3 May 2024 Reuters report that Russian forces have occupied a former American military base in Niamey, Niger.
December 2023 The Kremlin-backed Wagner mercenary group are now reported to be active in Sudan, Libya, Mozambique, Central African Republic, Mali and Madagascar.
In 2002 I got roped into working on a television documentary based on my book Hunting Pirate Heaven. In September of that year I found myself in the rundown port of Mahajanga on Madagascar’s west coast. I’d been having a great time, dashing around the Indian Ocean at someone else’s expense, seeking out historic and beautiful locations. Little did I know that fear and paranoia about Russian invasions could reach this neglected corner of the Indian Ocean.
That night, on the way back from the town's only decent pizza restaurant, three gun-toting soldiers accost us: foreign mercenaries have been seen trying to get into the town, so who are we?
There is myself, Ken the cameraman, and Max. I am pretty certain that Ken is not a mercenary, but I've only just met Max. He is over six feet tall, muscular with short-cropped hair and looks like he could single-handedly mount a reasonably efficient coup d'état in a small country. I show my passport and so does Ken. Max identifies the lead soldier, turns him convivially away from the group, then slips a 25,000 franc note into his tunic pocket. When we get back to the hotel, Max tries to get me to go and meet 'a friend', but I plead tiredness and he leaves. When he's gone, Ken and I step into the hotel's small casino. We need to talk.
It's busier than I've seen it before. The two Russians I'd seen around the hotel pool are playing roulette. They definitely look like mercenaries. The smooth tuxedoed manager, Charles, breezes over, Gaulloise in hand. It could be Rick's Cafe in the film, Casablanca, but he doesn't resemble Humphrey Bogart, more of a Peter Lorre character. "Mister Kevin, let me give you a word of advice. Don't associate with Max. He's a crook."
I raise a querying eyebrow.
He adds, "They say he is a gun-runner and drug smuggler."
I find a quiet table.
Ken and I had been sent out into the Indian Ocean with a bundle of television cash and orders to scout locations and 'shoot B-roll' before our director, Yulia, arrived. I hadn't liked to reveal my naivety by asking what B-Roll might be, but I was learning. It was ambience, close-ups, cutaways - extra stuff. The subject was European piracy in the 17th century. Our problem was that we were struggling to find traces of those ancient pirates while wading through a swamp filled with the modern variety. The big hope that Ken and I were working on was to set up a re-enactment of a great pirate attack: big galleons in full sail, blasting at each other with broadsides while men with cutlasses in their gobs leaped out the rigging. It was more B-movie than B-Roll, but in my head it was amazing.
One night in a bar in the Comoros Islands, an ex-French Foreign Legion man had given us a lead. "Try Mahajanga in Madagascar. They build huge wooden boats along the lines of sixteenth-century Portuguese caravels. I mean they haven't changed anything. No engine. All sail. Incredible. They run the coastal trade over there. Buy them some rum, they'll do it for you. Here's a number for my old mate, Max who’s out there..."
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And so we arrive in Mahajanga. After a couple of days, Yulia flies in from London, immediately furious with me for frittering away her budget, and with Ken for shooting 26 hours of random, beautiful B-Roll. "It's an edit-suite nightmare!"
I was totally new to film and, looking back, she had a point. I had no idea what I was doing, no idea that most of a film budget goes into post-production, not the hiring of galleons. Yulia was more experienced, she had even had a couple of documentaries aired on American cable channels.
In the casino, Ken stares gloomily into his beer. "This could be a disaster. I need to get paid. Have you been paid?"
I shake my head.
He sighs. "My kids are in private school. What about this guy Max? Should we avoid him?"
"He seems okay to me, just doesn’t belong to the local Rotary Club. Think about it. He showed us those incredible sailing boats today and he knows the captains. We can hire a couple of them and dress the crews up in costumes." I had it all planned. There was a tailor in the market who had offered to run up 40 pirate costumes at short notice. Max had a mate who had cooked lunch for the King of Swaziland and 800 guests - he'd do the catering.
Ken snorts derisively. "You heard Charles: Max is in the gun-running business."
"That’s just gossip. He got excited about our plan - that means a lot. He'll be really useful."
"Not if we get locked up - or shot. Besides, Yulia doesn't like him and we have no filming permit."
That was Yulia's decision. I didn’t care for bureaucracy either, but it was a mistake. A writer with a notebook can go unnoticed; three people with a large camera on a tripod might just escape attention; two galleons and forty thieves fighting a pitched battle outside a militarily significant port would probably not.
We are interrupted by Vadim, a Russian expatriate who claims to be in the gemstone business. Tonight he's depressed. His Madagascan contacts have been cutting open quartz, painting the inside green, gluing it back together and selling the results as emeralds. "It sounds amateurish," he grumbles, "But it's hard to spot."
I ask Vadim about the other two Russians. Vadim lights a cigarette and eyes them suspiciously. They are losing heavily at roulette, distracted by the croupier's cleavage. Vadim turns back to me. "Definitely military."
"So what are they doing here?"
He lights a cigarette as a waiter arrives with a cocktail glass. "You know I was a T-72 tank commander - in another life - until the T-90 replaced it. That's a good piece of equipment. A real Ferrari - 50 kilometres per hour into Red Square then take aim at the fucking parliament."
"It's strange that you Russians all end up here: Mahajanga. I mean it's not an obvious destination."
He shrugs. "Collapse of empire. Now we take the scraps we can get. "
"So what scraps are there here - for them?"
"I don't know. Ratsiraka?"
Ken drains his beer and stands up. "If you guys are going to talk politics, I'm going to bed."
When he has gone, Vadim and I discuss the current situation. As luck would have it, our team had arrived in the middle of a political crisis, one centred around the name Ratsiraka.
The ex-president, Didier Ratsiraka, had been ousted a few weeks earlier, fleeing into exile in the Seychelles (good choice), but the country was rife with rumours of him returning, backed by Russian mercenaries.
"I could do without all my fellow-countrymen here," complains Vadim. "They make life more difficult."
Ratsiraka had trained as a naval officer and risen fast after Madagascan independence from France in 1960, climbing the political ladder with socialist views that earned him the nickname "The Red Admiral". Once in power in 1975 he sought assistance from the USSR and flirted with agrarian ideals of rural self-sufficiency, fuelled by a suspicion of bourgeois intellectuals and the Frenchified cultural elite. The neighbouring Comoros Islands had gone the same way, establishing a Maoist state after a coup d'état led by a bourgeois Frenchified intellectual called Ali Soilih (coincidentally a native of Mahajanga). Soilih's own socialist paradise came to an abrupt end one night in 1978 when the French mercenary, Bob Denard, arrived with 43 ex-Foreign Legionnaires. Denard later claimed that he kicked open the presidential bedroom door to find Ali Soilih in bed with three teenage schoolgirls smoking a joint. Soilih later died, 'while trying to escape'. The fear of that midnight takeover by foreign forces had gripped the region's rulers ever since, a paranoia that Denard had done his best to foster, leading a motley private army of anti-communists through insurrections in Congo, Gabon, Benin, Yemen, Mozambique and Angola. The Comoros, however, were his pièce de resistance. He led coup attempts four times, twice successfully in 1978 and 1995, the latter with just 33 comrades all aged over 60.
Vadim orders us both a cocktail. "You see our president, Mister Putin, he is going to surprise many people. He wants the Romanov empire back. Chechnya is only the start. Maybe he would like to get his hands on an Indian Ocean port. They can be useful."
I laugh. The idea is preposterous. The USSR is finished. I'd been to some of its former communist outstations: Aden, Addis Ababa and Maputo, sleepy towns still recovering after their bouts of post-colonial socialist fever. When I first visited the Malagasy capital Antananarivo ('Tana') in 1998, it had that same atmosphere. Most back streets were built of wood: simple structures done by carpenters who knew how to save timber with narrow staircases and tiny doors. In some parts it seemed almost medieval. The city snoozed under the tropical sun, waiting to see who might come to the rescue, praying it wasn't the IMF.
In early 2002 that rescuer arrived. Local businessman Marc Ravalomanana took over and Ratsiraka fled into exile. In the streets of the capital Tana, huge crowds of people were moving. There were no demonstrations, just a feeling of feverish excitement, bordering on madness. A month before I'd gone to Mahajanga, I'd arrived in Tana enroute to meet Ken in the Comores. I stayed a couple of nights in a quiet little wooden guesthouse down a back street. One evening I heard a disturbance and went outside to find a wild mob milling around. From the hotel doorway I watched gangs of men jostle each other, street urchins running, women rushing home with the last bits of food they had managed to find in the shops. It felt nightmarish, everyone unhinged. Back in the hotel I asked about dinner and the owner shrugged expressively. There was nothing, the kitchen had run out. Opening my room door, a woman shoved past me then ran around the room shouting. A few seconds later she ran out again, fell down the narrow wooden staircase with a huge clatter, then sprang up and launched herself out an open window into the street. That was the ambience of our B-Roll: chaos.
Back in the casino, Charles comes over. "Messieurs Vadim and Kevin, Svetlana wants to give you a free spin on the roulette wheel."
Svetlana was the croupier, another Russian.
Vadim grunts. "I'm out."
I walk over with Charles who takes my arm. "Your friend Yulia…"
"Is she bothering you? She's just anxious about the film."
He snorts. "Is she Russian?"
I felt my stomach turn over. "No. She's British. She has Polish ancestors." But it was me blustering now: what did I know? Had she actually told me that, or had I made it up?
Charles chuckles. "She speaks Russian.”
"A lot of East Europeans of her generation know Russian," I countered weakly, "It's nothing."
I sit down and Svetlana lets me win a little, then says, "Good. You can buy me a beer now - it's my break."
I understand that she has invited me over only to escape the attentions of her compatriots. Over the drink she complains about them. "They are rude. I am not a prostitute."
I ask if she's heard the rumours of a coup d'etat. "Oh, it wouldn't surprise me, they have those all the time."
After abandoning Moscow in 1994, she had drifted through the former Soviet satellite states - Ethiopia, Tanzania and Mozambique - before ending up here. Her plan was to make some money and go home to Moscow where she could make a splash with her old friends and look after her elderly mother.
When I decide that I need to sleep, she says good night, adding, "Be careful. They suspect you too. They suspect everybody."
"I'm just here to make a film!"
She smiles sweetly at me. "Nobody believes that."
I walk out past reception and into the walled garden that surrounds the small pool. Huge fruit bats hang in the trees. The hotel is in the town, but feels separate and safe. My room is up some steps, along a deck-access balcony. I lock the door and lie down, browsing the television channels. They are showing the 1997 fight between Mike Tyson and Evander Holyfield, the one in which Tyson bites Holyfield's ear off. The commentary is in Malagasy. I turn the sound off. I want to hear any noises coming from outside. I'm thinking of what Tyson said before that fight: 'Everyone has a plan, until they get punched in the mouth.'
In the morning, at first light, someone is hammering on my door. I answer to find a grim-faced soldier, his rifle pointing at my stomach. "You. Come wiz me. Bring you passport."
I am, it appears, under arrest.
[to be continued]
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Another great piece, thank you. I'm assuming you know the story about the failed coup in the Seychelles led by Colonel “Mad Mike” Hoare, operating (I think) out of South Africa?
See https://sahistory.org.za/dated-event/mercenaries-south-africa-led-colonel-mad-mike-hoare-attempt-unsuccessful-coup