Al J. Venter - Portugals Bush War in Mozambique

Acknowledgements

Portugals Bush War in Mozambiqueis to be my last book on Lisbons colonial conflicts in Africa. There have been quite a few, beginning with The Terror Fighters, which covered the time I spent with the Portuguese Army in Angola in the 1960s.

Portugals Guerrilla Wars in Africawas written much later and was subsequently translated, along with other titles, into Portuguese. To date, that work has gone into five editions in both English and Portuguese, indicating a growing interest in how Portugal survived its distant conflicts in Africa in the 1960s and the first half of the 1970s.

Gaining access to the three Portuguese territories in Africa was always difficult, because unlike the Americansthen fighting a war of their own in Southeast AsiaLisbon rarely encouraged media coverage, especially if the approach came from an estrangeiro, a foreigner. Some journalists (using our own connections) made the grade, but that was a rare achievement; one of the reasons why these African struggles rarely made the news.

My access was due to one man, then a Portuguese Army colonel whom Id first met at the London Embassy where he served as military attach. This was the same man, General Jos Manuel Bettencourt Rodrigues who, among other achievements, was appointed Minister of the Portuguese Army (196870), Commander of Angolas eastern military zone (197173) where he trounced his guerrilla opposition, and finally appointed as Governor General of Portuguese Guinea (197374), today Guin-Bissau.

The colonel had invited me to his office at the embassy to chat about some of my experiences while traveling overland from Cape Town to Dakar, the Senegalese capital. Along the way Id spent time in the Republic of Guinea, a former French possession that had transmogrified from a colony into a Marxist state and by the time I arrived there, was in solid support of a guerrilla army fomenting revolution in Portuguese Guinea.

I was stuck for some time in Koundara, a small town in northern francophone Guinea which lay adjacent to the Senegalese frontier, having been told that my papers were not in order. They were, of course, because Id used the same passport to traverse a dozen other African states as I headed towards London.

In the process, thanks to a couple of Peace Corps volunteers who were teaching there, I was able to observe a lot of what was going on at the time in Koundara, much of it linked to what was happening militarily only a couple of hundred kilometers to the west. In particular, there was a Soviet radio relay station functioning in a house close to where I was staying.

After Id arrived in London a few weeks later, I mentioned this in passing to some of my South African friends and someone must have sent it on to Pretoria. They, in turn, alerted Lisbon, which was why Colonel Bettencourt Rodrigues asked me to join him for coffee.

Axiomatically, one good turn deserves another, and it was to the good colonel that I turned when I wanted to visit Angola a year or two later to cover that war.