Cape Talk, Thursday night

So at the time, I was working for a magazine called Outside in the States, which is a kind of an outdoorsy, kayaking, rock climbing type magazine. The editor took a very broad view of what adventure was, and I managed to kind of persuade him into a story on the attack in Mozambique because of the sort of frontier nature of the operation up there. It's very wild cat.

Oil and gas. It's the middle of nowhere. There's no infrastructure. And the reason there were thousands of foreign contractors up there was they were building essentially an entire new town in the middle of nowhere to accommodate what would eventually be 15,000 people to work this giant gas plant to tap one of the biggest gas fields in the world. But they were building this in the bush. There's no infrastructure.

Infrastructure: there's no roads, there's no electricity, there's nothing, no water. So, there were an enormous amount of foreign contractors up there. And I initially wrote about them and how they came under attack, as you say, by a group of ISIS guerrillas. And at the time, there were a group of South Africans and some Brits, a few others, 183 people who holed up in a hotel and were under siege for a few days. That's what made the headlines at the time.

They were under siege for two days. No help came. They eventually broke out in a convoy. The convoy was shot up in two different places. Some of them made it, some of them didn't. It was, you know, it was a kind of action-packed survival story with some very tragic consequences and seemed to sort of speak to corporate or lack of corporate responsibility. Essentially, the people that had been working for.

Or Total Energies, the big gas operator in the area, Total had abandoned them and had left them to their fate. So that was a story I wrote for outsiders, I say. I got kind of obsessed with it. I wrote a 20,000-word story. I'm pretty sure that was the longest English language story published that year. But it was only after that was published, my translator on the ground. We'd never managed to get a sense of what had happened.

To the town of Palmer because it was deserted. So there was no one, literally, no one to talk to. Everyone had fled, 60,000 people. And it was after the story was published, my translator said, People are starting to come back. Do you want to come back and talk to them? So I did. And the first day we went out, I met a guy who said, Oh, I've been waiting for someone to come and ask me what happened. Here's a list of 142 dead in my dalaria. The next guy we met said,

You should know about this canoe that went down with people sort of fleeing with 50 people on board. The next guy showed us a pile of skulls. The next guy showed us a police station which had been having a party and everybody had been wiped out. And it had taken bulldozers 10 days to bury everybody. And after a day of this, I realized, you know, this is just beyond my ability to quantify alone. And it was my translator actually who said to me, well, you should set up a survey group.