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Yahoo
09-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Simon Mann, mercenary who was jailed for leading an attempted coup in Equatorial Guinea
Simon Mann, who has died aged 72, was an Old Etonian, former SAS officer and soldier of fortune who made millions from providing mercenaries to protect diamond mines and oil refineries in Africa; in 2004, however, he bit off more than he could chew when he became involved in an alleged plot to overthrow the government of Equatorial Guinea. The plot went disastrously wrong when Mann and 67 fellow 'mercenaries' – mostly old sweats from Apartheid-era South Africa's bush wars – were arrested by Zimbabwean security forces at Harare Airport, where they had touched down in order to take on a consignment of arms. Mann claimed that they were on their way to protect diamond interests in the neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo. But they were accused of setting out to overthrow Equatorial Guinea's tyrannical president Teodoro Obiang Nguema. The story of the alleged coup contained more implausible characters and plot twists than an airport paperback thriller. There was an African dictator who allegedly enjoyed feasting on human testicles, there was the promise of liquid gold – offshore oil reserves that promised to make millions for those daring enough to seize them; there were walk-on roles for mercenaries, business tycoons, the disgraced peer Jeffrey Archer, exiled politicians and Baroness Thatcher's son, Mark. At the centre of everything was Mann, maverick scion of the Watney's brewing empire who seemed to be a throwback to the days of Cecil Rhodes, when white buccaneers toppled governments and ran private fiefdoms. The adventures on which Mann embarked would lead him, eventually, to a foetid cell in Harare's notorious Chikurubi prison, from which he was extradited in secret in February 2008 to Equatorial Guinea, where he was incarcerated in the infamous Black Beach jail. In November 2009 President Obiang granted Mann a complete pardon on humanitarian grounds. Simon Mann was born on June 26 1952. His father, George Mann, was a former Guards officer who captained the England cricket team on their 1948-49 tour of the Cape (Simon's grandfather had also been England cricket captain). Described by the cricketer's bible Wisden as a 'forceful batsman, prone to hitting hard', he later became chairman of Watney's, the brewing giant. Simon followed his father and grandfather to Eton, where he bucked the family trend by preferring rowing to cricket and, according to one friend, was always planning African coups at the back of the class; he was always known as 'Maps Mann' because he always had maps in his hand. Lacking academic ability, he sought an outlet for his daredevil instincts in the Army. After training as an officer at Sandhurst he took a commission in the Scots Guards and did a three-year stint as a troop commander in G Squadron of 22 SAS. Returning to the regular Army, he completed a tour of Northern Ireland and had postings in Cyprus, Germany, Norway, Canada and central America. In the mid-1980s Mann left the army to go into 'business', the precise nature of which remained a mystery even to some of his closest relatives. After a stint selling computer software he moved into the 'security' business, providing bodyguards to wealthy Arabs to protect their Scottish estates from poachers, before briefly getting back into uniform in 1990 to serve on British Gulf war commander Sir Peter de la Billière's staff in Riyadh. In 1993 he set up Executive Outcomes with the entrepreneur Tony Buckingham. A mercenary outfit, it made a fortune protecting oil installations from rebels in Angola's civil war and training Angolan government troops. Two years later he established an offshoot, Sandline International, with a fellow former Guardsman, Lt-Col Tim Spicer, and shipped arms to Sierra Leone in apparent contravention of a UN embargo. With an estimated £10 million in the bank, Mann bought Inchmery, a former residence of the Rothschild family on the banks of the river Beaulieu in Hampshire, together with a Cape Dutch gabled house in Constantia, a secluded suburb of Cape Town whose inhabitants at one time included Earl Spencer and Sir Mark Thatcher. There, he and his third wife, Amanda, became well-known figures on the Cape social scene. As well as meeting Baroness Thatcher at a party thrown by Mark, in a rare foray into the public domain Mann agreed to play the part of Colonel Derek Wilford, commander of the paratroopers who fired on marchers in Derry, in a 2001 television reconstruction of Bloody Sunday. The story of the alleged coup plot emerged from 'confessions' made in prison by Mann and his alleged co-conspirator Nick du Toit, a former South African special officer and member of Executive Outcomes, who had been arrested a day after Mann in the Equatorial Guinea capital Malabo. In his testimony Mann said that he had been approached in 2003 by the Chelsea-based Lebanese oil tycoon, Ely Calil, who had made his fortune trading oil in Nigeria and was a friend of Severo Moto Nsá, self-styled president of the Equatorial Guinea government-in-exile. Moto had long sought the overthrow of President Obiang, and at a subsequent secret meeting in Spain the three men allegedly hatched a plot to bring about the tyrant's downfall. It was claimed that the three men struck a deal under which Calil and Mann would arrange to put Moto in power in return for a lump-sum payment of $16 million. Mann would also get the rights to supply Guinea's future security needs and Calil would become the country's chief oil broker. With the deal concluded, Mann and Calil were alleged to have set about raising the money needed to pay for the operation. The basic deal was that 10 investors would each contribute £100,000. In return they would share £15 million between them on the coup's completion, with the hope of further dividends as the oil began to flow. Du Toit was tasked with recruiting the 80 or so mercenaries needed and, from these, he would take a small advance guard to Guinea in the guise of being involved in a tourist business. Once they were installed, Mann would fly in under cover of darkness with the rest of the men. The president would be seized in his bed and Moto installed. All began according to the alleged plan, and on March 7, with du Toit in Malabo, 64 mercenaries boarded an old Boeing 727 which Mann had bought for $400,000, and took off for Harare from Wonderboom airport near Pretoria. When the aircraft touched down at Harare airport, it taxied to the military sector, where those on board were expecting to link up with Mann and pick up their weaponry. Instead, Mann, the three flight crew and all 64 mercenaries on board were arrested and their weapons seized. The next day, du Toit and his 14-strong group were arrested in Malabo. All those named by Mann and du Toit in their testimonies denied any involvement in the plot and claimed that the men had been tortured to make false statements, and Mann later claimed that his initial statements had been made under duress. Relatives of those arrested in Harare maintained that they had been on their way to Congo to guard diamond mines. It was noted that the small-scale and rather amateurish nature of the operation hardly suggested planning for a military coup. But other evidence seemed to lend weight to the coup-plot theory. A South African telecoms tycoon, Gianfranco Cicogna, recalled being approached by Mann to invest $120,000 in a 'project' in Equatorial Guinea (he declined). Documentary evidence from one of Mann's offshore companies, Logo Logistics, showed that a person by the name of JH Archer transferred £74,000 to the company just four days before the alleged coup attempt. 'JH' are the initials of Lord Archer, a friend of Ely Calil. Archer's lawyers denied that he had sent money and both he and Calil denied knowing of any coup plot. The biggest fish to become entangled in the scandal was Baroness Thatcher's son, Mark, who was alleged to have paid for a helicopter to fly Moto into Guinea on the night of the coup. His name entered the fray after an explosive but hilarious letter from Mann to his wife was intercepted by prison guards. In the letter, written shortly after his arrest, Mann asked her to elicit the help of chums on the alleged plot's 'wonga list' of financial supporters: 'Our situation is not good and it is very URGENT,' Mann wrote. 'They [the lawyers] get no reply from Smelly [thought to be Ely Calil] and Scratcher [the nickname Mann used for Thatcher, on account of the acne he suffered while at school]...' But Mann then went on to suggest that Scratcher's involvement amounted to more than using his contacts to lobby for their release. 'It may be that getting us out comes down to a large splodge of wonga!' he wrote. 'Of course investors did not think this would happen. Do they think they can be part of something like this with only upside potential – no hardship or risk of this going wrong? Anyone and everyone in this is in it – good times or bad. Now it's bad times and everyone has to f---ing well pull their full weight… Once we get into a real trial scenario we are f---ed.' He ended the letter with the words: 'Anyway [another contact] was expecting project funds inwards to Logo from Scratcher… If there is not enough, then present investors must come up with more.' On July 22 2004 Mann was convicted in Zimbabwe on two counts of attempting to buy firearms illegally. He was sentenced to seven years, later reduced to four. Sir Mark Thatcher was arrested in August 2004 and given a four-year suspended prison term and a hefty fine after pleading guilty to breaking anti-mercenary legislation in South Africa by agreeing to finance the chartering of a helicopter, though he denied knowledge of the coup plot and maintained that his involvement had been unwitting. Kept in solitary confinement at his own request, Mann was said to have endured torture and privation. In April 2007 he was said to be suffering multiple organ failure and to be suffering from a life-threatening intestinal condition caused by poor diet. Hopes that the Zimbabwean courts would turn down any request for his extradition to Equatorial Guinea were dashed in May 2007 when, shortly after his release from jail, he was rearrested following a decision by a Harare court to reject defence arguments that he would not be given a fair trial in Guinea and was likely to be tortured. After his extradition, in March 2008 he was allowed, or possibly encouraged, to give an interview to Channel 4 News in which he again fingered Ely Calil as the mastermind behind the 'f***-up', said that Sir Mark Thatcher was 'part of the team' but dismissed suggestions that Lord Archer or Peter Mandelson were involved. Urbane, charming and apparently relaxed, despite the shackles and years of solitary confinement, Mann claimed not to have been put under pressure by the Equatorial Guinea authorities, though there were suspicions that he might have agreed to 'spill the beans' in return for being spared the death penalty. Simon Mann was married three times. His first two marriages were dissolved and he married thirdly, in 1995, Amanda Freedman, with whom he had four children. They survive him with three children of his earlier marriages. Simon Mann, born June 26 1952, death announced May 9 2025 Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. 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The South African
08-05-2025
- General
- The South African
Inside an archive: Family ‘surprises', earthquakes and land claims
National Archives Awareness Week is currently underway from 5 to 9 May. As the Western Cape Archives and Records Service runs workshops to teach members of the public about the repository, we explore what exactly can be found out by digging into history. The Western Cape Archives and Records Service is South Africa's oldest such service. It contains some of South Africa's earliest written records, starting from 1651. This week, the institution is running a daily programme, focused on digitalisation, to encourage South Africans to make good use of the documents. There are various events online and in-person in Cape Town. The week culminates with a free Family History Workshop for beginners in central Cape Town on Friday. According to Helen Joannides, an archivist in the Public Programmes and Outreach Division of the Western Cape Archives and Records Service, the institution has made important contributions to South African families. She told The South African: 'The archives have been used by many families to delve into their family history so you can imagine the surprises there.' Indeed, social media platforms like Reddit are full of stories of South Africans discovering secret family members. Comment by from discussion inGenealogy Joannides adds: 'Archival records are also legal proof so they have been used for successful land claims.' For example, Joannides describes how renters, who had lived in District Six prior to the Apartheid-era forced removals, used an archival document to prove they had been residents in the area and to successfully institute a compensation claim. The document was a register from a hospital which recorded the addresses of patients. Archives are also used to research historic earthquakes. This data helps scientists better prepare for future earthquakes. Interested persons can sign up on the Western Cape Archives and Records Service website. The family history workshop will be repeated later in the year. South Africans can also visit the archives at 72 Roeland Street, Cape Town from 08:00 to 16:00 from Monday to Friday, and from 08:00 to 14:00 on the first and third Saturday of the month. Let us know by leaving a comment below or send a WhatsApp to 060 011 0211. Subscribe to The South African website's newsletters and follow us on WhatsApp, Facebook, X, and Bluesky for the latest news.
Time of India
04-05-2025
- Business
- Time of India
Elon Musk calls Nazi accusations ‘outrageous,' says media engaged in character assassination: 'I'm difficult to kill, so ...'
Elon Musk , head of Donald Trump 's Department of Government Efficiency ( DOGE ), lashed out at media critics and denied allegations of white supremacist sympathies in a Fox News interview released Friday. 'It's an outrageous thing to claim that I'm a Nazi,' Musk said, suggesting that if his detractors could 'press a button' to kill him, 'they would.' But, he added, 'since I'm a little difficult to kill, they are doing character assassination instead.' Musk's comments follow months of growing criticism. At Trump's post-inauguration rally, he delivered a straight-arm salute interpreted by many, including his estranged daughter, as a Sieg Heil. His actions since purchasing Twitter, X now, have further intensified scrutiny. — cb_doge (@cb_doge) Musk restored previously banned white supremacist accounts, and in March, during sweeping federal layoffs under DOGE, he shared a post implying that dictators like Stalin, Hitler, and Mao didn't kill millions—'public workers did.' After backlash, he deleted the post. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like 2025 Top Trending local enterprise accounting software [Click Here] Esseps Learn More Undo Shortly after the inauguration, Musk also addressed a campaign event for Germany's far-right Alternative für Deutschland party, warning Germans against losing their culture to 'multiculturalism.' 'Children should not be guilty of the sins of their parents, let alone their great grandparents,' he said at the time. Speaking to Lara Trump, the former president's daughter-in-law and Fox News host, Musk said the 'relentless propaganda campaign' against him mirrors the treatment of Donald Trump. 'They've also called President Trump a Nazi… but he also is not a violent person, and, in fact, has done a lot to prevent wars,' Musk said. 'That's the very opposite of being a Nazi.' Lara Trump sympathized with Musk, referencing his childhood in Apartheid-era South Africa. 'I'm sure you've seen a lot of horrific things,' she said. 'To be called a Nazi… that must be really hard for you.' Musk, in turn, blamed media manipulation: 'If you repeat a lie—'he's a Nazi'—enough times, some people actually believe it… especially people that still believe the legacy news.' He cited CNN specifically, criticizing the outlet but exempting conservative commentator Scott Jennings. In January, Musk's mother encouraged him on X to sue CNN after Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell challenged Jennings on air about Musk's gesture. 'Why don't you do it on TV right now if you think it's so banal?' Rampell asked. Jennings declined. As Musk faces increased unpopularity amid drastic government downsizing, DOGE policies have led to protests, vandalism, and arson at Tesla dealerships. His critics have dubbed Tesla vehicles 'swasticars.' In March, Musk revealed he and his DOGE team receive daily death threats. Still, he remains defiant. 'I've not harmed anyone in my life,' Musk said. 'But it is disappointing how well propaganda works.'
Mint
03-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Mint
Books: Upamanyu Chatterjee is master of the absurd in his new collection
In the titular novella from Upamanyu Chatterjee's The Hush of the Uncaring Sea: Novellas 2018-2025 , a racist sea captain from Apartheid-era South Africa is talking himself into abandoning an accidental stowaway aboard his ship—a naïve Bengali young man named Abani who boarded in Calcutta (now Kolkata) to see a relative off and took a nap at the wrong time. The passage is vintage Chatterjee, not just because of the black humour but also because of the way he presents evil as a tragically banal phenomenon; the idea that given the right circumstances, any of us could nonchalantly carry out the worst atrocities. Like leaving a helpless young man in the middle of the ocean on a threadbare raft with meagre supplies. 'Kon-Tiki covered seven thousand kilometres of the Pacific in three months on just some logs of balsa. In contrast, our guest would only have to commune with the dolphins for an hour or two before someone picks him up. The Indian Navy, a sister merchant vessel, a deep-sea fishing trawler, a smuggler's ferry being chased by some coastal patrol—somebody is sure to notice our lad on the raft, swoop down on him and take him in." Among the four novellas collected here, The Hush of the Uncaring Sea is the one that represents a departure in style for Chatterjee, and it is unyieldingly strange in the best of ways. After all, being at sea for extended stretches of time exposes the body and the soul to scenarios and challenges that end up reshaping them forever. At once a comedy-of-errors, a survival story and a twisted parable, Abani's journey is presented as neither wholly spiritual nor entirely secular but as the saying goes on X (formerly Twitter), 'a secret third thing". On more than one occasion I was reminded of the works of William Golding, especially his novel Rites of Passage (1980), where a line hits upon this same dialectic tension between religion/philosophy and maritime survivalism: 'Philosophy and religion—what are they when the wind blows and the water gets up in lumps?" The Stink of the Red Herring is perhaps the most genteel of the four novellas, despite it involving a murder mystery—and the founding of India's first detective agency circa 1961. Prem, the protagonist, leaves what could have been a promising engineering career in the US, to pursue his ambitions as a private investigator. Once again, Chatterjee leaves no stone unturned to highlight the many absurdities a man in Prem's position might encounter. Like many procedurals, this is a dialogue-heavy story and you can tell Chatterjee is having a lot of fun here, like when we're in the middle of a story about a gardener who loses his sense of smell in an accident. ''Poor fellow. To be a gardener when you can't smell the roses.' 'Or the stench of dung for that matter, in the manure.'" Of course, humour, especially in Chatterjee's fictional universes, often hides something darker and more ominous underneath. In The Hapless Prince , the longest of these novellas at just over a hundred pages, we meet an Indian prince named Hariram who has been nursing resentments against the British in general—and his bullying British schoolmates in particular—for a while. But when he sets up a plot to assassinate the British Resident and take out his old nemeses, a series of farcical events conspire to derail his plans. The Hapless Prince sees Chatterjee in peak 'dramedy" mode and contains some unforgettable passages, like the one below where Hariram is ranting about the British withholding permission to build a school. 'And yet when we want to set up, not a mammoth white-marble Temple Trust, not a religious camp for astrologers and soothsayers, but a school, our first school, not for the scions of the polo players of the nobility, but for the poor, you put a spanner in the works because you feel that when ready, it just might make you take a five-minute detour every morning when you want to canter off to Dumraon Hill for your horse-riding. You forget, you know, that we refer matters to you merely out of deference to your paramountcy. You are paramount, of course, but so is that new motion picture company in Hollywood." I had read The Revenge of the Non-Vegetarian in 2018, when it had been published as a standalone book. Seven years later, it has lost none of its urgency and in fact reads like it might have been written yesterday. In 1949, a Muslim family of six (and their dog) is burnt to death inside their own home by a Hindu man driven homicidal by hunger and jealousy. Madhusudan Sen (incidentally, the father of Chatterjee's famous IAS character Agastya Sen from the novel English, August ), the town's magistrate who cannot complete breakfast without sausage, eggs and liver, vows to turn vegetarian until justice is done. Of course, with the legal and bureaucratic bottlenecks characteristic of the nascent Indian state, the process ends up dragging its feet until 1973. This kind of plot is perfect for Chatterjee to tap into his vast reserves of gallows humour—in this case rather literally when the convicted murderer finds himself locked up with two rapists and one child-killer. But because his three cellmates are vegetarian, they are quite comfortable making fun of this man's meat-eating, calling him 'Gomaas Kumar" ( gomaas is the Hindi word for beef). This novella also reminds us that over and above his full comedic bag of tricks (satire, farce, parody), Chatterjee is also one of our finest exponents of the sprawling multi-clause sentence. Notice how he effortlessly conjures a vital, throbbing-with-humanity mis-en-scene of the murdered family's domestic life here. Everything the flames lick adds something new to our mental picture, and what a poignant picture it is, too. 'It had consumed everything, the dragon's breath, and found fodder in every nook—the curtains that partitioned off one half of a bedroom, the boy's schoolbooks, the mother's saris, the vats of mustard oil and ghee in the kitchen, the rice in the storeroom, the straw cushion that had been the dog's bed and most of all, the wood and coal kept at hand to stoke the kitchen fire." The Hush of the Uncaring Sea sees one of our finest writers in crackling form. Like a true master of the absurd, he's at his funniest when he's being deadly serious. In their convictions as well as their fragilities, Chatterjee's characters are painfully, undeniably Indian. Aditya Mani Jha is a writer based in Delhi.
Yahoo
09-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Four decades on, still no justice for South Africa's Apartheid-era atrocities
Victims of Apartheid-era atrocities are suing the South African government for damages over failing to prosecute those suspected of committing Apartheid-era crimes. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission identified some 300 suspects to be investigated for possible prosecution, but the vast majority were never pursued. Lukhanyo Calata was 3 years old when his father's body was found. He says he was too young to remember his dad, and only recalls his funeral. 'I remember seeing what I grew up calling 'the red box',' he said, referring to his father's coffin. 'I remember seeing it being lowered into the ground, and I knew that my father was in there. What I didn't know at the time was that I would have to grow up without him,' said the 43-year-old. Fort Calata was an anti-Apartheid activist from the town of Cradock in the Eastern Cape. He was raised by his grandfather, the secretary general of the African National Congress (ANC), who instilled in him the fight for civil rights. As Calata grew into a young man, his activism gained traction in Cradock and he became a target of the state's security apparatus. On June 27, 1985, Calata and his comrades Matthew Goniwe, Sparrow Mkonto and Sicelo Mhlauli drove to Port Elizabeth for a United Democratic Front meeting. But they never returned. Their desecrated corpses were found burned, with signs of torture. They would become known as the Cradock Four. 'They had pulled my father's tongue out of his mouth,' Calata said. 'And they had cut off his ring finger. I don't know why.' The suspected killers of the Cradock Four asked for amnesty but were denied. Read more on FRANCE 24 EnglishRead also:In South Africa, poor governance leads to collapse of Johannesburg's infrastructureOpenly gay imam shot dead in South Africa
