BIG READ: The day a hero of the people decided to murder them

About 30 years ago veteran foreign correspondent Fred Bridgland wrote a sympathetic biography of Angola’s Unita leader Jonas Savimbi, hailed widely for his charisma and dynamism. In a new book, The Guerrilla and the Journalist, he takes the narrative forward, developing the original story on the basis of new information. Tito Chingunji, Unita’s brilliant young foreign secretary, who had approached Bridgland to write the original biography, subsequently risked his life to help him reveal that Savimbi actually was an especially psychotic murderous tyrant. Here is an extract from his new book.

It was Jonas Savimbi’s cold-blooded way with women that enmeshed Unita’s foreign secretary Tito Chingunji ever more tightly into the web of O Mais Velho (The Elder), as Savimbi insisted he be called. The story is so preposterous, so devilish, that I feel almost too uncomfortable telling it for fear of being disbelieved. Tito told me the basic story, and I have fleshed it out from numerous other sources.

Tito and a slim, beautiful girl called Ana Isabel Paulino fell in love with each other in 1974 in Silva Porto in Angola when Tito, just 19 years old, was released from Sao Nicolau penal colony (he was incarcerated for actions against the colonial Portuguese authorities) and appointed chief of Savimbi’s bodyguard. Ana was a teenage secondary schoolgirl in Silva Porto, who later I often saw in the small city. She was beautiful and vibrant, she dressed colourfully, and she always seemed to be surrounded by laughing friends. Tito and Ana agreed to marry and raise a family when there was peace.

Ana Isabel was sent by Savimbi on an advanced secretarial and language course in Paris, from 1977 to 1979, arranged with the French DGSE secret service. When she returned to Jamba, she was appointed head of Unita’s secretarial school, training 20 young women at a time in touch-typing, shorthand, Portuguese, French and English.

When Tito was posted to Morocco in 1980, Savimbi claimed Ana for his own. She was forced to become his “number one” official wife in his harem of mistresses and concubines. She accompanied him abroad to the US and Europe, dressed elegantly in the latest fashions, her presence promoting Savimbi as a modern and sophisticated man.

Before sending Ana to Paris, Savimbi is alleged to have raped Raquel, his own niece, and had also made her one of his concubines. When Raquel’s parents protested, they were executed.

Raquel turned up in London in 1982 to begin a college course and assist in the Unita office. She had, in fact, been sent on a mission by Savimbi to seduce and spy on Tito. How willingly he succumbed I do not know, but he and Raquel were both at that time intensely lonely people bearing almost impossible burdens about terrible events inside the Unita movement. Nevertheless, succumb he did. Raquel, however, broke down and confessed to Tito the nature of her assignment and how Savimbi had ravaged her and murdered her parents. She begged him to take her or she would, at best, be returned to concubinage with Savimbi, or, more likely, be killed like her parents.

“Raquel was an emotional wreck,” Eduardo Chingunji, Tito’s nephew, told me. “Having heard her story, Tito told me her situation was so dire that he could not reject her.”

Eduardo believes Raquel fell truly in love with Tito. It was hardly surprising. He had apparently effortless charm. He was young, handsome and highly intelligent, the hero of a whole younger generation back in the Angolan grasslands and forests. He was also her only chance of survival.

Tito was not in love with Raquel, at least not initially, according to Eduardo. “But I know he felt huge compassion for her,” he said. “He was also in a classic Catch-22 situation. It spelt danger for him if he spurned her, and he realised that for her it was a clear matter of life or death.”

They married in London, unbeknown to me. There was no public ceremony. In 1983, Raquel became pregnant and at the end of the year visited Jamba. She and her son by Tito, Kaley, born in 1984, were not allowed out again by Savimbi. Raquel subsequently bore twin boys by Tito.

With both Ana and Raquel back in Jamba, living in Savimbi’s compound, Savimbi effectively had 24-hour control over Tito, although most of the people continued to think Tito was Savimbi’s favourite son.

It was soon after Raquel’s return to Jamba that things took a very dark turn. Tito described this to me when we met in Washington in September 1988.

On September 7 1983, Savimbi summoned everybody to a “very important rally” on the central parade ground at Jamba. Savimbi’s bodyguards and commandos were ordered to ensure that no-one missed the event.

As people flowed towards the arena — where international television crews had filmed senior US, British, Portuguese, French and Czechoslovak politicians and officials reviewing Savimbi’s troops — they saw a giant stack of wood at its centre and blindfolded men tied to trees at the edge of the parade ground. Savimbi arrived with his senior officers. All were wearing scarlet bandannas and neckerchiefs.

Soldiers were drawn up in battalions and companies to pay military honours to Savimbi on his arrival. Bela Malaquias, who was among the gathered crowds and who later penned an autobiography based on her experiences as a member of Unita, wrote: “The atmosphere was one of terror.” Revolutionary songs were chanted by the soldiers. One line, Malaquias recalled, went: “Friends, just listen to the teachings of our great King, Jonas Savimbi. Only him do we follow!”

Malaquias said there were jugglers, traditional dancers and a karate demonstration before Savimbi rose to speak on a day that would be remembered as Setembro vermelho (Red September).

According to accounts gathered by Tito, Eduardo Chingunji, Bela Malaquias and others, Savimbi said witches had been plaguing the movement, causing soldiers to lose their lives on battlefield frontlines. Some witches would this day breathe their last and would no longer be able to sabotage the war effort, Unita’s leader told the gathering.  

An armed detachment walked towards the blindfolded men. The soldiers lined up, fired and the men slumped dead, still held by their ropes to the trees.

Savimbi had only just begun.

He ordered every person in the crowd, children also, to pick up a twig each and cast it on the woodpile. The giant bonfire was lit. O Mais Velho called names of women and asked them to step forward. They, he said, were witches who had been condemned to death. Some had children — they too would die with their mothers because “a snake’s offspring is also a snake”. Savimbi’s all-women propaganda music troupe, the so-called Departamento de Agitacăo e Politica (Department of Political Promotion), or DAP, applauded and danced to the news. Most DAP members were Savimbi concubines.

Savimbi said what was about to happen would be an example to everyone: people practising witchcraft would be burned. Anyone who defended the condemned women would be in big trouble. “These witches did not spare the soldiers wounded at the front in defence of the homeland who are now in hospital,” Malaquias recalled Savimbi telling the death rally.

Malaquias went on: “The military had been convinced by Savimbi that frontline deaths were the result of interventions by women witches. Once they had been manipulated, they worked hard to prepare for the burning alive of the women. They shouted in unison, ‘Death to the witches!’ ... All this was being done by a man who hyped himself as the people’s saviour.”

The women whose names Savimbi had read out were ordered to stand before the presidential platform. A woman called Judith Bonga was called first. Judith was so shocked that she was unable to move. Commandos grabbed her and threw her into the flames. Eyewitnesses said she jumped from the fire and begged for mercy. Savimbi always wore, at his waist, an ivory-handled pistol that fascinated reporters so much that they made it almost as famous as the man himself. Now he drew the gun and, together with one of his senior generals, forced Judith back into the fire where she perished.

Victoria Chitata begged Savimbi to save her small son, who was dragged with her to the bonfire. No-one moved and she and her son died together in the flames. Victoria cried out for someone to save her son, who she said was innocent. No-one moved.

Aurora Katalayo, Violeta Chingunji’s younger sister and Tito’s aunt, was a paediatrician and haematologist who had trained as a doctor in Switzerland. She was also the widow of a popular and outspoken guerrilla commander, Major Mateus Katalayo, who she told relatives and friends had been killed on Savimbi’s orders three years earlier. Katalayo had publicly castigated Savimbi for trying to break up his marriage.

The Pulitzer prize-winning journalist and writer Leon Dash, who had spent three months trekking through the bush with Unita fighters, got to know Mateus Katalayo in the course of the first of his two long treks across Angola. Katalayo acted as interpreter for Dash. “I suspected then that the smart, arrogant, blunt-spoken major would eventually clash with Savimbi,” said Dash. “Mateus was much too cynical to deify any man.”

Aurora Katalayo had resolutely refused Savimbi’s invitations to sleep with him either before or after Mateus’s death. Aurora, by several accounts, vehemently protested her innocence as she was frogmarched from the crowd with her four-year-old son Michel.

“I’ve done you no harm. I do not deserve this. After this day, it’s the beginning of your end,” Aurora is alleged to have said. She cursed Savimbi’s soul aloud, calling him a criminal and warning that he had condemned himself and would never be victorious as she and Michel were pitched into the flames. The proof Savimbi gave of Aurora’s witchcraft was the “Swissification” of Michel and his 12-year-old sister M’Bimbi, but, said Tito and others, she died only because of her resistance to Savimbi’s sexual advances.

When Clara Miguel was called to be burned, she had her infant daughter in her arms. According to reports, she did not say anything but tossed her child into the arms of the closest pair of hands before she walked forwards to her death.

“In an act of great betrayal, Clara’s husband ran towards her and kicked her (as she advanced towards the fire). I suppose he wanted to demonstrate, such was his panic and fear, that he had nothing to do with the witchcraft of his wife and child and that he unconditionally supported President Savimbi’s action to rid the party of all dangerous women,” Malaquias wrote.

One lone man, Joao Kalitangue, died on the pyre. Kalitangue, a qualified nurse, had for many years cared for Savimbi’s mother, Helena Savimbi. Kalitangue’s wife, Isabel, a kindergarten teacher, and their four children aged 7 to 15, including a mentally handicapped daughter, and a 12-year-old nephew were also burned to death.

I discovered years later that another woman murdered by Savimbi in the flames was Arleta Navimbi Matos, sister of Tito’s wife, Raquel, and yet another of Savimbi’s many concubines. Navimbi was pregnant by Savimbi at the time of her death, having already given birth to a daughter by him, Celita Navimbi Sakaita. Her crime, according to Savimbi’s witch-finders, was having flown over the Unita leader’s main residence several times to prevent him winning the war.

Tony Fernandes, at the time a senior Politburo member before his defection nine years later, witnessed the burnings. He described them to me as the most horrific events he has ever experienced. Fernandes defected in 1992 and later became Angola’s ambassador to Britain from 2005 to 2006.

• Fred Bridgland’s “The Guerrilla and the Journalist: Exploring the Murderous Legacy of Jonas Savimbi” is published by Jonathan Ball.