Narsiso "Gomie" Gomes, Unsung hero.

Narsiso ‘Gomie’ Gomes

A Portuguese-speaking South African war hero: One among many.

odesconhecidoheróiduranteOperaçãoSavana, soldado de línguaportuguesa do Batalhão 32, Koevoet

With over 500 years of Portuguese influence in southern Africa, and two Portuguese colonies,the Portuguese impact on the sub-continent was always going to be substantial.In the regional competition for power, coupled with ethnic divisions which paid no heed to international borders, the military situation was always going to be fluid.What happened in one territory inevitably spilled over into another.And good fighting men were always going to be in demand.

The story of ‘Gomie’ Gomes is only one of many of the fighting men of Africa; men who grew up in a Portuguese colony, who were absorbed into a fighting force,and who eventually practiced the only thing they knew: war, for their adopted country, but often more for their unit.Like the French Foreign Legion, for these Portuguese black Africans the unit became their family and their home.The politics around it was secondary, if of any value whatsoever.What is remarkable is what these men sacrificed for their new country, South Africa. Some experienced front - line combat for over fifteen years, constantly at war with the enemy, sometimes as far as ‘the other side of the river’. Many paid the highest price and are buried in northern Namibia or southern Angola.But the survivors were, without exception, tragically abandoned by the South Africans, used and rejected.

Angola was a Portuguese colony for hundreds of years, exploited not only for its mineral and natural wealth but also for its people.For decades the slaves of the New World came from the interior of Africa, places like Angola.By the 1950's, colonial Portugal, like the rest of the colonial powers, was under pressure: the winds of changes were blowing and Africa was screaming for independence.In Angola three liberation movements were formed, all embarking in the early 1960's upon armed resistance against the Portuguese: the Soviet-backed MPLA, the Chinese-backed FNLA and UNITA. The FNLA had its support base in the north and east, UNITA in the southeast of the country, with the MPLA primarily centered round the capital Luanda.

Narsiso Gomes was born in 1946 in Mushiko, Luena in the east of central Angola, not far from the Congolese border.His parents were ethnic Chokwe but all the children learned Portuguese, the lingua franca of such a large, diverse country.At 17 he was press ganged into the FNLA and taken over the border, ending up at Lubumbashi in the southern Congo, close to the Zambian border.Here, at Chapa camp, the recruits were trained in guerrilla warfare for ten months. The instructors were French-speaking whites, mercenaries in the pay of Congolese President Mobuto Sese Seko, a staunch supporter of the FNLA. The French instructors identified the young Gomes as a potential saboteur and so he was trained intensively in the ‘art’ of wrecking railway lines.

In 1965 Gomes was deployed into Angola to fight the Portuguese. For the next ten years he fought countless actions against the colonist army and committed many acts of sabotage on the country’s infrastructure.Many of his comrades were killed but as a capable guerrilla Gomes always managed to disappear into the bush to fight another day.By 1975 the scattered FNLA groups were consolidated. In Portugal the guard had changed and Angola became independent in November 1975 as the three factions inside Angola fought it out for the spoils.But foreign support for the three protagonists had also changed.The Americans, South Africans and Israelis took over support of the Pro-Western Holden Roberto and his FNLA. The MPLA continued to draw its support from the Soviets, with UNITA likewise receiving succor from the Eastern Bloc.

Gomes’s first encounter with white South Africans soldiers was at Bie in 1975.From here the FNLA force was taken to southern Angola to await further instructions when South African Special Forces Operators suddenly arrived on the scene.How exactly FNLA troops led by FNLA officers changed to FNLA troops led by white South Africans is detailed by Colonel Jan Breytenbach, the commanding officer of the time, in his books (Forged in Battle, Buffalo Soldiers, They live by the Sword and Tempered Sword). By the time the FNLA troops had been retrained and re-equipped by the South Africans, there was no longer any dispute as to who was in charge.The reconstituted FNLA unit became known as ‘Zulu Force’ and was to take part in the 1975 South African invasion of Angola, Operation Savannah, with Gomes fighting in every major engagement such as Sa da Badeira, Macemedes, Catengue and Lobito. However, when the South Africans withdrew, at the behest of the CIA, the FNLA troops were left in the lurch, forsaken by their political leaders, Roberto and Chipenda. They belonged to nobody, nobody wanted them, so Breytenbach had them transferred across the Kavango River into South West Africa where they were re-formed as Bravo Group, later to become 32 Battalion of the South African Army.The buffalo would become their badge, their existence and their reputation.

They were then moved to the Caprivi and later to Rundu.For these men from Angola, this was only the beginning of fifteen years of combat with their new unit.For the following eight years, Gomies, in Platoon 1 of Alpha Company 32 Battalion, was involved in all the bigger – and many lesser known – operations.He was there during the attack on Savate; when the battle ended that afternoon the enemy, FAPLA, the MPLA’s military wing, had a serious bloody nose. He was there at Eheke when Operation Kropduif went pear-shaped; it was a victory but a worthless one.Cuvelai, Ione, Mupa, Cahama, Namacunde, Xangongo and many other places would all see Gomies and the Portuguese-speaking soldiers fighting against FAPLA, SWAPO and the Cubans.When the South Africans attacked Techamutete from the ‘wrong side’, the north, it was a complete surprise to the FAPLA defenders. Gomies was there too.

But the constant fighting and the long periods that the 32 Battalion troops were deployed placed immense pressure on the men. Gomies was already thirty-seven, having been a soldier for nineteen years, sometime guerrilla  sometime infantryman, but all the same a fighting man.He was tired of being deployed for months on end, weary of carrying heavy packs.He was looking for a way out.In 1983 he began investigating the idea of driving rather than foot-slogging into battle. At the South West African Police counter-insurgency unit in Oshakati worked his wife’s cousin,Warrant Officer Lukas Kilino. Kilinohad previously been an FNLA officer and a 32 Battalion NCO before joining Koevoet.Gomies went to see him about a transfer to the police. Kilino personally completed the forms for him and in 1983 his transfer to Koevoet took place.No longer would he be six months away from home, no longer would he lug forty-kilogram packs on his back.For the next six months he was re-trained –again.He was then attached to a new fighting team, ‘Zulu November’, trained by Sergeant Boesman Pretorius. When they were eventually deployed Gomies became the gunner for Car 3 and for the remainder of the war he was a mounted machine-gunner. Occasionally though, he would join the rest of the men on foot, but no more serious walking and no more heavy backpacks and mortars to carry.

  

He fought in dozens of contacts with SWAPO. At the big fight at Kahenge he was present when WO Bennie was killed action.In 1986 he took part in the battle at Oshana Shanandjili when four Koevoet teams contacted a major SWAPO force.Thirty-seven SWAPO troops were killed in the engagement, one of Koevoet’s biggest clashes with SWAPO in the unit’s history. In early April 1989, SWAPO, in contravention of UN Resolution 435, invaded Namibia.In the bloodiest action of the twenty-three-year-long conflict Gomes was there, behind his machine gun on his Casspir.

Shortly after SWAPO’s April 1989 invasion was crushed, Koevoet demobilized. In the newly-independent Namibia, under retributive pressure from SWAPO and with little opportunity, most Koevoet men made a break for the South African border. At Upington Gomies and others were collected by the South African Police, trained again and redeployed as ‘Special Police’.He worked out ofMoordkop near Rustenburg, in Pongola, KwaZulu-Natal, on the Swaziland border and any other place where they were needed. SWAPO’s nemesis was now eradicating crime in the form of stock theft, dagga plantations and the like. In 1994, the South African Police and the government sold these men out for a better relationship with the ANC. They were paid minuscule severance packages and left to get on with their own devices.Gomies left the police and went into the private security industry.

  

For more than fifteen years he had fought South Africa’s battles.For five more years he protected its citizens.In 1999 his three decades of active service caught up with him.His health was such that he could no longer work.He returned to Vingerkraalnear Warmbathswhere today he lives in a shack, without any police or army pension.Like so many others.But he remains a proud man, a man who fought the good fight and never lost a battle.

Leon Bezuidenhout

Pretoria

February 2013

(Thanks Leon I  hope that other readers of the Blog take your lead and write down the stories of the men that they worked and fought with, the unsung hero's in the battle against Communism)