Death in africa - ColdType

FRED BRIDGLAND
terrifying twist. He said affairs within Savimbi’s movement
were more complex and traumatic than anything he had previously
told me. He said that each time he returned to
Savimbi’s forest headquarters he did not know whether he
would come out again or whether he would be killed.
“Why?” I asked.
He reminded me that when we researched the book together
he had said his parents, Jonatão and Violeta, had disappeared
in 1980 during a Cuban and Marxist government offensive
and were presumed dead. “It’s what I believed when I first
talked to you about them,” he said. “But then I heard they had
been beaten to death on Savimbi’s orders. I have confirmed it
was true. He has also had my sister Xica executed.”
Alarm bells began clanging inside my head. My Savimbi
book had stirred huge controversy and I had staked my reputation
on its accuracy. Now Tito was beginning to reveal a side
of the movement that had been hidden from me. “You know
that four of my brothers died?” Indeed, I did. From Tito’s and
Savimbi’s accounts, I had described their various heroic
deaths in combat against Portuguese, Cuban and Angolan
Marxist soldiers.
Tito went on: “I now believe that three of them, possibly all
four, were killed on Savimbi’s instructions. My father discovered
this and it is why he and my mother were executed.”
The slaughter of his family was only part of the horror, said
Tito. Several senior leaders outside the Chingunji family had
been beaten to death. Savimbi had also ordered the public
burning on giant bonfires of dissident women and their children.
This was madness. Echoes went through my mind of
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