Chasing the Devil: The Search for Africa's Fighting Spirit

by Tim Butcher

  On reaching Sierra Leone by steamship on 19 January 1935 the Greenes spent just four days in Freetown, gathering last-minute supplies and hiring staff, before a train took them 230 miles across almost the entire breadth of the country. It was then a relatively stable and well-organised British colonial protectorate and they did not dawdle, anxious to reach the real object of their adventure, Liberia. Hiring a truck for the last 40 miles, they crossed the remote eastern frontier by foot on 26 January 1935.

  Supported by twenty-six porters, three servants and one chef they took on one of Africa’s most remote regions, its daunting climate, terrain and tropical diseases. Liberia in the 1930s had no roads so their column proceeded entirely on foot, crossing the country along jungle trails that wormed through an almost unbroken thicket of scrub and high canopy rainforest. From the border with Sierra Leone, their route traced an eastward arc through the hilly northern region until it approached a section of land bulging into Liberia from the neighbouring French colonial territory. To save time they decided to cross into what is now the post-colonial country of Guinea, walking southeast for 65 miles, before re-entering Liberia and swinging south and west for the last section of the walk which led them across a relatively flat, lowland plateau all the way to the Atlantic. Conditions were harsh and after tough stretches they would rest, normally for a day or two and, on one occasion, for a full week. After walking a total distance of 350 miles they reached the Liberian coast at a place then known as Grand Bassa on 2 March 1935, five weeks after crossing the Sierra Leonean border. From there they sailed home via Monrovia.

  Theirs was very much a journey of its time with runners carrying messages in cleft sticks to villages further down the trail and with the two white outsiders sitting down to three-course lunches in the middle of the jungle – bread was baked freshly each morning. Graham Greene wore a sun-helmet and they took hammocks in which they could be carried by their porters, although he appeared only to use his when he got ill. Their tent went unused as they invariably spent the nights in Liberian jungle villages or mission stations where they were given huts. These would be furnished each evening with two beds, two chairs, a table, a water filter and a tin bath, all of which had to be lugged by the bearers. Along with clothes packed into three Revelation suitcases, they had numerous crates of food containing such treats as golden syrup, tinned sausages and steak-and-kidney pudding. Progress was much lubricated by a good supply of whisky, often drunk with juice squeezed from limes found along the way.

  From my perspective the route was perfect as it went through territory inaccessible to outsiders during the recent fighting. The advice of the British government and a private security firm working in post-war Liberia was that it was still too dangerous for travellers, but I took the view that I could make it safely through if I found the right local guides. I have to admit there was also an element of personal vanity involved in taking on such a risky journey. The death threat from Taylor’s people still niggled, piquing my pride to think I had been scared off from going back to Liberia when his regime was collapsing. Returning would be the only way to prove to myself I was no longer spooked and it might also allow me to reframe my view of the region, one still tainted by the deaths of my two friends.

  As I began my preparations I convinced myself that enough time had passed for the death threat now to be meaningless, but then I got this email from an old BBC Africa hand, which rekindled a certain degree of nervousness.

  The trip sounds fantastic … and dangerous, particularly given the way you are regarded in Liberia. I guess that threat died a little while ago … or are you still on the hit list?

  Security was always going to be my biggest problem, not least because I was going to have to cross what until recently had been some of the most sensitive land borders in Africa. The spot where the Greenes entered Liberia in 1935 was the same area where RUF rebels, trained and armed by Taylor, passed the other way in the 1990s, attacking Sierra Leone. And the section that passed through Guinea raised more concerns. The rebels who eventually ousted Taylor in 2003 came mostly from Guinea and there were plausible reports that they had not disarmed but had simply slipped back across the border into the Guinean forest through which my trail would lead.

  Unlike the Greenes, I had the benefit of modern maps and as I started to think about the detailed route I found several of the Liberian villages they mentioned. They appeared, as described, more or less a day’s walk apart. The old narrow-gauge railway they used in Sierra Leone was long gone, though, sold for scrap in the 1970s, and I knew from direct experience the only remnants were a few engines and carriages stored in a small museum housed in a Freetown shed. The museum was set up after I had written a piece for the Telegraph about discovering in Freetown the remains of a carriage built for the Queen’s 1961 visit to Sierra Leone. I had tracked down the engineer responsible for building the royal coach and only at the very end of the interview did the old man let slip his work had been in vain.

  ‘The Queen never did travel on our train. They never gave us a reason why,’ Mohamed Bangura explained forlornly.

  A Telegraph reader with memories of taking the colonial-era train when it ran between Freetown and Sierra Leone’s second city of Bo, wrote one of those great letters you still see in newspapers from time to time, saying she could remember how the train was so slow the children mocked it with a song to the tune of ‘She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain’ that went:

  The train for Bo, he no agree for go,

  The train for Bo, he no agree for go,

  The engine man dun tire,

  The engine no catch fire,

  The train for Bo, he no agree for go.

  The demise of the train meant I would have to make different arrangements, using taxis, buses and minibuses, known by Sierra Leoneans – almost onomatopoeically – as poda-podas, to get to the frontier with Liberia. But while Liberia now has a modest road system, my plan was to try to follow on foot the same 350-mile trail through the jungle used by the Greenes, seeking out the same villages, even staying in the same places if possible. Graham Greene described how he was warned that the climate in Liberia was so tough outsiders would perish unless they had hammocks to be carried in, but with modern medicines and water purification gear, I thought it worth at least attempting the journey entirely on foot. There was no way I could make my trip without local help with navigation and transporting my gear so, in a figurative sense at least, I would also be ‘carried’ by locals.

  Knowing how I thrive away from routine news reporting, Jane was as supportive as ever, although she suggested firmly that I take out hefty life insurance. This would be the first major adventure I would attempt since the births of our two children so she insisted on the gold service from the insurers. It cost a fortune but came with a solemn undertaking to pay out if I suffered death arising from a list of causes that read like a bullet-point summary of the modern history of Sierra Leone and Liberia – ‘war, riot, revolution, invasion and overthrow of the legally constituted government’.

  When Jane asked me if I ought to do some training I remembered the thoughts of an ocean rower I had interviewed in 1992 before he embarked on an attempt to row across the Pacific. His name was Peter Bird and we met in a pub in north London. As he drained his third pint of Guinness I asked what fitness training he had done. ‘Training?’ he said with a quizzical tone as he got up to go to the bar again. ‘There will be plenty of time to get fit during my voyage.’ His adventure in the Pacific was unsuccessful and, undeterred, he tried again four years later only to be lost at sea.

  It took a year of planning but finally I reached the point where I had prepared as much as possible. I had tracked down all my old contacts – diplomats, aid workers, journalists, academics – and, through them, a host of new ones. With their help I had built up a thorough picture of what I would face crossing Sierra Leone by public transport and Liberia by foot. I got in touch with some potential local guides and made plans for dealing with emergencies.
/>
  But my plan still lacked one key component: I had no ‘cousin Barbara’. I had not found anyone willing to join me in the Congo, a trip described to me before I left as suicidal. This time the journey would not be suicidal, just downright dangerous. A walk of roughly 350 miles would be tough enough in any environment, let alone the war-scarred backwoods of West Africa where food and clean water would be hard to come by, and I felt I could use a companion simply to keep me going.

  Graham Greene comes across as blithely patronising towards his cousin in Journey Without Maps. In early editions he does not even refer to her by name, although in later versions Barbara Greene’s name is slipped in once. Throughout the book she is scarcely credited with any thoughts, ideas or input to the expedition and key moments are described by Graham Greene only in the first person such as ‘I came on shore …’ and ‘I arrived in …’. She was for the most part written out of his account of the trip.

  In fact Barbara Greene basically saved his life. The Foreign Office mandarin’s assessment that Graham Greene might not be strong enough to cope with West Africa haunted the latter stages of the trek as he became dangerously ill with fever. The ultimate success of the trip relied heavily on Barbara Greene’s wits and stamina. I felt a more honest sense of her contribution to the trip came from a private letter Graham Greene wrote to his mother after completing the journey, in which he acknowledged Barbara Greene’s spirit although he played down the gravity of his sickness.

  We’ve had a terrific trek, much longer than the one I first thought of … four weeks in all, sleeping in native huts among the rats. B. stood it very well indeed; indeed she got used to the rats quicker than I did, & one day I got a bit ill I was glad to have her there to look after the carriers.

  The closest I came to finding someone willing to join me was the first person I contacted when I started planning the trip in earnest. Joe Poraj-Wilczynski was a career soldier in the British army whom I had met in 2000 when he was a senior British military observer within the UN mission in Sierra Leone. Later in his career he served as British defence attaché in Freetown and then chief of security for the UN special court set up in the city to try those responsible for the most serious war crimes in Sierra Leone.

  Joe was super helpful, giving me frank and up-to-date advice about the border crossings and other security concerns. He was also hugely enthusiastic about the trip, saying he would love to come, although in the end it did not work out as he was unable to take time off from his latest position working as a security consultant for a mining company. At the eleventh hour he mentioned his son, David, recently graduated from Oxford and unsettled in a London office job. Joe said his son was keen to join me. I sent to David one of those half-joking, half-serious messages to the effect that I was looking for a Barbara substitute to act as the official artist for the trip, and he replied in the same vein.

  I am not sure if your message was in jest or not, but I would make a most excellent Barbara Greene. Although my painting skills are questionable, I can at least drink whisky and would make a good Sherpa if nothing else. When are you off and what’s the route? Are you walking the whole way?

  At first I dithered, unsure if it was a good idea to have a stranger along. I had only his father’s word that he would be strong and determined enough to cope with what would be a genuinely arduous trip. And, of course, there was always the risk of our not getting on. But then I took a more ruthless approach and told myself I would test him for the first few days. If it was not working out I would have no compunction about dumping him. Furthermore, while he might have been a stranger, he did bring one big plus to the project. There are few people I would trust more than Joe to resolve a security crisis in West Africa, so by having his son with me I could, from a purely selfish point of view, be sure the cavalry would come if we got into trouble.

  I had found my Barbara and was just beginning to congratulate myself for being so thorough when unexpected news came through. For our trip to succeed we would have to follow the Greenes for three or four days walking through Guinea, a challenging enough prospect but one that I felt was manageable if only because Guinea was so stable, ruled by the same dictator for twenty-four years.

  Shortly before we were due to leave, that sense of stability vanished. The long-standing dictator died and within hours a coup had been staged by an unknown army captain called Moussa Dadis Camara. It made an already uncertain trip even more exciting. Graham Greene would have loved it.

  CHAPTER 2

  Province of Freedom

  Above: Dawn ferry across Sierra Leone River estuary approaching Freetown, January 2009

  Below: Sierra Leone newspaper advert warning about fraudulent asylum providers

  The bass blast from the ferry’s horn bounced back from the sea fog making my chest shudder, but the other passengers on the open deck atop the MV Great Scarcies carried on their early-morning chatter without interruption. Listening to them was like tuning a short-wave radio, the babble of foreign sounds every so often crystallising into a familiar word. They were speaking Krio, the broken form of English with roots reaching back to eighteenth-century mariners and which is still the main language of Sierra Leone. I heard tok for talk, aks for ask and pekin for child – derived from piccaninny.

  As the ferry slipped away from the quayside of the Tagrin terminal on the north shore of the Sierra Leone River, I could barely feel the swell of the nearby Atlantic. The river estuary provides Africa’s greatest natural harbour, a freak combination of powerful tidal currents that prevent silting in a deep channel tucked behind a mountainous peninsula acting as a bulwark against the ocean’s motion. When Sierra Leone’s capital, Freetown, was founded it was natural that the city should be built on the estuary’s southern shore, the sheltered, inland side of the forested peninsula with its plentiful supply of fresh water from mountain streams.

  Leaving the dock I watched a vulture circle slow and high above Tagrin just as everything beyond the confines of the ferry was swallowed by the mist. An evangelist stood up from among the packed benches, held a Bible aloft and began to praise the Lord. He wore opaque sunglasses and as his rhetoric built his head bobbed with the slightly unnatural articulation of the unsighted.

  On the car-deck every inch between the vehicles was taken up by passengers, mostly women hawkers with cotton lappa wraps pulled tight around their shoulders for warmth. At their feet were baskets heaped with produce: cairns of bananas, peanuts bundled by the handful in knotted twists of plastic, portions of fried yellow plantain freckled with tiny black seeds and tinged red by the palm oil they had been cooked in. Young men sat astride motorbikes, cheap Chinese-made models with the excess of chrome common to second-rate machinery.

  We were still close enough to the shoreline for the air to have the distinctive smell of Sierra Leone, a warm fragrance just on the pleasant compost side of rotting. I had smelled it first on my chaotic arrival here in 2000 and nine years later I had smelled it again when I flew into a much more peaceful Lungi international airport the evening before boarding the ferry. The old baggage hall, where British troops had once set up bivouacs next to the luggage carousel, had been newly painted, the walls plastered with adverts for expensive beachfront properties. One of the smartest developments offered ‘boys’ quarters’. It showed how little had changed for the wealthy elite of Sierra Leone since the Greenes arrived in Freetown in January 1935 for the start of their journey and went in search of servants they also referred to as ‘boys’.

  The topography that had blessed Freetown in the era of sail now cursed it in the era of flight, hobbling the city’s development. The main airport had been built at Lungi on the flatter, northern side of the estuary, meaning that people arriving by air face a fiddly onward journey to reach the city on the southern shore. To go overland involves a drive along second-rate roads ballooning far inland to get round the vast river mouth, a journey that can easily take ten hours in the rainy season. In peacetime, Tagrin ferry terminal offers a cheap but slow
option preferred by most locals – although wealthier travellers have in recent years been able to choose from speedboats, helicopters and even hovercraft, all of which are costly and sometimes spectacularly unreliable. British diplomats were recently banned from using the helicopter service after one of the aircraft burst into flames in mid-air killing all on board. The diplomats responded by buying their own motorboat for airport connections, complete with tiny flagstaff from which the High Commission’s official standard flies in miniature.

  The ferry had not been running during the war and I rather relished this chance to reach one of the world’s great seaboard cities by boat. Like many planes, ships, vehicles and other pieces of mechanical equipment in Africa, the Great Scarcies arrived here very much second-hand. Laxer safety standards mean machinery often comes to Africa in its dotage and airfields and ports all around the continent are full of venerable vehicles eking out the twilight of functionality. The Great Scarcies used to run European holiday-makers between the Greek islands in the 1980s and 1990s before a consortium of Sierra Leonean businessmen spotted a post-war opportunity and arranged for her to venture round the top left corner of Africa before creeping south along the edge of the Atlantic all the way to Freetown.

  ‘She’s a good enough ship,’ Tholley Ahmed, the bosun, told me as he stared into the offing after we got underway. The bridge had no radar so during the hour-long crossing, the skipper relied heavily on Tholley’s eyesight. When I asked about the owners, Tholley glanced round at me and replied with a somewhat resigned tone, ‘They’re Lebanese.’