MY 30 DAYS FILMING
A BLOODY WAR
War reporter James Brabazon spent a month filming Liberian rebels during their
bloody civil war. He tells ShortList how he managed to make it out alive. Just
The Rocket Propelled Grenade
slammed into the group of guys
I was standing with. I looked
over, there was blood and bits
everywhere. I looked at my
bodyguard, Nick, our faces were
maybe the span of a hand apart, and then a government
high-velocity rifle round passed right between our faces
and slammed into the wall next to us.”
This isn’t the hyped-up blurb for some piece of SAS
fiction; this was just another day for war reporter and
filmmaker James Brabazon and his security guard — and
best friend — Nick du Toit inside Liberia’s secret civil war.
34 / WWW.SHORTLIST.COM
It all started while Brabazon was in South Africa in
May 2002. During a chance meeting with an old friend,
he learned of an ongoing skirmish between government
forces and US-funded rebels in Liberia, West Africa,
and that the war had been raging on and off since
1999. No Western journalist had been able to cover it.
“Commentators in the UN and the BBC were sceptical
about whether it [the civil war] was taking place,”
Brabazon explains.
The Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy
(LURD) had mounted a sustained offensive against
president Charles Taylor’s armies. As a result, crime, theft
and murder are all everyday occurrences. But that wasn’t
Brabazon paid the LURD
rebels to provide him a safe
passage into Liberia
going to deter Brabazon, who desperately wanted a scoop
and knew exactly who would get him in and out safely.
“I needed a war hero to protect me while I filmed
in Liberia. I thought I knew what I needed — what I had
already been told I would require: a bodyguard; an
experienced soldier; someone capable of defending
me under fire — someone, frankly, extraordinary.”
That someone was a middle-aged South African
called Nick du Toit — a former member of South Africa’s
equivalent of the British SAS who was later imprisoned
for his role in the attempted coup in Equatorial Guinea
in 2004. And, despite his likeness to an accountant, a
highly trained killer.
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