THERE is no trace of Cafunfo on the official maps of Angola. To find out where it is, you need somebody to pencil it in for you - 50 kilometres from the border with Zaire, in the rolling savanna above the Cuango river.
In recent years, many people have found reason to mark Cafunfo on the map. The small dusty town is of considerable interest to the Angolan government which holds it to the UNITA rebels who surround it; to the South African mercenaries who were hired to recapture it from UNITA in July 1994; to the United Nations, which is trying to bring Angola's 20 year civil conflict to an end.
The interest has nothing to do with Cafunfo's strategic position - a remote 200 km from the nearest government held position - or with the allegiance or welfare of its 10,000 inhabitants. The fact is that Cafunfo lies at the centre of Angola's main diamond producing district and, while neither side likes to come right out and say it, Angola's war has now boiled down to the hard matter of diamonds.
At Cafunfo both sides are now digging, only a few hundred metres apart across the shallow Cuango river. Caught in the middle, the town has turned into the kind of place where Sergio Leone set his spaghetti westerns, a dirty frontier outpost running on pure greed.
For the past 18 months Cafunfo has been reachable only by air. Three, four or five times a day aircraft drone in from Luanda or Saurimo, the nearest government held town, and descend onto the red dirt airstrip. Officially there is a ceasefire, but most pilots seem unwilling to test this theory by making low level approaches over UNITA held territory, only six kilometres away.
The town in the eye of Angola's storm proved to be a strangely still place, halfway to ghost town. Bullets and shrapnel had scarred every building and in the official end of town, built by the state diamond mining company Endiama, many of the houses seemed empty. Weeds sprouted up through the empty engine compartments and missing windscreens of neatly parked cars, crippled by gunfire.
A couple of Soviet built light tanks rusted where they stood on the approaches to the ramshackle headquarters of General Marques, where the occasional scruffy soldier sauntered in the heat of day. Two empty army trucks meandered through the deserted streets, like the stunned survivors of a rout. In Cafunfo, it seemed as if the internal combustion century was drawing to a premature close.
There were other odd things about the town. Flying to Cafunfo courtesy of the World Food Programme, we found ourselves sharing a light aircraft with two Irish Holy Ghost missionaries, Colin Reddy and John Coleman, en route to Saurimo. They told us that despite its size, Cafunfo had no church and no priest. Father Reddy, who had visited the town shortly after the government recaptured it last year, remembered seeing serious malnutrition.
"The situation was really bad," he said. "Because of the landmines the people had no access to the fields to grow food and the government side was doing major racketeering. People were swapping diamonds for subsistence foods."
Six months later there were few signs of malnutrition but the townsfolk were sullen and poor, while the diamond diggers who streamed in on foot each evening were dressed in rags. Yet there was clearly a lot of money about: in the busy all day market at the shanty end of town, a tin of sardines costs 20 million Kwanzas or $6, a small tube of toothpaste $15 and a bottle of French labelled "whiskey" $75.
Battiste, our interpreter, was a Luanda man employed to mind equipment left in Cafunfo by the De Beers diamond company. He told us that he could not afford to buy a beer in the town: anything he needed had to be flown from the capital, itself possibly Africa's most expensive town. There was only one disco and few women, he said wistfully, and they would not dance with strangers.
"Here an onion costs a dollar, complained Lt Colonel Alex Pavits, commander of the town's seven member UN monitoring team. "In Luanda you could buy a kilo of onions for that. In Hungary, I could have a whole sack.
The situation seemed stable, he said, although ceasefire violations were common. The main danger was mines, which continued to appear near the town: tour months ago his predecessor lost both legs. On New Year's Eve a gun battle killed several people on either side, while there was some shelling by UNITA a few days later.
Given the difficulty the government experienced in recapturing and holding the town, it was surprising to learn that none of the wealth being produced there was benefiting the state exchequer. A local Endiama official said the company's production in Cafunfo had come to a halt, but he admitted that some local people were being allowed to prospect in certain areas, "so they can live", he said.
Since 1992, when UNITA repudiated peace elections and went on the warpath again, official diamond production has dropped from $270 million a year to only a few million dollars. Unofficial production has boomed, however, even in government held areas like Cafunfo.
"They just go out and make a hole in the grounds and see what they find: then they sell it," explained a local Portuguese merchant who had spent more than 30 years in the region.
But was it legal to dig up diamonds that belonged to the state?
"Before, no. But there's no law here now, because of the war."
In fact there is no way to be sure just how much digging is going on in Cafunfo or, more importantly, who benefits. To visit the town one needs written permission from Endiama and a minder from the Ministry of Mines, and when we arrived both it and the army were expecting us.
The Cafunfo enclave, 20 km by about 40 km, is dotted with known diamond fields, but it took more than a day to persuade General Marques that the two highly accredited foreign journalists on his doorstep should be allowed to visit just one of them. There were many landmines, the general explained, and if UNITA saw white faces they might mistake us for South African mercenaries.
Eventually he relented, but the party which left for the front line at Pone, 13 km to the north, was by way of an official tour, top heavy with plain clothes soldiers and Endiama officials. At the broken river bridge, where the government's writ ends, four UNITA fighters appeared on the UNITA side and shouted at us to leave. A scarecrow MPLA soldier, who had appeared from out of the bush, gave them the thumbs up across the twisted metal.
On the way back to town dozens of miniature figures came into view across the river, swarming over a hill littered with broken machinery. They were UNITA fighters, said Battiste, busy digging diamonds of their own.
Next stop on the hustled tour was a government held diamond field near the airstrip, where dozens of half naked men steadily shovelled red soil out of square pits, digging down to diamond rich silt deposited millennia ago by a small tributary of the Cuango. An old man slithered down to the muddy stream and poured some dirt from a bucket into a sieve, then sifted it out in a flimsy wooden weir.
Without any warning, a rifle shot sounded from the dense bush close by. The workers froze, their shovels poised, staring up into the thick growth along the lip of the valley. After a few seconds they resumed digging at their steady pace, sweating heavily in the humidity which shimmered up from the river.
Diamond mining is a hazardous occupation in Angola. Many diamond fields, like those at Cafunfo, lie close to the porous front lines that in theory separate UNITA from the government. Landmines are a major hazard, and local truces that allow digging to take place can be cancelled without notice. Fights between diggers are not unknown, and many garimpeiros are said to die each year. Two days before we visited Cafunfo four Angolans, three Filipinos and two Britons from a diamond concession died when their truck hit an anti tank mine near N'zaji.
THE main beneficiaries from all this sweat and danger are not the diggers themselves but the foreign middlemen who buy the diamonds and ship them out, legally or otherwise.
The manager of Endiama's company store confided that diggers were always trying to swap raw diamonds for beer and food. A few days later in another northern town a digger offered my colleague four uncut diamonds for only $40: not enough to buy a black market bottle of whiskey, or feed a family for a week.
In Cafunfo the main buyer was said to be a Mr Soza from Portugal, but he wasn't around. His deputy was a cheerful young Portuguese man who drove around the district in a jeep containing several governments soldiers and two South Africans, who had the distinctive look of Executive Outcomes mercenaries.
General Marques had not been abashed to tell us that advice and training from EO had helped him to recapture the town in 1994: some of the mercenaries later told journalists that they also had to do much of the fighting. All over Angola remnants of the EO force, now officially disbanded, can be seen cashing in on their victory as "security men" for foreign companies, or entrepreneurs in their own right. Some are even said to have become diamond buyers.
Soza's deputy lived in a fortress surrounded by armed men, and when we went to see him he was with the general and could not talk to us. In the end all we learned from him was that the army and the buyers of illegally mined diamonds were on intimate terms.
The international community has often complained that Angola's warring factions seem in no hurry to come to the table. Alluvial diamonds can be dug without capital investment, smuggled with ease and sold without question. Watching the diggers slipping in from the bush, and the light aircraft coming and going, it was easy to see why some people might not be anxious for, the stand off to end.