Quotes from Karl Maier

In Rwanda, one person's God is another person's Satan -Thérèse Nyirabayovu

By all accounts the Angolan people, the great majority of them poor, illiterate and living in isolated villages or urban slums, carry out their civic responsibilities with great dignity and patience. The two voting days in Angola are another confirmation that anyone who mouths the cliché that Africans are not ready for democracy is simply ignorant of the facts. African politicians, however, are a different matter.

They have suffered and risked death for their country while their commanding officers are becoming rich. 'Look at that lieutenant, how fat he is. How come the officers are all fat? None of us are fat, because we have no food.

The month before I had found a cockroach in a bowl of onion soup and, when I complained, the waiter dutifully removed it and returned with another bowl from the same pot. Sheepishly, I explained that I no longer had an appetite for onion soup. A few days later, when I told the hotel manager how disappointed I was to find that onion soup was no longer on the menu, he said, 'Oh, we ran out of cockroaches.

Wadigimbi has told me on several occasions that journalists are a waste of time, which is certainly an arguable point of view, but surely not one that the director of the foreign press centre should hold.

The years of speeches about democracy and freedom were just words directed at an audience of mainly conservative Americans who had become enamoured with Africa's best known 'freedom fighter'. His commitment to democratic principles was no more real than the Maoist rhetoric Savimbi spouted in the pre-independence days when China was his biggest backer. It all comes down to this: 'If I don't win, I won't accept the result.

The 140 children at the Cuando mission represent a tiny fraction of the hundreds of thousands of Angolan kids who have no one to look after them. Most wander aimlessly around the countryside or live by their wits on the streets of Luanda and other major cities, begging for money, washing or even just watching cars. In what should be one of Africa's richest countries, guarding vehicles has become a major form of employment.

There were 675 people in his village, he says, but one-tenth of them have perished in the past three months. 'It began in November and the children were the first to begin dying.' We are eating some leaves, but the people don't have the strength to look for food any more.

One wiry little man sees from the form that I am living in South Africa and begins to question me about the situation in the run-up to the country's first all-race elections. 'Mandela will never win there, will he? Our

The good thing about what's happened in Huambo is that the problems have forced these people to work for the first time. The city people are lazy, and finally they are being made to work,' he says. I wonder how Elizabeth Casilva, whose family is on the brink of starvation, would feel about such a statement. She could not possibly work any harder, and yet only a feeding centre kept her son Erickson from dying.

In 2005 Transparency International, the Berlin-based corruption watchdog, ranked Angola as one of the ten most corrupt countries in the world.

The saddest part of it was that most of the troops fighting with the Portuguese were black Angolans. It has always been like that. Angolans killing Angolans.

His beard is flecked with grey now, but even at 57 he still has a cherubic face that breaks easily into a broad, youthful smile. Only his eyes betray immense pain. Dignity is the word that comes to mind when one meets him.

Angola's vast reserves of oil and diamonds should make it one of Africa's richest countries, but the politicians—Deofina calls them the donos, or owners—spend everything either on the war or themselves.

There are ample signs that the two sides are simply using the lull in the fighting to re-arm and re-equip their forces to have another go at a war neither can ever win.

Only God can intervene, Deofina believes, to save a people condemned to damnation by their leaders. She is a deeply religious woman, a member of the Seventh Day Adventist Church, and she is hoping God will do away with the politicians and self-appointed messiahs—the donos - who have dragged the country, her family, to ruin. 'The problem is that the donos never die.

Her age was one of the reasons she always got away with it. In Africa elderly people still command respect.

In just a few months, he vows, Cabinda will be free of Angolan rule and the huge sums of money earned from the oil exports will be used to uplift the enclave's 150,000 people. 'Without doubt, we are going to win this war, even if it takes twenty years.

A young American woman I meet has been a UN observer in Kuito for more than a month. She speaks no Portuguese and gladly admits she knows nothing about Angolan history. She is surveying the scene, admiring the tough-looking UNITA soldiers, and suddenly announces, 'I like UNITA's style. They're strict, but they're cool too.' I wonder where the United Nations finds such people for so important an assignment.