passengers cram into
the vehicle and clatter down to the Kuvango. It is a serene and beautiful
place. The river is wide and the slow water swirls southwards towards Namibia,
small eddies creasing its membrane. This flow will eventually pass the place
where the young soldier was based. It will continue the journey he was unable
to. His life dried up so violently in Angola, along with many others, while his
comrades carried on.
I try to capture the peacefulness of the scene in photographs. The war is long gone and the river still runs
the same course and the reeds hush us and we speak in murmurs as our footfalls
grate on the stony ground. I steal a stone from beneath the cold, clear water
and then take a shot of the place. For
the man whose brother died here.
As the philosopher, George Santayana wrote: “Only the dead have seen the
end of war”. The remaining warriors must find peace as best they can.
