Death in africa - ColdType

FRED BRIDGLAND
of Laputa’s party.”
It was that day that I first met Tito. He stood behind Savimbi.
Tall and slim with fine features, Tito had soft, intelligent eyes
and a beret set at a jaunty angle. Despite his guerrilla fatigues,
he exuded calm. Women thought Tito Chungunji was beautiful.
It was true. Tito introduced himself. So began an intense
and fateful relationship. Tito was commander of the Dragons
of Death, Savimbi’s fifty-strong bodyguard. He had not risen
so high and so fast entirely on merit. He was the scion of a
family that matched Savimbi’s in importance in the resistance
movement. Tito’s father, Jonatão Chingunji, was a descendant
of clan kings who had ruled in central Angola back into the
mists of time. There were twenty-two clans among the
Ovimbundu, Angola’s biggest tribe, each with its own royal
ruler.
While Savimbi led the guerrillas in the forests, Jonatão, a
teacher and Christian pastor, organised underground cells in
small towns and villages along the Benguela Railway – built
by a Scottish engineer at the beginning of the twentieth century
to haul copper more than a thousand miles from the mines
of the Belgian Congo and Northern Rhodesia to the Atlantic
port of Lobito.
Jonatão recruited men to fight alongside Savimbi, gathered
intelligence, food, medicine and boots for the guerrillas, and
established escape routes from the country for Angolans
threatened by the ruthless PIDE political police, guardians of
the Portuguese dictatorship. Tito, as a boy, visited Savimbi’s
supporters to deliver secret messages and collect money for
the movement, carrying a bag in which small sums of money
were placed and covered with food.
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