In 1915, South Africa took over control of the country from Germany, and at the end of the First World War, South West Africa was formally declared a protectorate of South Africa, a state of affairs that a substantial percentage of the population has been attempting to change ever since.

I mulled over the lengthy briefing I had been given on the country by Roger Brandywine, the Foreign Office resident expert on South West African affairs, as I stepped out to the top of the gangway steps. In the blinding sunlight it was hard to see anything for a few moments, and I trod on the heel of a large man in front of me, who wore long khakicoloured trousers, a loose shirt with an orange goldfish pattern, and a straw pork pie hat on top of a very large head with a fat white face; he swivelled round, and in a strong German accent laced with an even stronger stench of garlic, spat out, ‘Votch your step, you fucking man,’ then proceeded to miss his own and fell headlong the entire length of the gangway. I didn’t see any great banners saying Welcome to Namibia. Reckoned I didn’t need to.

It was unlikely that anyone was keeping watch on Wind-heok Airport, waiting for me to turn up, and even more unlikely still that, if they had been, they would have recognized me when I did. I handed a German passport to the white immigration officer and he studied it closely for some moments. The photograph he looked at showed a man with a Zapato moustache, thick tortoiseshell glasses and hair lacquered down and brushed straight back. When he looked up at me, he saw exactly the same man. The name on the passport was Josef Shwartzenegger, and under the heading for occupation it said: Geologist. He closed the passport, handed it back to me and nodded. Geologists were a dime a dozen through this airport.

I took a cab the thirty-eight kilometres up into the centre of Windhoek, and checked into the Kalahari Sands Hotel in Kaiser Strasse. I put my bags in my room, and went out of the hotel into the street in search of a public call box. There was a possibility that the hotel’s phones were bugged by the South African secret police, BOSS, and as I was going to have to use my real name to the person I was going to call, in spite of having checked into the country and into the hotel under the name of Shwartzenegger, I didn’t want to arouse anyone’s suspicions.

When the telephone rang at the Westondam Corporation’s Dambe Mine, about fifty miles north-west of Windhoek, it was answered immediately. The Dambe Mine was one of Westondam’s many worldwide interests. The chairman and chief executive of Westondam was one Sir Donald Loewe-Congleton, better known to readers of Private Eye as King Kongaroo, and better known to me as father of Gelignite.