They have been sighted in Ivory Coast, where they are supporting President Laurent Gbagbo against mutineers and former soldiers who have seized half that West African country.

Gbagbo's government, for its part, claims the rebels have recruited mercenaries from neighboring countries.

Two white mercenary units tried -- and failed -- to get into Madagascar recently, one to support the incumbent president, the other to back his predecessor, AFP reported.

During the 1967-70 Biafra war, mercenaries fought on both sides.

Those flying the Migs for the Federal Nigerian government were the rejects -- drunks and incompetents -- of other air forces, unable to fly on instruments.

They frequently knew the mercenaries fighting for the ultimately unsuccessful secessionists, even talked to them by radio, so the watchword -- usually -- was "I won't kill you if you don't kill me".

But sometimes the employers demanded action: One South African shot down a clearly marked red cross plane flying relief supplies into Biafra, killing all aboard.

He spent his subsequent evenings drinking brandy and coke in bars, becoming more maudlin as each evening wore on, trying to justify what he had done.

The heyday of mercenaries in Africa came after the independence of the then Belgian Congo in 1960, which became Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo, when the likes of Frenchman Bob Denard and his "Affreux" -- "the frightful ones", Belgian "black jack" Schramme and Briton "mad Mike" Hoare fought in the secessionist province of Katanga -- times of blood and guts and craziness.

Denard, now 75, also took part in a succession of coups in the Comoro islands, in the Indian Ocean, a country he regarded as his second home after taking a Comoran wife.

After spending time in the notorious Sante prison in Paris, he was aquitted in 1999 of murdering a Camoran president.

the establishment in apartheid South Africa of executive outcomes in 1991 brought sudden order in Africa to the world's second-oldest profession.

The crazies were no longer welcome. The company recruited battle-hardened and disciplined South Africans and Rhodesians, blacks as well as whites. They received regular salaries, invalidity insurance, pension plans ...

Those guarding VIPs pressed their uniforms and spit-shined their boots. They fought in Angola, Sierra Leone, even as far afield as Papua New Guinea.

In Ivory Coast, according to a South African analyst working for the respected Institute of Strategic Studies (ISS), mercenaries began arriving in October.

"Forty of them arrived in Abidjan ... and some 160 are meant to follow," ISS analyst John Tuma told AFP late last month.

"On the face of it they are there to protect the president but the sheer number suggests that there may be more to it than that", he said, indicating that the mercenaries might bolster the ineffective Ivorian army, which fled many towns as the rebels arrived shooting in the air.

Nico Palm, the former head of executive outcomes, which officially closed down in 1999, denied vehemently that the company was still operating underground and had supplied the mercenaries in Ivory Coast.

"Neither the ex-chairman nor myself have activated the company or given permission for executive outcomes to be used as a vehicle for any activities," he said in a statement to the local Sapa news agency. "The name of executive outcomes is therefore being used in a totally fraudulent manner."

South Africa's Foreign Ministry is nevertheless looking into the case, because the new government passed a law in 1998 forbidding all mercenary activity.

"We have seen reports of this alleged activity by South Africans and have instructed our officials in the Ivory Coast to look into the matter," spokeswoman Nomfanelo Kota told journalists.

"Certainly the South African government has not sanctioned any such activity," she added.

Palm claimed that a "fraudulent" company established in another country and using the executive outcomes name and logo had supplied the mercenaries in Ivory Coast.

The "closure" of executive outcomes was nevertheless greeted with skepticism by analysts, including those writing for Britain's Jane's ***Defense Weekly***, who said they believed it would soon reappear in another guise in another country.

In Madagascar, President Marc Ravalomanana said 36 South African mercenaries took off for his Indian Ocean island in June in a bid to assassinate him a month after he had taken the oath of office following violently contested presidential elections in December In the meantime, a dozen French mercenaries took off for Madagascar to support Didier Ratsiraka, the former president who rejected the result of the December poll.

Those mercenaries, armed to the teeth, and using a chartered falcon, got as far as Tanzania, where they were apprehended and repatriated, with the discreet help of the French Foreign Ministry.

British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw suggested recently that mercenaries be harnessed for peacekeeping operations -- an idea that drew scathing criticism.

"I find it breathtaking in the extreme that ...

the foreign secretary should even contemplate giving such companies a veneer of respectability and suggesting that there could be circumstances when democratic countries or agencies like the UN should sub-contract peacekeeping or humanitarian intervention to such organizations," said British Labor Party MP Andrew Mackinlay.