A makeshift memorial in honour of Prigozhin (NATALIA KOLESNIKOVA/AFP via Getty Images)

The death of Yevgeny Prigozhin, master mercenary, readily evokes a host of analogies: Hitler’s Night of the Long Knives, King Phillip IV’s immolation of the Knights Templar, the Biblical injunction that he who takes up the sword shall.
I have no personal experience of Wagner, nor can I claim to know why Prigozhin was killed or by whom. Russia is like Africa, they effortlessly spin impenetrable mysteries in which the impossible becomes the truth, the possible the lie.
But I can claim to know a little about mercenaries in Africa. In my youth I co-authored a book with one of the continent’s more elusive mercenaries, a Congo veteran who was regarded as so passe by publishers that they declined to publish his story until he suddenly popped up, as mercenaries do, as part of a coup against an Indian Ocean island in 1982.
His name was Jerry Puren and he served as a mercenary in the secessionist Katanga province, later Shaba, in the Congo from 1961 until 1963. United Nations action drove him into Belgian exile with Moise Tshombe, the deposed Katangese President. He was present at Ndola in Zambia, then Northern Rhodesia, when the UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold was killed on a peace mission in 1961 in a mysterious aircraft crash. Puren always insisted to me that he had been merely passing through; it was the Americans what done it.
When Soviet-backed rebels swept into the Eastern Congo in the mid-Sixties to overthrow the Western-supported President Mobutu Sese Seko, the CIA raised a mercenary force of mostly South Africans, named Five Commando, later promoted as The Wild Geese (another historical analogy), and sent them to stop the insurgency. They did. Puren returned with Tshombe but overstayed his welcome: ensnared in the abortive Katangese Gendarmes coup of 1967, led by Belgian and French mercenaries with impossible tabloid-generated names such as Black Jack Jean Schramme and Demon Bob Denard.
Puren ended up in dead-end jobs in South Africa until again called to the colours, the green-back ones. Together with Mike Hoare, former commander of Five Commando, they launched an abortive coup against the Seychelles Government of Rene Albert in November 1982 with a hotch-potch of South African military adventurers. He had promised to take me, a hungry young journalist, on his next mission but stood me up. Just as well: it could have been a career-limiting move.
Hoare and the gang escaped by hijacking an Air India aircraft. Puren, part of a one-man self-designated forward reconnaissance unit, was left behind. As he heard the aircraft thundering overhead, he admitted to himself that he was in big shit. He spent 19 days in hiding before surrendering. Together with four other advance party scouts also captured, he was sentenced to death. Only the intercession of Archbishop Desmond Tutu saved them. Diplomacy got them an early release.
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