Al-Qaeda hostage Stephen McGown on how he survived six years with his captors

Somewhere in a press archive in South Africa is a photograph that bookends Stephen McGown’s extraordinary life in captivity. In it he holds the front pages of the Sunday Times and The Star whose headlines scream ‘SA Man taken in Mali’ and ‘Al-Qaeda hostage back home’, respectively, defining the days when Stephen was taken hostage by the Al-Qaeda and then freed six years later. Stephen is seen grinning, the light in his eyes undimmed, a remarkable indicator of courage, hope in the darkest of times and the power of the human spirit.

It was to share his experiences as the longest-held, surviving Al-Qaeda hostage in the world and to launch his award-winning book, Six Years with Al Qaeda, to an Indian audience that Stephen was invited to the inaugural session of the Kindness Festival held in Chennai. The festival is an outreach programme of The Kindness Foundation, an India-based non-profit organisation founded by Mahima Poddar, with a vision to expand the perception of kindness in communities through tools, workshops and experiences.

In a question-and-answer session at a hall filled to the brim at the Hyatt Regency, Chennai, Stephen spoke about how his road home through the Sahara ended up being the longest journey of his life – nearly five years and eight months.

Stephen McGown’s book, Six Years with Al-Qaeda | Photo Credit: B VELANKANNI RAJ

Stephen was an investment banker who worked in both Johannesburg and London, holding dual citizenship — South African and British. His years in London were capped by his marriage to Catherine. A couple of years later, the duo decided to move to South Africa where Stephen was raised to start a family and help his parents farm. So, while Catherine took a flight to their new life in Johannesburg, Stephen decided to ride down from London via the Iberian peninsula and across the great, heaving continent of Africa.

Stephen set out with a group of riders travelling across the Sahara’s boundless caramel dunes, past blue-turbaned Tuaregs, nomadic tents, baked-earth mosques and wandering camels. He entered Mali, a country sanded over by the desert, its scree and arid vegetation cooled only by the coal-black night. It was at the metaphorical town of Timbuktu that Stephen, along with Swede Johan Gustafsson and Dutchman Sjaak Rijke, was captured while relaxing on a porch after a meal.

Stephen McGown (right) and and Johan Gustafsson in a video grab, while being held hostage | Photo Credit: Special arrangement

“I had researched the route well. But in hindsight, I believe it was meant to be. A German tourist was killed when he resisted and the three of us (known as the Timbuktu Three) were driven off, face down, in the back of a pickup by our Al-Qaeda captors who were teenagers wielding AK-47s,” says Stephen, unravelling the details of his odyssey. It was November 25, 2011 and when Stephen finally was set free in July 2017, his journey encompassed his own uncertainty, isolation, physical, emotional and psychological trauma, as well as those of his wife and parents. It also became, as Mahima steered the conversation, “a journey of forgiveness”, resilience and redemption.  

Initially, the lack of information filled Stephen with terror. “As a prisoner you have no information, not even on a need-to-know basis”. Videos went out every three months, when the family got to see the men, turbaned and bearded, but alive and somewhat well. However, when the Al-Qaeda took over vast swathes of North Africa, the videos got fewer. “Watching some of the videos was like living in a perpendicular universe. We never met others, although rations arrived regularly. We were constantly on the move. I stayed sane by hoping I’d be released by my friend’s birthday the next month, by Christmas, by my parents’ birthdays. Then, when we crossed two years, the benchmark became 10 years. So even in the fifth year I believed that I still had time.”

Stephen McGown, in conversation with Mahima Poddar, founder of the Kindness Foundation at the inaugural event of the Kindness Festival in Chennai | Photo Credit: B VELANKANNI RAJ

This expanding notion of time was, however, filled with instants of living in the moment. “When we have too much we lose this. I swung between short-term and long-term hope. There was always shelter to be pitched, food to be cooked and we ate a variety of fowl and beast, including lizard. The lungs are never great,” he chuckles.

Stephen revealed that many a time his fellow captives and he never saw eye-to-eye. “Although we had travelled together, the relationship became superficial once we were captured. So now, I tried to get to know the Al-Qaeda, learnt Arabic and French, read the Quran, played chess.”  

Every time western jets kept hovering there was a possibility of escape, but Stephen knew that any attempt to do so would have been futile. In early 2017, the other two hostages were released. By July, Stephen was driven into the desert for over a day, into Gao, and finally, when the emir’s car parked under a tree he was told he was free to go. “It was an anti-climax,” laughs Stephen. “I didn’t expect it to end this way.”

But his other life was just beginning. He learnt his mother had passed away two months before his release, his bike had made it home to Johannesburg before he did, his father had moved heaven and earth to bring him home and Catherine had not moved on. “It took me more than a year to find my feet. But at no time did I ever feel anger, I thought of it as a strange privilege.”

Stephen has since shared his learnings with people across the world and written the book as a legacy. To questions whether he had the Stockholm Syndrome, the adventurer-survivor and symbol of hope, replies in the negative. “Not at all. Those years taught me to put people at the heart of it.”