Louie and the landmine manual
The US Embassy had sent me a document requesting that the holder be allowed passage to Luanda. We went to one of the offices in the long building with the veranda to print the document, and Louie loaned me his laptop to access my email. After wrestling with the printer for a while, Giorgi got it to work for me. After I returned Louie’s laptop to him, we relaxed for a while in the office while it rained outside. I noticed a set of manuals on a shelf, and I went over to have a look. Most were large tomes with boring names like “Standard Operating Procedures,” but a small spiral-bound book caught my attention. It was an ordnance handbook containing diagrams, pictures, and descriptions of commonly encountered landmines and projectiles. Louie noticed what I was reading, and as I leafed through it, he would make comments like “We pulled a lot of those from around Cuito Cuanavale” or “Nasty ones, those.” He knew a lot of them by their technical names at a glance, and in general he demonstrated an impressive breadth and depth of knowledge on the subject.
It became obvious to me how depraved landmine manufacturers and planters could be. For instance, anti-vehicle mines are supposed to be used solely to incapacitate a tank or other heavy machinery, so they require a lot of force to trigger. Louie said it was common to find several anti-personnel mines planted around an anti-vehicle mine so that one person would set off a devastating chain explosion. Also, some mines in the manual looked like toys, with cheerful colors and interesting shapes, as if to target unsuspecting children. Landmines in general seem to bring out the sadistic side of humanity in their indiscriminate application of destruction. They are intensely impersonal in delivering their payload, and there must be an incredible sense of anonymity as they are laid in the ground to wait days or decades for a victim. And it brought home how little consideration was given to the long-term impact on Angola.
Disposal pictures and video
Louie talked about how HALO disposes of the weapons they find, and he brought up some pictures and videos on his computer. One image showed a large cache of weapons and unexploded ordnance that had recently been discovered near Menongue. Barely hidden in the bushes, hundreds of bombs, mines, and guns sat exposed to the elements for decades, apparently staged but never deployed. With nerves of steel and steady hands, Louie and crew counted, sorted, and disposed of the stash. Each item was triaged, and anything deemed too unstable to move was detonated in place. Everything else was carefully stacked in a hole in the ground, and the biggest explosives were placed at the bottom of the pile to ensure complete destruction of the lot. He showed me a picture of a hole neatly lined with all manner of war implements. He then played the video of the entire cache being detonated. The scene opened in a peaceful forest, a breeze lightly stirring the trees. I couldn’t tell where the weapons were buried until a loud crack sounded through the trees and the location was marked by a dark cloud shooting up into the sky.
Talk on the veranda
After a while, the rain started to let up. Christy, Louie, and I relaxed in the veranda, and the talk tended toward what they had learned and observed during their time in Angola, ranging from wildlife to politics, particularly the corruption that had permeated the previous president’s administration.
With only a state-run news outlet, hard facts about corruption and politics in Angola were difficult to find and harder still to confirm. In the absence of reliable sources, rumor and conjecture abounded. The HALO team in Menongue had plenty of both to share. When the topic of corruption in Angola is brought up, the name dos Santos can’t be far behind. The former president, Jose Eduardo dos Santos, used Angola as his personal piggy bank, passing laws out in the open that benefited only him and his inner circle, making deals behind closed doors, and skimming large sums of money from the country’s coffers. Then there is dos Santos’s daughter, Isabel. She clearly was a major beneficiary of her father’s self-philanthropy, receiving lucrative appointments and entire companies at the stroke of daddy’s pen. Despite the obvious source of her wealth, Isabel dos Santos maintains that she owes her success only to her business acumen and clever deal-making skills.
Jose dos Santos was replaced in 2017 by a new president, João Lourenço. The new president seems to be making good on his promise to ferret out corruption and eliminate it, but the jury is still out on how much positive impact he can or will have. He is from the same party as dos Santos, and some think he is cut from the same cloth. However, he has condemned Isabel and other dos Santos cohorts, demanding that the wealth they stole be repatriated to Angola from offshore shelter accounts.
Oddly, the people of Angola don’t always act like they have a dog in this fight against corruption. Not enough voters expect the next politician to be better than the last, and perhaps some aspire to be the next person to make a fortune in Angolan politics. Regardless, it was Lourenço who simplified Angola’s tourist visa process in 2018, making it possible for me to arrive in time to get stranded by the coronavirus. So at the very least, I credit him for that.
Parachutes and flails
I naturally wondered: how do you get humanitarian work done in a country like Angola? With respect to demining efforts, the nature of the proxy war made a particularly nasty mess to clean up. Though some combatants tried to keep accurate maps and turned them over to HALO, there was a lot of irresponsible and indiscriminate laying of landmines by certain parties during the war. I was told that some reckless units would just parachute into a region and randomly seed the entire area with mines as they retreated.
I asked if HALO ever used the demining flails that I had seen in videos, large machines like bulldozers that pound the ground with chains to detonate mines. Christy told me such machines are not quite the panacea that they would seem. Aside from the obvious problems of high initial investment and recurring cost of fuel and maintenance, the machines have poor effectiveness on steep grades and in thick bush. They are most effective on flat ground with few obstructions. And Angola presented some unique challenges. Angola is crisscrossed with rivers. During and immediately after the civil war, there were few permanent bridges still standing. The only option for deploying such heavy hardware was to fly it in. Airplanes capable of such operations were prohibitively expensive and often unavailable. Lastly, once a large machine had gone through an area, quality control protocols still required deminers on their hands and knees to certify that the area was cleared. The big machines are occasionally used to help confirm a suspected minefield, but they are not put to wide-spread use.
National Geographic, Okavango & Mines
The conversation turned to the topic of wildlife. It was noted that there were few big animals left in central Angola. Economic conditions combined with decades of war and rampant poaching decimated the wildlife populations as the animals were killed and either eaten or sold. An estimated 100,000+ elephants have been destroyed over the decades. A similar devastation has befallen hippos. There are a few wildlife preserves, but they were largely neglected during the war and are still poorly funded. Some species are making a comeback in those protected areas, but poaching is still a big problem, as there is not enough coverage, and poachers who are caught often face little punishment.
Christy said there is still wildlife more than 100 kilometers into the bush. For the moment, it is difficult to get at them, thanks to the lack of access and the landmines that keep even the most intrepid poachers and adventurers at bay. As the curtain of landmines is slowly lifted, and the area starts to open for development and tourism, the wildlife far back in the bush will be threatened. Safeguards need to be in place to protect the animals from the impacts of tourism and poaching. That is where the National Geographic Okavango Wilderness Project comes in. The elephants and hippos live along the Cuito River watershed that feeds the Okavango Delta. The project’s expeditions continue to shed light on the urgent need for a framework of laws and regulations to protect this vast, untouched area. The conservation of the Okavango Delta is part of a larger initiative to protect the natural resources of Angola. National Geographic is partnering with conservation organizations and the governments of Angola, Namibia, and Botswana to preserve the unmatched biodiversity that is the Okavango River Basin and Delta. This is a critical time for the hidden wildlife of Angola. Without vital protection soon, several species could disappear forever from the Angolan landscape.
Dinner and a movie
By the time we were done talking on the veranda, the sun was sinking toward the horizon. We hadn’t expected to still be at the base, but we were obviously going nowhere that day. The question of what to do with me came up. They could probably tell that I didn’t want to go back after spending the day at HALO base. Though I missed my new friends at OM base, I didn’t relish the thought of slinking back in failure a second time. Thankfully, Christy didn’t deem it necessary to send me back for the night. He told Louie to “get housekeeping to make up a bed” for me, and it was settled. I got to stay.
There wasn’t much left to the evening, and we all hoped to have a busy morning loading up the vehicles once permission was granted by the governor. Dinner and a movie for the evening was a quarter of a chicken for each of us and an old John Cusack film. It grew dark and still outside, and the gentle evening sounds of insects and rustling leaves came through the window screens. Christy and Giorgi turned in, and when the movie ended, Louie showed me where my room was. I expressed my gratitude for all his help. His response was one I had heard many times that day.
“No worries”
Bedtime and a cold shower
My room was in the back of the bungalow. It had a bed with a mosquito net canopy, a storage bench that doubled as a seat, and a lit mosquito coil to ward off the little biters. The coil burned out after a few minutes, and I didn’t bother to relight it. The bed’s canopy would be my protection. I wanted to start the next day fresh, so I headed to the other side of the courtyard to one of the shower rooms. I had gotten used to not assuming amenities, so when I turned what I thought was the hot water handle and only cold water came out, I took it in stride and had myself a cold and quick shower. The evening was still warm enough to keep me from shivering as I headed back to my room, anticipating the excitement of the next day.
Welcome to Angola 