Not Child's Play

In 1990, David Muller set sail to Mozambique with his wife and two young children, to fulfil a boyhood dream of sailing to the tropics on the yacht he had spent ten years building. The dream holiday came to a shocking end when the yacht ran aground on a stretch of beach near Bazaruto Islands. While waiting for high tide to refloat the yacht, a patrol of Renamo child soldiers, armed with AK47’s, arrive, along with two adult captives. The boys ransack the yacht, taking the terrified Muller family hostage. Later that night the child soldiers bayonet the two prisoners to death.

Not Child’s Play brilliantly traverses the Muller’s nightmare of seven weeks in captivity. You will be taken into the enigmatic world of the child soldier and share the Muller’s daily battle to protect their children from the impacts of the civil war in which they had become trapped. Plagued by intense mental and emotional strain, with the fear of violence and death a constant, as the days drag by, uncannily the hostages and captors begin to bond.

“Our time with Renamo was defined by constant paradox. The young boys who in cold-blood killed people, also played childhood games with our children. We could not speak their language and struggled desperately with a lack of information about our status. However, the kindness shown to us in sharing what few resources they had, transcended the brutality of the war in which we were all trapped, and required no translation. Every day held terrors, yet we were perplexed by the innate innocence of our captors. Therein lay the paradox.”

The eventual dramatic rescue 49 days later, in a rescue mission carried out by the South African Navy, was the culmination of intense negotiations between South Africa and Mozambique. The ceasefire that had to be agreed to enable this operation to take place was the first between the warring parties. Two weeks after our rescue, formal peace talks began, and peace came to Mozambique two years later.