The career of the former soldier and mercenary Simon Mann might have seemed unexceptional in the pages of John Buchan or Rider Haggard but unfortunately for him it ended not in the 19th century but in a jail cell in post-colonial 21st-century Africa.
Mann, who has died aged 72 following a heart attack, spent five years in prisons in Zimbabwe and then Equatorial Guinea between 2004 and 2009 for his part in the attempted “Wonga coup”, so called because of his unavailing plea for his friends, including Sir Mark Thatcher, the son of the former prime minister, to stump up funds – “a splodge of wonga” – to rescue him following a failed attempt to overthrow Teodoro Obiang Nguema, the president of the west African oil state. It was, he admitted, “a fuck up”.
