By day, Sāo Tome Island drowses in tropic torpor. Toward evening, however, the diminutive Portuguese colony off West Africa's underbelly in the Gulf of Guinea suddenly rouses. Along its single airport's runway can be seen a motley squadron of DC-6s, a C-46, a Super Constellation, and lately bigger but nonetheless obsolete C-97 stratofreighters, wheezing into readiness. Trucks dash up, hauling crates of food and medicines. Eventually, crews as varied as their airplanes — Swedes, Finns, Americans, a stolid Yorkshireman, a not so dour Scot — screech up in cars and climb aboard. One by one, at 20-minute intervals, the cargo planes lumber down the runway, turn northward toward the Nigerian coast. Late afternoon sunlight splashes on little blue and gold fish, the fuselage emblems of the interfaith airlift organized by the World Council of Churches and the Catholic relief organization Caritas to shuttle food to starving Biafra.
Since Uli airport, 90 minutes' flying time from Sāo Tomé, is shrunken Biafra's lone remaining link with the world, the night shuttle frequently hauls passengers as well. A visitor has to be nerveless to endure the trip. Approaching the coast at dusk, the planes are occasionally shot at by Nigerian antiaircraft batteries. When they reach Uli, homing in on the airfield's radio beacon, they face worse harassment from a twin-engine Nigerian Ilyushin the pilots call "the Intruder." The Ilyushin hovers over blacked-out Uli every night for four hours, drops 500-lb. bombs from time to time, and forces the food planes to pull up and scatter. Its pilot breaks into their radio frequency in mocking, accented English. "This is genocide, baby," he taunts. "Come on down and get killed." Some do. Two mercy planes have crashed in the eleven months since the airlift got under way. The eight crewmen killed in the crashes lie in simple graves at a nearby village called Mgbidi.
A Nice Road But. To avoid the Intruder, planes travel 20 miles to another beacon erected in a treetop where they hover in holding patterns. Here the danger is perhaps greater. Other planes from Gabon loaded with arms and ammunition also join the pattern; sometimes as many as 20 ships are circling simultaneously, some assigned the same altitudes by inexperienced Biafran ground controllers. The sight of fire-bright exhausts in the African night is slim comfort to other flyers. Says Swedish Pilot Ulf Engelbrecht: "If all the pilots some night were to turn on rotating beacons and clearance lights, a dozen of them would die of fright at their proximity to one another."