The Princess in Africa
On January 13, 1997, wearing blue jeans and a blazer, Diana stepped into the throbbing heat of Luanda, the capital of Angola, after an 11-hour flight to southern Africa with Whitlam and Lord Deedes, the grand old man of The Daily Telegraph. The country was reeling from a 20-year civil war. During the war an estimated nine million mines had been scattered among a population of 10 million, and clearance had barely begun. The streets were populated with men, women, and children without legs, few of whom had wheelchairs or even crutches. Some 70,000 innocents had stepped on land mines; every 334th citizen was an amputee, but only a few hundred false limbs were fitted every month. Diana was galvanized by what she saw. In the wreck of Huambo, still a disputed and heavily mined city, she and her party had to walk in single file behind an anti-mine engineer to reach a small, godforsaken hospital that had no electricity and not enough beds. There was 16-year-old Rosaline, who had lost her right leg and the baby in her womb. And there was seven-year-old Helena, who had gone out to get water and stepped on a mine. It had blown out her intestines. A saline drip was keeping her alive. Flies buzzed around her. The photographer Arthur Edwards, who was covering the expedition for The Sun, says the child was lying exposed on her back when Diana got to her. "The first thing she did was something instinctive. She made the child decent, covered her up. It was the thing a mother would do. She was concerned for the child's dignity." The rightness of her gesture was something he never forgot, nor was the way she talked softly to the child and stroked her hand. After she moved on, Christina Lamb, the Sunday Times foreign correspondent, who spoke Portuguese, stayed with the dying child. "She said to me, 'Who was that?' And it was quite hard trying to explain Princess Diana to somebody who didn't know. And I said, 'She's a princess from England, from far away.' And she said to me, 'Is she an angel?'