The story is about a group of skydivers lured to Mozambique in 1974, at the time on the edge of independence from Portugal, to be seen by an international journalist as South Africans interfering in the internal affairs of a sovereign state. What we used to call a Commie Plot…
Why skydivers?
I had about 60 jumps at the time. I had been a founding member of the Rustenburg Parachuting Club, then joined the Pretoria Parachuting Club where the story starts.
Why Mozambique?
From 1971 until 1974 I had worked as an agricultural research technician, most of that time in Mozambique’s Zambeze Province north of Beira to the Malawi border, in the Zambezi Delta by Helicopter and swamp tractor. From the Shiré River west to Bandar; and east to Murrembala and Mopeia. We mapped from aerial photos to the ground; soils, vegetation, grazing and irrigation potential. Much as Geoff Nourse had done in the story.
What more could a twenty-five year-old with an adventurous spirit want than to head for the wilds of Africa in a Land Rover with a rifle behind the seat? I loved it.
The background towns and villages, for the most part, exist. The “flat-topped mountain” as described could be anywhere in that wild mountainous region between Gorongoza and the mighty Zambezi River.
What about Sierra Mueda, the extinct volcano where the group is forced to jump into the arms of the waiting Frelimo group, and the journalist? No, not by that name, anyway. But on the aerial photos we were given in 1971 to map part of Tete Province east of Tete Town, lies one such mountain. I have never found a name for it, and we never went there as we were working around Bandar and Lake Lifumba when we were warned by the local folk that if we did not move out, we would be shot by Frelimo.
We moved out, and we finished mapping from the little village of Doa on the Beira-Tete railway line. The one that was frequently mined and blown up. I heard a detonation myself, one day, back then. Being young and stupid, I went to look. I took the train driver for a beer or three. Maybe he was Gomes?
But, with Google Maps – for which thanks! – I have found it; a beautiful round green ring in arid isolated hilly country. There is no village nearby. No running streams. Being a volcano, I dreamed of one day hiking there to look for diamonds! Or even the caves where, in my imagination, the Frelimo cadre lay in wait…
I zoomed in. Wonderfully exciting. It was a disappointment, however, but also intriguing, to see the shine of three new tin roofs on the northern lip. Obviously recent. By zoom, I followed the track to get there from a few-huts little village called Namisseche. A very rough and tortuous track indeed, to those three new buildings. What are they doing there? Hunting? Prospecting?
There is a path – and I suspect it is a foot path, or a scrambler motorbike track, and not a four-wheel drive track – leading zig-zagging down into the bowl of the crater. It appears to lead to dark spots in the cliff faces of the several ridges in the crater bottom… Caves?
I wish I had the bucks to go and see! A spot of youthfulness would serve, as well, because it looks rough. I know it’ll be bloody hot, it is the Zambezi valley, after all. And it is malaria country. And tsetse fly country…
What about the characters?
Well, anyone who reads my thriller The TRIBES of HILLBROW will meet elderly Geoff Nourse and Cecile (nee Cradock) McNeil briefly again. It’s thirty-five odd years on, so the then unborn Geoffrey Cradock McNeil is a young man. Dan McNeil and Ryan O’Donnell feature, too, as mercenaries back in the Congo of the sixties… Take a look.
https://www.amazon.com/Peter-J.-Earle/e/B00478NBPC/
GOODREADS: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7945783.Peter_J_Earle
Peter J. Earle 