From the trenches of war to the mountains of peace
CHANGE: Former Unita child soldier Jose Maria Joao is now a guide and bouncer in Cape Town HE’s a slab of muscle, coated in sweat, staring into the camera. Almost imperceptibly, his giant pectorals flex.
When he speaks of how he was forced to kill for Unita as a child soldier in Angola’s civil war, a gold tooth glints, adding menace to his words.
Jose Maria Joao finds that not many people pick fights with him. That, and his longing for peace after years of conflict, is why his new life in Cape Town — pub bouncer by night, mountain bodyguard by day — is the most tranquil he’s known.
“I can’t use violence. Security is not fighting. You must watch so that your people don’t do the bad things,” he said.
“So if you see some people want to fight, you just call them and say: ‘Why you want to fight? Don’t fight. This is not a place to fight, everyone is getting a good time and wants to be cool and happy, so you can’t fight.’ ”
Joao, 45, looks like a man of war in a YouTube video called Run Jose, wearing nothing but a pair of shorts, a sheen of perspiration and an intimidating glower.
Another video, A Soldier’s Salvation, depicts the man of peace he has become: mingling with customers at The Power & The Glory pub in Tamboerskloof, leading tourists up Table Mountain, serving food at a soup kitchen.
Mountain walkers in Table Mountain National Park have often been the target of thieves looking for easy pickings, which is why word of Joao’s services has spread far and wide. Tourists even contact him through Facebook before visiting South Africa.
In return for the sense of security his presence provides, visitors who use his mountain guiding services often reward him with gifts.
“For me it’s not business, I want to make my people healthy, to be fit. Some people, they say ‘You doing nice things for life’, so they give me some present. Some of the people, they don’t have anything, so I say: ‘OK, maybe one day you’re gonna have but we’re still doing first breakfast [his term for the first exercise of the day, which sometimes includes a run up the mountain].’ ”
Joao maintains his imposing presence through rigorous physical exercise, including boxing, and he claims to be able to reach the top of Table Mountain in 50 minutes.
His next venture will be a gym he wants to call First Breakfast for Life, and he has already had many requests from people eager to exercise with him.
He has been training Maybe Corpaci, an Italian who has lived in Cape Town for five years, on the mountain for three weeks. She said: “So many people have told me ‘Ah, I want to come too with Jose’, because everybody knows Jose. But I think people are also a little bit scared, like ‘Oh my god, Jose is going up the mountain’ — it’s a bit frightening for some people.
“They think it’s probably going to be quite hardcore, you know,” said Corpaci.
On home turf in Tamboerskloof, Joao is a familiar figure. He waves back to people by making a peace sign with his fingers; the gold tooth in the middle of his smile appears radiant rather than threatening.
It’s a far cry from his childhood, when he was “arrested” as a teenager by Unita, the antigovernment rebel force which was engaged in Angola’s civil war for more than two decades.
In 2000, a dream shook him awake early one morning and he felt compelled to flee the conflict that had robbed him of his innocence and his family. So he started to walk to South Africa.
Now he describes himself as a peacemaker, helping every Wednesday at a city centre soup kitchen.
“You don’t want to see the blood any more. You want to see the peace. Everyone enjoying, everyone have a good time, everyone laughing,” he said.
“I like Cape Town too much because it is peaceful. I love all of the people and everyone knows me. It’s nice.”
For me it’s not business, I want to make my people healthy, to be fit