Author: jamenelson@gmail.com

Malongo in the enclave of Cabinda was Chevron’s operational base for their offshore oil and gas production in Angola. Cabinda, while geographically within the Congo had been historically part of Angola.

Apart from the camp there is nothing in Malongo except jungle.

Cabinda is a ten minute helicopter trip away, and Luanda is an hour and a half south down the coast, by Fokker fifty.

The mouth of the Congo River is only three hours steaming south.

Continue reading “Malongo April 1993 Banana Base, Zaire.”

Christmas in Equatorial Africa falls in the middle of the very hottest, and the very wettest time of the year.

And so it was in 1995, when I was working in Malongo, a Chevron oil workers camp near Cabinda, an enclave of Angola. In those days it was completely surrounded by Zaire but  nowadays it is completely surrounded by the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Continue reading “Malongo Christmas 1995.”

February 1994

85% of the time on the job in Angola, life plodded along with each day the same as the previous and most likely the same as the one following.

However, there was that 15% of the time when all hell could break loose.

Continue reading “Malongo Wamba A, High Island V ‘Wild Well’”

Ninety percent of the diving work carried out by us during my time in Malongo, was inshore, within ten miles of the coast, and as such hugely influenced by the Congo/Zaire River emptying into the Atlantic just south of where we worked.

Specific adaptations, horrific to some people, had become routine to the diving team and we dealt with the current and the sometimes almost zero visibility.

Continue reading “Malongo, Guinea current.”

With apologies to Clement Clarke Moore

Written in Malongo December 1995

It was the night before Christmas and all through the camp.

It was bucketing rain and all things were damp.

The cicadas and crickets were making such noise.

No kids in this place, just a lot of big boys.

Then a flash and a whoosh, up in the sky.

A bright sleigh and reindeer is passing close by.

The bar had been closed for three hours or more.

While the rain in deluge from the sky it did pour.

The sleigh came in safely, I’m glad to report.

And made a beautiful landing in the heliport.

Not a soul stirred, no one had seen him arrive.

Except the mosquitoes, he was being eaten alive.

Of course it was Santa who’d just found that berth.

And of course it’s Malongo, the end of the earth.

He looked quickly round and thought what a hole.

Come  Dacher and Dancer, get us back to the North Pole.

They sped away quickly away from that area.

And after twenty-one days he came down with malaria.

But on that rainy night as they sped away North.

Santa looked back and he issued forth.

This place that you work, it fills me with grief.

I’m sorry my visit of necessity was brief.

But on this Christmas day, with this wish I will go.

Soon you’ll be back with your loved ones I know.

So just for the present make the most of your plight.

And to you all Happy Christmas, and a very good night.

Continue reading “Malongo Christmas 1995 The Night before Christmas”

On 1 January 1996, the camp in Malongo was attacked by FLEC, the Front for the Liberation of the Enclave of Cabinda, just one of the dizzying arrays of acronyms, created during the war waged by various Angolan sects, against their Portuguese occupiers.

Cabinda was not part of the deal finally worked out with Portugal. At one stage it was part of the Congo and then Zaire, another name for the Congo on the south bank of the Congo/Zaire River, and not the other one, whose capital Kinshasa is on the North Bank.

Amid all the confusion in that part of the world, the ordinary people just wanted to have enough to eat and a reasonable assurance that they would not suffer genocide, or be shot by their own police men or soldiers.

Continue reading “Malongo Mortar Attack on Chevron CampNew Years day 1996”

During the 1990s I worked as a professional diver in Cabinda, Angola West Africa.

Cabinda while geographically in the Congo (Zaire as it was at the time) historically had been an enclave of Angola, and as the Atlantic ocean off shore from Cabinda was rich in oil, Angola was unlikely to give it up.

The Cabinda diving team worked out of and Malongo, a ten minute helicopter ride from the airport in Cabinda.

There was nothing in Malongo except the camp and jungle.

Continue reading “Malongo Sperm Whale Calf at the Deep Water SBM.”

It’s probably best not to try to examine Central and West African politics through the prism of European understanding. What passes as acceptable political behaviour in the sense of what that phrase means in Europe, cannot be applied in Africa.
Colonial powers left the African continent in such a mess that it may well take hundreds of years to clear up.
Power in Angola, DRC or any West or central African country is not decided upon by-election, because the losers simply reject the result of any quasi-democratic selection process and call upon their supporters, often numbering in the millions, to take up weapons and go to war.
Few commentators consider the history of Africa when the contemporary situation is under discussion.

Continue reading “Malongo Banana Base Zaire. Thinking about West African Politics.”

Things stalled for a while after I had finished the course, so I moved back to Dublin to find a real job. 

I went back to live with my dad and his new wife in Sandymount, and I found a position with an International trucking company very quickly, whose warehouse and offices were literally around the corner from where I had worked before embarking on my diving career.

I was back in the business that I had worked in for ten years prior to plunging into the diving industry, & I was back living in the house that I had grown up in.

‘Plus sa change, plus la meme chose’ 

Continue reading “After the Fort William Course, and before I went on my first ROV job.”

When I had just about given up hope of the Mexican job ever happening, my flight tickets and itinerary arrived from Idrotec.

 On Friday 22^nd of May I flew Dublin Shannon New York Mexico City arriving in Mexico early afternoon; the connecting flight to Cuidad Del Carmen was the following morning, so I had been instructed to stay at the Marriott hotel, which was in the airport terminal building.

Idrotec had thoughtfully provided a voucher for dinner and my bed and breakfast the following morning.

Continue reading “Mexico Cuidad Carmen, Campeche, May 1998”