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He wore a sergeant’s stripes on his sleeve and was fat, immensely so, but tall as well, with a shiny face so black it seemed almost blue. He pushed his cap back from his forehead and examined our passports, slowly and carefully, one by one. So far he had not said a word, and I took the opportunity to try and see past him and the truck. Before a soldier carrying an old FN FAL rifle quickly moved across to block my view I had seen a line of sandbags placed across the road with more soldiers crouching behind them, their guns pointed across the river.

"Where you going?" asked the sergeant. He spoke slow, careful English.

"Across the river," said one of my colleagues. It doesn’t matter who he was, but he’s dead now. A month later, his vehicle hit a landmine. "We want to see what’s going on."

"No, across river, very bad. Fighting. You go back hotel. No safe."

"But we want to know what’s going on. Can you tell us at least? Is it the rebels? A coup? Which side are you on?"

"You go hotel." The fat sergeant smiled benevolently. "You be safe. No go river, very dangerous. Fighting." He gave us the passports and turned back towards his trucks.

"Let’s try and find a way round this roadblock," the man who would be blown up later muttered in my ear. "There ought to be a lane or two we could use."

Just then the soldiers I had seen behind the sandbags began firing across the river, and we scrambled away back towards the hotel before someone from the other side began firing back.

Later that day the power returned. The fighting had more or less stopped by then, we could hardly hear any shots any more, and some people had reappeared on the streets. Nobody knew anything even in the hotel. All sorts of rumours were flying round.

In the evening a general spoke on the radio and on national TV. Bisarian TV was a pretty mediocre affair, just one channel with poor picture quality, but we were all watching it with as much attention as if it were the latest from the studios of the BBC.

The general had a shiny face and was sweating heavily and was in a dress uniform festooned with medals. He looked like something out of a Hollywood film on Idi Amin, I remember. But what he said was far more important than what he looked like, and that was that the army had taken over the government in the hour of national crisis. So we knew at last. It was a coup.

By the next morning things were more or less back to normal in the city and the phone lines were up, and my bureau told me to stick around and report on the coup and the war. No flights, in any case, were leaving from Keke’s airport, so I was stuck there, like it or not. I went over to the interior ministry to ask for accreditation as a foreign correspondent – something I had been told was essential under Bisarian law if I were to work there – but all I found was a burnt out shell. It must have been a prime target during the fighting.

All this time the rebels kept on advancing, and the new junta in power reversed the previous administration’s policy of minimising the rebellion in the media. Instead, they began playing it up for all it was worth, so that they could pose as saviours of the nation. And it was then that at last the rebellion became newsworthy.

I’m sure most of you will recall the headlines in the papers about the rebels, the dreaded Karibu and their leader, the Rei N’deer. I got a crash course on the history of the rebellion those first few days of the military takeover, sitting in my hotel room and waiting for some sort of interior ministry to begin functioning again. The Karibu were the people of the south west of the country, who thought they had been exploited and denied their rights by the rest of the nation. They were a great and powerful people, too, once an independent nation in their own right and still with their hereditary king, the Muz. The Muz himself was pretty much a figurehead. He appeared on the photos I saw of him dressed in a suit, with a leopard’s skin head dress and his ornamented wooden sceptre, but all he really did was read speeches written for him by his advisers. The council of advisers was the real power led by the king’s Prime Minister, the Rei, whose name was N’deer. They did not want to revive their little kingdom. They had bigger ambitions - they wanted to control the whole country.  This was why they called themselves the National Front.

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