Books

Black legion, white soldier

Richard West

The Last Adventurer: From Biafra to the Sudan Rolf Steiner (Weidenfeld £5.95)

Films and books such as The Wild Geese have glamorised the white soldier in Africa, but may have confused us as to his role. In particular they have confused us as to the nature of a mercenary.

Most white soldiers in Africa are professionals or conscripts serving their national army. This category includes the white South African troops; the majority of those in Rhodesia, where men from eighteen to fifty are liable to spend half the year in uniform; the many thousands of French soldiers in countries like Chad, the Ivory Coast, Senegal and Djibouti; and very likely the Cubans in Ethiopia and Angola who, although technically volunteel.s, would seem to have been recruited in the manner of all sergeant-majors: 'I want three volunteers! I'll have you, you and you!'

The French Foreign Legion, some of whose men recently dropped on Zaire to halt a massacre at Kolwezi, is in a special category of its own. Although the other ranks are from outside France, and predominantly from Germany, the regiment has remained, with certain lapses, the pride and joy of Frenchmen.

The second type of white soldier in Africa is the mercenary who serves on contract to whatever state or political faction will offer him adequate money. Such were the soldiers portrayed in The Wild Geese. The self-styled ex-mercenary leader Mike Hoare, who fought on the side of Katangan and other secessionists during the Congo troubles, has said that the book 'reflects faithfully the spirit of men who fight for money and adventure'.

Some Congo mercenaries reappeared to fight in Nigeria and more recently in Angola, where several of them were captured and sentenced to prison or death by the present Marxist government. There are a number of foreigners in the Rhodesian army, some of them veterans of the Vietnam war, but since they are not very well paid they cannot be classed as mercenaries of The Wild Geese type.

A third and rare type of white soldier in Africa is the crusader who to a greater or lesser degree believes in the people or cause for which he fights. One can assume that at least some of the Cubans believe in their 'liberation war' just as some Americans in

Rhodesia are passionate anti-communists. The most famous of these crusaders was

Count von Rosen, a Swedish pilot who flew for the Abyssinians in 1936 and then for the Biafrans, thirty-three years later. He died recently in a plane crash, again on behalf of

his friends the Abyssinians, or Ethiopians as they now call themselves. A few such crusaders, as opposed to mere mercenaries, fought on the Biafran side in the Nigerian civil war and were later portrayed as the heroes of The Dogs of War by Frederick Forsyth who had been a Biafran supporter. In his book a group of white soldiers who had once been employed by a black general, clearly Ojukwu, set out to overthrow a West African despotism, clearly the Equatorial Guinea Republic.

The most famous white soldier in shortlived Biafra was Rolf Steiner, who never regarded himself as a mercenary and has called his autobiography The Last Adventurer. In Biafra he was a legendary figure, of whom John de St Jorre of the Observer could write that Steiner 'had joined the Hitler Youth at the age of sixteen . . . lost a lung at Dien Bien Phu and was flown out on the last plane'. From Steiner we learn that he was twelve when the war ended, did not fight at Dien Bien Phu and contracted a lung disease in Algeria, with the Foreign Legion. One does not quite gather from Steiner's autobiography exactly why he left boarding school at the age of seventeen and joined the Legion. He seems to have been a solitary, rather earnest boy who on having been converted from the Protestant to the Catholic faith promptly resolved to be a priest. On finding himself unworthy of such a calling, he joined the Legion. Simple as that. He was proud to be a legionary, rose to the rank Of sergeant and got his share of decorations and wounds. He admired the enemy in Vietnam (even drinking beers with off-duty Vietminh) but he detested and despised the rebels in Algeria, becoming a counter-terrorist for the OAS — though not to the point of wantonly killing civilians. 'It was too savage' he writes. When the French withdrew, Steiner went to live in France with his pied noir wife.

The next six years are left in mystery, although one learns that the marriage failed. According to John de St Jorre he saw Steiner in 1967 at Bukavu in the Congo 'blazing away at Mobutu's Cuban pilots' but Steiner writes nothing of this, at any rate in the book's English edition. According to Mr St Jorre, Steiner came to Biafra in the summer of 1968 after having been recruited in Lisbon. According to Steiner he was recruited in Paris and came to Biafra late in 1967.

These points of detail may sound trivial but they bear on the veracity of Steiner's account. It would seem to me that unless Steiner is proved inaccurate one should prefer his account, at least with regard to dates and places, to those of journalists at the

Spectator 12 August 1918 time who may have been misinformed or misled. At any rate Steiner constantly expresses the utmost contempt and disgust well as Congo hmeeinrgace.naries as soldiers as as human During the year he spent in Biafra, Steiner built up a Commando Brigade of 3,000 men which by other accounts as well as his own was the finest fighting in the country. He taught the Biafrans how t° blow up the armoured cars they so dreaded, how to lay ambushes and how to exploit the rain forest terrain. His contempt for the Sandhurst methods employed by Biaff,°, officers made him a number of enemies 'un' also some loyal friends such as his deputY,

unit .Emeka.

The jealousy of senior Biafrans may have contributed to the row with Ojukwu and Steiner's expulsion late in 1968. According to Frederick Forsyth, Steiner was suffering from nervous exhaustion and remonstrated with Ojukwu; according to Mr St Jorre, was drunk. According to Steiner himself he vas expelled at the request of the Franc', Intelligence Service who had been trying to, use him to get a better oil concession out °,1 Ojukwu. Upset though he was by his exPur sion, Steiner retained his adopted 13iafran son, his Baifran citizenship and his glint" ration for the Biafran people. He still, so he says, corresponds with the exiled Ojukwn. Back in Europe, Steiner continued to. propagate the Biafran cause and also that of the South Sudanese, another black Cath0lic. people who suffered the persecution ot Muslim northerners. He went to Uganda (which he could not have done had he been in Bukavu in 1967, since all the mercenaries there had pledged themselves never revist Africa) and met Idi Amin, then the armychief, who sympathised on tribal grounds with the people of South Sudan' to and was also friendly with the Israelis, Tile Israelis backed the South Sudanese t° annoy the Arab northerners. According to Steiner, most of his titre in South Sudan was spent in teaching the Pe' ple how to grow food, enforce elementa?!. hygiene and protect themselves from tr!! government's murderous raids. His downfall came through an unwitting involvement in Ugandan politics. A Britis,, intelligence agent, whose name he provide", was trying to overthrow President Ml°4 Obote and to replace him by Amin. 0 bote government wanted to use Steiner:s counter-plotting. When he refused, he v`' kidnapped and taken to Khartoum, theear, ital of the Sudan, where he was hicleou. tortured, tried, sentenced to death and then to twenty years prison of which he f servc°

tou At the end of his odd and rather ching book, Steiner provides a kind of eren 'Field of red, green beret, blacklegitohne,

is my life. Red, green and black col ours of Biafra. . . I do not know whetber have a need for violence, but I believe that have ennobled it by putting itwhiteinthessueldrv.ieters' of just causes'. There are few in Africa who could make such a claim'