by Tim Butcher
It is a quirk of West Africa that a small but powerful community of immigrants from the Levant has made it their home since the 1920s, accepting the very real risks of occasional war and unrest in exchange for access to lucrative local business. Graham Greene chose a manipulative Arab diamond smuggler as the villain of his Sierra Leone-based novel The Heart of the Matter, written in the late 1940s, and on my earlier visits to Freetown I learned the local Lebanese business community was stronger than any other. My work as a journalist has often taken me to Beirut where the long-serving Shia speaker of parliament, Nabih Berri, one of the key players in the muddled mosaic of modern Lebanese politics, speaks proudly of having been born in Sierra Leone.
The passengers continued to chat as Tholley scanned a horizon growing as the rising sun gathered in the mist. A local fishing boat powered by an outboard engine came into view, its low, painted wooden flanks rising to an elegant prow with a single upright figure, muffled up against the chill, at the sternpost, hand on the tiller. Known in these waters as banana boats, they pay scant attention to international frontiers, slipping up and down the coast from Sierra Leone as far round as Nigeria, more than a thousand miles to the east. I could see a white flag on a bamboo cane sticking from the prow. Coastal fishermen were among the first Africans to receive the attention of Christian missionaries and I was sure the flag carried a biblical invocation seeking protection from the perils of the sea.
Down on the car-deck there was movement. The motorbikers had begun fidgeting with their kick-start pedals and the women were standing, stretching out of their lappa cocoons. Those who had heavy loads to carry on their heads fashioned hand cloths into quoits to cushion their scalps. I looked far ahead and could see why they had stirred. Freetown was coming into view.
At first it was like a watery Japanese print as I could make out only the blurred loom of mountain ranges overlaid more and more faintly, one behind the other. But as the mist dissolved the focus sharpened to reveal under the hills a shoreline of buildings, rooftops, tower blocks and the occasional startled outline of a leafless cotton tree. The sight reminded me of Graham Greene’s description of Freetown as ‘an impression of heat and damp’. But it also made me think of the first European explorer to describe the area in writing, a Portuguese mariner called Pedro da Sintra, who arrived around 1462 and wrote of a ‘high mountain summit which is continually enveloped in mist’.
Da Sintra must have come here during the rainy season, as he described how thunder could be heard coming perpetually from the cloud-bound massif. He called it Serra Lyoa, which can be translated as the ‘Mountain of the Lioness’. As this part of Africa has always been too forested to have supported its own lion population, it is thought he meant either that the constant roaring sounded like a lion or that, to his eye, the mountain was shaped like a lion. Historians remain divided on the issue but they agree that within a hundred years or so his Serra Lyoa spelling had morphed into Sierra Leone.
The discovery of a sheltered harbour with a plentiful supply of drinking water on the otherwise hostile low-lying, disease-ridden coast of West Africa meant that by the sixteenth century Sierra Leone was already receiving plenty of visitors by ship. There were traders, initially Portuguese, and their footprint is still evident today. A white person walking into a rural village near the coast of Sierra Leone will hear the children crying out ‘Oporto, Oporto’, the favoured local term for white man. Later came the Dutch and then the British, some of whom stayed in the area, often on off-shore islands chosen for protection. Several began families with the local population and opened trading posts. Archaeology, linguistics and oral tradition indicate various African forest-dwelling tribes had lived in the area for hundreds of years before da Sintra arrived and it was with these long-standing tribes like the Sherbro, Bullom and Temne that trade began. It started conventionally enough with the exchange of European manufactured goods for African craftwork, but the discovery of the New World at the end of the fifteenth century and the subsequent demand for slaves to work on plantations in the Americas changed everything.
Suddenly the Sierra Leone River estuary saw the arrival of more ruthless traders, interested only in profitable human plunder. There were raiders like Sir John Hawkins, the Elizabethan sailor whose hugely profitable first slaving expedition took him in 1562 from England via Sierra Leone to the Caribbean, and later, Bartholomew Roberts, a drunken, ruthless Welshman who captured more ships than any other buccaneer during the golden age of piracy and came to Sierra Leone in the early eighteenth century to burn the official British slaving fortress to the ground. The dominant Temne chiefs showed no scruples in selling prisoners from their regular inter-tribal wars to white outsiders and soon the estuary had become a nest of pirates and slavers, earning the following colourful description in the classic work, A General History of the Pyrates, published in the 1720s:
There are about 30 English men in all, Men who in some Part of their Lives, have been either privateering, bucaneering or pyrating, and still retain and love the Riots and Humours, common to that sort of life. They live very friendly with the Natives, and have many of them … to be their Servants; The Men are faithful, and the Women so obedient, that they are very ready to prostitute themselves to whomsoever their Masters shall command them.
The dissolute character of the region in the late eighteenth century makes the next chapter in its history quite extraordinary. In London a group of high-minded idealists, supported, it must be admitted, by opportunists and even a few racists, settled on Sierra Leone as the site for a pioneering experiment in social engineering. The streets of Britain’s growing cities were then crowded with the poor, among whom a few thousand non-white faces stood out. Some were slaves brought from the Americas to Britain by plantation owners and then freed; others were lascars, sailors who had joined British crews in the East Indies and disembarked in the port of London; others were former slaves who had fought with the British on the losing side in the American War of Independence and then fled to London, fearing they would once again be enslaved if they stayed in America.
They might have had a wide range of backgrounds but with few exceptions they lived the same wretched life of penury, begging on the streets of London and Britain’s other major ports. This was the era of salon politics, when hugely important decisions could be made by small groups of the great and the good meeting not in parliament or government buildings but in private houses or bars. Such a gathering created the Committee for the Relief of Black Poor in January 1786. Its original aim was to collect money and rations for destitute blacks in Britain but within a few months the committee’s all-white members, meeting originally in the Bond Street home of a wealthy bookseller but later at Batson’s, a coffee shop in the City of London, came up with a far more ambitious plan.
The committee would persuade poor blacks to leave Britain and go to the tropics to found a utopian community where they could eventually rule themselves, free of the control of white superiors. The abolition of slavery was then being debated by Britain’s ruling elite and the idea of giving the black poor their own colony was supported keenly by some of Britain’s leading abolitionists. But it also received the backing of some of Britain’s most high-profile supporters of slavery, owners of sugar plantations in the West Indies, who embraced the idea of clearing London of its black poor and thereby getting rid of a potentially troublesome reservoir of hostility to slavery.
Various places were suggested as a suitable location for the experiment, including the Bahamas, but, after discussion with representatives of London’s black community, Sierra Leone was chosen as the site for what was originally to be called the Land of Freedom, changed later to the Province of Freedom. In copperplate manuscript, a minute dated Wednesday 26 July 1786 recorded what was discussed by committee members meeting at Batson’s Coffeehouse.
Five of the Deputies of the Blacks … mentioned a Person now living in London who is a native of that country [Sierra Leone] and gives them assurance that all the na
tives are fond of the English & would receive them joyfully.
The brains behind the Sierra Leone plan was an English amateur botanist and abolitionist named Henry Smeathman, who had come to know the Sierra Leone River estuary in the early 1770s through several years spent on a nearby island studying plants and developing a fixation with termites. This was a time when most of the whites based in the area were involved in slavery but while Smeathman opposed the trade he appears a cheerful fellow, not interested in making an issue out of his hosts’ occupation. When in 1773 he visited Bunce Island, site of the main British slaving fortress within the Sierra Leone River estuary, his diary recorded rather pleasant games of golf. It was only a few years since golfers in Scotland had come together to form what would later become the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews but Smeathman describes in detail how the slavers of Bunce Island passed the time in between slaving raids by playing a game he called goff.
We amused ourselves for an hour or two in the cool of the afternoon in playing at Goff, a game only played in some particular parts of Scotland and at Blackheath. Two holes are made in the ground at about a quarter of a mile distance, and of the size of a man’s hat crown … That party which gets their ball struck into the hole with the fewest strokes wins.
Smeathman was approached by the committee because of his experience of living in West Africa and, notwithstanding the presence of various slaving sites in and around the Sierra Leone River estuary, he was able to convince the committee the area would make a perfect site for the relocation of Britain’s black population. He died before the first ships set sail.
The relocation plan was high-minded and not a little confused. It referred to ‘Asiatic blacks’, the lascars, as being suitable for resettlement in Africa even though they came from the Far East. It bundled them together with black people whose roots did at least reach back to Africa but to parts of the continent hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles away from Sierra Leone. And for good measure the committee included more than sixty white women in the settlement plan, prostitutes in the eyes of some historians, lawful partners of poor blacks in the eyes of others. The thinking of the white committee members might have been driven by philanthropy but it betrayed a clear conceit, the idea that non-whites and their hangers-on could effectively be dumped in any old part of Africa.
There was little joy in the reception given to the 411 predominantly black settlers who eventually reached the Sierra Leone River estuary in May 1787 on three Royal Navy ships chartered by the committee behind the Province of Freedom. At first the local Temne chief was happy enough to accommodate the new arrivals. During his life King Tom had seen plenty of foreign outsiders, mostly slavers and brigands, pass through his territory and although the new group was slightly different in that it was made up mostly of black people, he had no qualms about signing a treaty on 11 June 1787 with their white leaders concerning ownership of the mountain peninsula which ended:
And I do hereby bind myself, my Heirs and Successors, to grant the said free Settlers a continuance of a quiet and peaceable possession of the Lands granted their Heirs and Successors for ever.
In exchange for ceding the peninsula in perpetuity, King Tom received a bundle of items valued at a few pennies over £59. It included eight muskets, a barrel of gunpowder, two dozen laced hats, bunches of beads, a length of scarlet cloth and, in a gesture worthy of the region’s piratical history, 130 gallons of rum.
In those early days there were moments of excitement when the pioneers made encouraging discoveries that hinted at a land of plenty. A bushfire one day was followed by the distinctive smell of roasted coffee. On closer inspection, the settlers found part of a hillside thick with wild coffee plants. But various delays and problems en route had meant the settlers arrived in the country at the worst possible time of year, with the rainy season just beginning. No staple crops could survive the ferocious storms, while malaria and other waterborne diseases spiked. Within three months a third of the settlers were dead, their immune systems ravaged by hunger and exhaustion. Several key white officials, including the two doctors and the chaplain, who had been specially commissioned to help set up the Province of Freedom, did not just run away, they betrayed the whole ethos of the project by joining the slavers on Bunce Island. Occasionally some of the black settlers – freed slaves themselves – preferred to move to Bunce Island where they could at least get food, shelter and even wages in exchange for helping with the ongoing shipment of slaves. The dreamers back in London struggled to understand how freed slaves could themselves turn into slavers.
The first Province of Freedom effectively ended in 1789 with confusion and betrayal when, after a squabble, the settlement was burned to the ground by King Jimmy, King Tom’s successor, forcing the few remaining settlers to flee into the bush. But the committee back in London refused to give up, sending out a colonial agent who found only sixty-four survivors from the original 411, among them a few hardy white women described unfavourably by one observer as ‘strumpets’. It was just enough to found a new settlement in an abandoned Temne village consisting of seventeen mud huts. According to local lore, the houses had been abandoned because they had been ‘occupied by devils’ but this did not seem to deter the agent.
What the project needed most was people, so the philanthropists sent out another tranche of black settlers in 1792, this time drawn not from the streets of London but from Nova Scotia, the rocky promontory off North America where large numbers of former black slaves from America had ended up after fighting with Britain when America won its independence. They had been forced to flee America when Britain surrendered but, instead of enjoying full freedom under the British authorities in Nova Scotia, they endured a wretched existence struggling against the bitter winters, poor soil and colonial laws that left them, in some ways, worse off than they had been as slaves. Around a thousand were happy to leave the icy, rocky shore of Nova Scotia and sail to Sierra Leone, where they gave the name Freetown to the settlement they founded. And a few years later the Nova Scotians were followed by another group of settlers, Maroons, who were slaves deported from Jamaica after rebelling against their masters.
But the development that really saved the Province of Freedom project was, ironically, something that ensured its black population would never in their lifetimes enjoy proper freedom. In 1808 the mountain peninsula guarding the Sierra Leone River estuary became a full British colony.
The original plan by the eighteenth-century philanthropists had been to create a community where black settlers would be in charge of their own destiny. Quite how they would live alongside the indigenous population was a question not really dealt with by the dreamers, but the point was that blacks would, through the munificence of British philanthropy, be free to rule themselves – a beacon to all those still trapped in slavery around the world.
That dream came to an abrupt end in 1808 when the company set up by the philanthropists to run the Province of Freedom effectively became bankrupt and the British government moved in to stake the peninsula as a colony. This heralded a boom period for black settlement in Sierra Leone as, following the work of abolitionists led by William Wilberforce, the Royal Navy moved to enforce the 1807 ban on the slave trade. Navy ships were deployed along the west coast of Africa with orders to intercept ships carrying slaves across the Atlantic and it was to the newly founded colony of Sierra Leone that these warships would come to off-load the so-called ‘recaptives’, Africans who had been captured once by slavers and again by the Royal Navy. No matter where these people came from they found themselves settled, in ever increasing numbers, in what had been set up as the Province of Freedom.
In 1808 the settler population of Sierra Leone was just 2,000, made up of remnants of the London settlers, the Nova Scotians and Maroons. The recaptives soon swamped this original group, with the Royal Navy delivering a total of 6,000 slaves retaken on the high seas by 1815. The influx continued at a similar pace over the next thirty years, meaning that recaptives bec
ame by far the dominant settler community in Freetown.
But the irony was that, in spite of the growing number of black settlers, colonial rule meant a small cohort of white officials, appointed by the British government in London, still ran the affairs of a much larger black population, both settlers and indigenous Africans. It meant the dream of the philanthropists was only ever half fulfilled. Yes, black settlers had been saved from slavery, but they never enjoyed full freedom. And tension between white colonials, black settlers and indigenous people would dominate every subsequent turn in the history of Sierra Leone.
*
Traces of Freetown’s ancestry were visible everywhere as I made my way into the city to prepare for my journey across Sierra Leone and Liberia. After the relative cool of the early-morning crossing, I had stepped off the ferry and felt the true weight of West Africa’s climate. By the time I found a taxi, an old Mercedes estate with a German number plate, I had already begun to flag. Wilting into its saggy front seat, I groped for the window handle but found only a knurled, rusty stub. Taking pity on me, the dreadlocked driver, George Decker, leaned across and slapped the flat of his hand against my window with such force that the glass pane shuddered down.
Traffic oozed like treacle along hot, narrow roads clogged with pedestrians, livestock and hawkers. Street-sellers need not worry about missing a sale as they had plenty of time to catch up with slow-moving vehicles whenever a passenger showed interest in the local newspapers, knock-off DVDs, plastic bags of chilled water or other items for sale. I could barely see through the web of cracks in our windscreen but George kept up a sotto voce commentary on local landmarks, almost all of which were connected to Freetown’s early history.
We inched past Cline Town, one of the larger suburbs, named after Emmanuel Cline, a ‘recaptive’ from Nigeria who made enough money as a trader in the mid-nineteenth century to buy what was then empty land near the shoreline on the eastern approaches to the city. And we paused at what was once Cline Town’s largest building, Fourah Bay College, the oldest university in colonial Africa. Founded in 1827 to train freed slaves as teachers and chaplains, it produced a stream of alumni who took their qualifications far beyond Freetown – the first cohort of modern black professionals to spread across Africa. It earned Freetown the soubriquet of ‘The Athens of Africa’ and a suitably grand three-storey college hall was constructed close to the shoreline. Built out of quarried blocks of laterite, the distinctively coloured pinkish stone that is common on the Freetown peninsula, in its day it would have looked at home in the grounds of any Oxbridge college. Its portico was framed by elegant cast-iron columns, Norman windows lined its flanks and its grounds were tended by a staff of gardeners. But by the time I saw it the elegance was no more. Abandoned when Fourah Bay College moved to other premises, the college building was a roofless ruin, its internal floors concertinaed into a heap of broken masonry and its walls scorched with fires lit by squatters who overran it during the civil war.