By ALEX DUVAL SMITH
New Zealand backpackers served as unwitting dupes in an audacious arms-smuggling operation during the war against apartheid.
The travellers who booked African adventure holidays through a London travel firm in the late 1980s served as cover for arms smuggled to activists in South Africa.
The company was Africa Hinterland, and besides tourists its specially adapted white Bedford lorry carried AK-47 automatic rifles, handguns, limpet mines, grenades and ammunition hidden in the seats.
Over seven years, 40 tonnes of arms and ammunition were smuggled by the company, which had an office in Greenwich High Rd, London, and was set up by the armed wing of the African National Congress (ANC).
The company went out of business at the same time as apartheid, not long after Nelson Mandela was released from jail in 1990.
A documentary to screen on South African television this weekend will give details of the operation.
The white Bedford, which was driven by British anti-apartheid activists, still exists and was put back on the road by the makers of the film, The Secret Safari.
Jenny Harris, a Briton who was Africa Hinterland's field manager when it was launched in 1986, said the best customers were "young New Zealanders and Australians, and even some young South Africans, who were in London during a year out."
Stuart Round was one of three British drivers who made nearly 40 trips from Kenya to Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana and finally South Africa.
Aged only 19 when he began, he said: "When I landed in Nairobi at the start of this thing in 1986, I was very, very apprehensive."
Jo Lewis, a former driver who now runs a vegan restaurant in London, said: "The passengers were our cover ... I am sure we were the best company operating overland safaris because we were so worried about failing."
Peter Gibbs, director of Adventure Travel Company in Auckland, was not surprised at the use of tour trucks for smuggling.
Mr Gibbs, who was not familiar with Africa Hinterland but was a passenger on a couple of overland trips across Africa during the 1980s and led tours across Asia, said it was easy to hide contraband.
"I know there was a bit of smuggling on a few other trips on the old trucks, but not through Africa and not arms - whisky and all sorts of things into Pakistan."
Aucklander Veronica Clark, who travelled for eight months across Africa in a Bedford truck with another London-based tour company, said the vehicles would have been good for smuggling because border guards were more interested in bribes from tourists than checking the trucks.
The film's producer, David Max Brown, whose father, Mannie Brown, established Africa Hinterland in London, said ANC leaders had been apprehensive about the documentary.
"Possibly the ANC's still embarrassed about using unwitting tourists as a cover."
But if the film is to be believed, the tourists who took the truck safari to Cape Town in the late 1980s are largely pleased to have unwittingly played a role in ending apartheid.
"I think it was probably one of the best things I ever did," said an Australian, Misha Coleman.
Ironically, a number of Africa Hinterland's clients regularly got off the truck in Zimbabwe and flew back to Britain because they did not feel that it was morally right to take holidays in South Africa at the time.
The truck was specially adapted by Rodney Wilkinson, an anti-apartheid activist who had fled to Britain after blowing up Koeberg, a nuclear reactor which was about to be commissioned in the Cape.
First he designed a yacht for smuggling arms - the idea was to offer boating holidays. Then he came up with the overland safaris idea. David Max Brown said it took nine months to rebuild the brand-new Bedford with two rows of plastic-covered seats facing each other.
In 10cm grooves under the padded seats, one tonne of arms could be hidden after being carefully packed to minimise the danger of explosion and detection by sniffer dogs at the border between Botswana and South Africa.
After Mr Mandela's release in February 1990, Africa Hinterland moved to Johannesburg, from which tours of southern Africa - also intended for arms smuggling - were offered to South Africans.
The operation finally ceased in 1993, the year before the republic's first democratic election.
- HERALD CORRESPONDENT
African arms smugglers used Kiwi tourists
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