by nkomo Wed Aug 25, 2010 2:09 am
Honestly....there is very little information on what the Bulgarians did in Africa. I found this information on the internet:
Africa
A few days after the murder of the first Prime Minister of Congo, Patrice Lumumba, the Bulgarian leadership decided to send weaponry and military equipment to his political formation [xxxii] . After confidential talks with one of Lumumba's ministers, Pier Moulele, in Cairo in April 1961, another shipment of 200 tons weaponry was transferred through Egypt, but disappeared somewhere on Sudanese territory. Four years later a new significant Bulgarian arms delivery [xxxiii] to one of the few parallel Congolese “governments”, those located in Stanleyville, was successfully transported through the territory of Egypt, Sudan, and Tanzania. The military aid for this Congolese formation amounted to 500,000 USD, while in the same time about 100 Congolese men received military training in Bulgaria.
At the beginning of the 1960s, Bulgaria established military contacts with some more new states in Africa – Kenya, Zambia, Ghana, Tanzania, Mali, Nigeria, and Guinea. Several hundreds of young African military received their training and education in Bulgarian military schools. A few national-liberation movements in South Africa – MPLA of Aghostino Neto in Angola, FRELIMO of Eduardo Mondlane and Samora Machel in Mozambique, PAIGC of Amilcar Kabral in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, ZANU of Robert Mugabe and ZAPU of Joshua Nkomo in South Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), ANK of Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo in South Africa, and SWAPO of Sam Nuyoma in Namibia – received modest financial and military aid and military training in Bulgaria since the mid-1960s.
Since the establishment of pro-Marxist regimes in Angola and Mozambique, seven new protocols for military support to these two countries were agreed upon for the period 1976–1983 only. For instance, in 1982 free Bulgarian arms delivery to Mozambique exceeded 750,000 BG leva; it included 1,000 automatic guns “Shpagin”, 50 machine guns “RPD-44”, 1,000 automatic pistols “TT”, 500 carbines, 2,000 shells, etc. [xxxiv] Meanwhile, in 1981 about 50 Mozambique State Security servicemen were trained at the Bulgarian Ministry of the Interior Special High School [xxxv] .
In the 1970s, the economic and military cooperation between Bulgaria and the African Horn countries was also extended. While Bulgaria maintained more effective collaboration with Somalia until 1976, the Bulgarian government redirected its relations to Ethiopia after the signing of the Soviet-Ethiopian secret defensive agreement in December 1976. [xxxvi] In July 1980, Todor Zhivkov and his Ethiopian colleague Mengistu Haile Mariam signed a treaty for friendship and cooperation between Bulgaria and Ethiopia in Sofia, the only signed treaty with a non-European country including a special article (§ 5) for “collaboration in the military realm” [xxxvii].
source: http://www.ocnus.net/artman/publish/article_28787.shtml
I had an opportunity to get one a couple of years ago but it was a multiple choice type of deal and I chose something else instead. Apparently life is all about choices!
