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to advance him some funding. With this help, and his own
powers of persuasion, he had contrived to recruit his modest team, no more than 500 strong and some materiel. Most of his fighters were hired guns who brought with them their own motley armaments.
In a gesture towards some military professionalism, he was recruiting a few white mercenaries, but this was also to make his insurrection the more newsworthy in Europe and the United States.
    Samson raised his force in Cabinda in northern Angola, right by the Congolese border. He then took his men further north by a cheaply chartered tramp steamer and disembarked in Equatorial
Guinea, a tiny country with a lawless reputation in which he could buy an unopposed reception for modest price. From there, the column had marched and driven in a ragbag of vehicles almost due east
with an outline plan to pass swiftly through the extreme north of Gabonese territory en route to their end objective, a few hundred kilometres distant.
    Barry Bingham and Josh Trollope were late to join the force, and Barry had insisted on first passing through Libreville to collect fifty per cent of the contract price up front which was the
deal he had struck with Moses Samson. It was enough for signing on and starting up. There were all sorts of reasons why the balance might never get paid.
    When Barry went sick, he and Josh had been in Libreville for twenty-four hours, just long enough for them to pick up their money from Samson’s bag man and get it safely into the French
banking system. It was over an evening meal before their onward journey that Bingham collapsed without warning, literally into the soup. Josh knew enough about Africa’s sicknesses and malaria
in particular to speculate that Barry would be lucky to survive this attack, never mind catching up with ‘the army of Moses’.
    This left Josh in a difficult situation but not with a decision over which he hesitated for long. He knew that he couldn’t return the money to a nameless man who had long since vanished
and he couldn’t hope to hang on to it and bail out without the risk of Samson’s retribution overtaking him. He would never be free of that worry and besides, he would be condemning
Barry to an unpleasant end if the malaria didn’t get him first. And then there was another aspect. If Josh went ahead and did some of Bingham’s job for him, he could count on picking up
a fair proportion of Barry’s pay as well as his own.
    So Josh stuck to the plan even though he was sorely hampered by being alone and unable to communicate easily. He rendezvoused at dawn the next day with a one legged guide and they travelled
north together by native bus, an interminable journey which gave Josh the chance to practice extravagant explanation in sign language and pidgin of what had befallen Barry Bingham. He was not
confident that his companion either understood or believed him, still less General Moses Samson whom they met more or less on schedule two days later in camp outside the little bush town of
Mbornou.
    There had been an unending tirade from Samson, delivered in a mixture of language and dialect of which Josh could decipher hardly a word, for all that the message was clear enough. White
mercenaries were expensive and unreliable, especially if they came from South Africa. They were there only to exploit the poor and downtrodden blacks, but they should be careful now as the day was
dawning for the new Messiah, Moses Samson himself, and all this announced with much beating of breast, rolling of eyes and jiggling of his little goatee beard. Samson cut a physically small and
insignificant figure, but there was no denying his presence and the inspiration which he aroused in his fervent followers. A true rabble-rouser, Josh thought to himself as he suffered this
performance which was interrupted from time to time by an immense Belgian mercenary who was on hand to provide a limping translation. In some response, Josh made the most