by Tim Butcher
The film is the closest I can get to the Freetown Graham and Barbara Greene would have experienced. The streets were swept, kerbstones painted and buildings well-maintained and yet the author still saw shabbiness and seediness, not just moral but physical. I can only guess at what he would make of Freetown today, with its systemic post-war corruption, flat-lining economy and beachfront swarmed by prostitutes.
Critical though he was of small-minded British colonists, he saved his most acid criticism for the Krios, the freed slaves of Freetown and their descendants, who fell between the two worlds of native black African and colonial white outsider. Some of his criticism veered towards the racist.
The men were less assured; those of them who were Creoles [Krios] had been educated to understand how they had been swindled, how they had been given the worst of two worlds … It would be so much more amusing if it was all untrue, a fictitious skit on English methods of colonisation. But one cannot continue long to find their painful attempt at playing the white man funny; it is rather like the chimpanzee’s tea-party, the joke is all on one side.
It feels to me a clumsy remark that suggested Graham Greene bought in to one of the conceits of colonialism, the thought that black men could not rule themselves and that any attempt to do as their colonial overlords did represented folly. It felt a disservice to people like Professor Eldred Jones who, as a young educated Freetown man in the 1940s and 1950s, used to go to a dining society that met regularly in the City Hotel with a strict black-tie dress code. It seemed unfair to sneer so sharply at him simply for ‘playing the white man’.
The Greenes passed through Freetown at the height of the colonial project when self-rule by the native population was so far into the future as to be unthinkable, but this was not the reason why Graham Greene disparaged Sierra Leone’s colonialism so sharply. He criticised it precisely because it sought to recreate in Africa something he had come to distrust, even despise. Graham Greene saw Europe in the 1930s as a place of economic depression, political extremism and dubious morality, so colonials were to be loathed for aspiring to copy the civilisation achieved by, for example, Britain.
I was passing through almost fifty years after independence and my gloomy overview was similarly coloured by the context from which I viewed Sierra Leone. After independence in 1961, political infighting gave way to corruption, then dictatorship and finally war, crippling Sierra Leone’s development. High expectations at independence that things would get better for the native population were not met. As I got to know Freetown’s rhythms I kept thinking about Hong Kong and historical parallels between the two places – both wonderful natural harbours on the edge of a continent, both claimed as colonies by Britain in the nineteenth century and both developed along roughly similar lines by white outsiders. But while Hong Kong grew into a hugely wealthy entrepôt for silk and other products, Freetown didn’t. The presence nearby of valuable natural resources, most notably diamonds and iron ore, served to hinder, not help, the country. In contrast to Hong Kong, trade in Sierra Leone did not beget trade, it begat rivalry, stagnation and ultimately war. As my journey progressed I would try to find out more about why this might be.
The beauty I found in Freetown was all natural – seascapes, forested mountains, dawn calm – and the ugliness manmade – squalid markets, broken-down buildings, beachfront hustlers. In Hong Kong it was the synthetic that made it a wonder, its steepling, neontrimmed night skyline, its foreshore impossibly crowded with building developments. Freetown had the air of a black-and-white-movie starlet, once beautiful with the world at her feet but who failed to make the leap to the modern era, condemned to grow ever older and uglier with nothing but memories of what might have been.
There was one more visit I needed to make before setting off and it involved chimpanzees, animals that once lived in large numbers in West Africa but which have seen their population dwindle through friction with humans. On one of my previous trips to Freetown I had written a light-hearted story about chimps, focusing on an individual male called Bruno who had become a symbol of the civil war’s cruelty. But since I last saw Bruno, he had been involved in a sinister and intriguing incident.
To reach the Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary you have to take the high road, east out of Freetown. You climb up past Wilberforce Barracks, named for William Wilberforce, the anti-slavery campaigner, and through Hill Station, a settlement built above the heat of the city for white colonials in the early twentieth century. Some of the original houses remain with their distinctive cast-iron stilts raising them high off the ground to avoid ant and rat infestation. Hill Station used to be served by its own narrow-gauge railway but it was abandoned in 1929 and only the route of the track remains, now a tarmac-topped road, and the grassy outline of the old terminus with its original Hill Station sign. During his time as a spy, Graham Greene would take late afternoon walks up the old railway line, describing how the roseate stone of the track glowed warmly in the sunset.
The first time I went in search of the chimpanzee centre I remember having great problems finding it. After Hill Station, the road crests a rise, narrows and begins to wind downhill through thickening rainforest. For a long time I struggled to explain to my taxi driver what I was looking for, carefully repeating the words several times – ‘the site of the chimpanzee rehabilitation centre’. At first he looked baffled before his eyes suddenly sparkled and he exclaimed in Krio ‘da ples weh day men da baboons’ – the place where they mend the baboons. Laughing loudly, he needed only a few minutes to find the turn off the narrow road for the steep drive up through the forest that leads to Tacugama.
David joined me this time after I arranged an interview with the founder, Bala Amarasekaran, a well-meaning accountant who set up the centre when he could no longer cope with having an adolescent chimpanzee in his home. Bala had arrived in Freetown as a teenager in 1978 when his parents moved from Sri Lanka and after completing his professional training he set up home, married and began working. He had told the story countless times of meeting the infant Bruno, an orphaned chimp whose parents had been shot and eaten by hunters, but the emotion in his voice was still there when he went through it once more for us.
‘We were driving through a village out in the provinces near the town of Magburaka in 1989 when we spotted this baby chimpanzee outside a hut, tied to a post by a piece of string. I could see he was dehydrated and in a bad way. I had never thought of taking on a chimpanzee before but there was something about this tiny animal that made a connection, so I offered to take him. At first the “owner” refused but when I offered thirty dollars he changed his mind.
‘We did not know if he would even survive that first night with us. To be honest we did not know what we were doing, as my wife and I had never done anything like this before. We bought a baby’s bottle and started to bottle-feed him with milk, that’s all we could think of. The day we got him home was the day Frank Bruno, the British boxer, fought Mike Tyson. Bruno was the underdog in the fight so that’s what we would call this little underdog – we would call him Bruno.’
They might have made it up as they went along but whatever they were doing clearly worked. Bruno thrived. Within a few months he was bouncing around the Amarasekaran family home wreaking unintentional havoc. When word got around that Bala had given Bruno a home, they were approached by a Scotsman who was about to move back home. He had had a chimpanzee in Freetown as a pet for years but could not take it with him so he begged them to look after it. Others soon came forward with chimps recovered from the slums of Freetown and villages outside, and by the early 1990s Bala had eight chimpanzees living on his property.
‘We built cages for them in the garden but of course they needed exercise so we used to let them out. Sure there was a lot of damage from things getting broken and it was chaos at times, but for the most part we could cope because they were young, apart from one older female who had been kept by a group of soldiers who fed her valium to keep her under control. The poor thing had develop
ed all sorts of mental and behavioural problems. At sunset we would all go for a walk around the area we lived in, Smart Town, and that must have been some sight. Every so often one or two ran away but they all came back eventually, and we got used to our neighbours knocking on our door to say one of our chimpanzees had stolen eggs or ripped up some tin roofing or got up to some other mischief. We used to pay out all the time.’
As his downtown menagerie grew too large, Bala put together a plan to try to return the animals to the wild. He persuaded the Sierra Leone government to sign up to a joint programme and in 1995 Tacugama was created, helped by seed money from the European Union.
‘Then all we had was a hundred acres of rainforest up here in the mountains. There was nothing here, no road, no infrastructure, no buildings. We had to come up with the money and the manpower for all of that, but slowly and steadily the project took shape. We cut the road, we built rooms for the chimpanzees, we created a quarantine section for new arrivals and then we built fenced-in compounds out in the forest where the chimpanzees could learn to be chimpanzees again.’
More chimps kept arriving but from the beginning Bruno had established himself as the Alpha Male, the dominant leader of the community. It was around then that I wrote my Telegraph piece on Bruno.
I can remember how the Tacugama guide warned me not to get too close to the fence around the enclosure. It was sound advice because when we got to the viewing site a large rock, about the size of a brick, came hurtling out of the thicket at head height and hit the wire netting, punching it outwards to within a few inches of my nose. Amid a loud chorus of chimpanzee screams and barks I could almost hear a ‘boing’ sound as the fence sprang back into shape, flinging the rock backwards into the bush.
Speaking in 2009 Bala explained Bruno’s behaviour: ‘A lot of people thought Bruno was aggressive but they missed the point. He had the character and the personality to establish himself as the Alpha Male and as such it was his primary job to protect the others. We had shelling here during the war, several times the area was bombed by jets and three times rebels came through here driving me and the staff away, looting our property and stealing everything, even the medicines for the chimpanzees. Bruno and the others learned strangers must be treated with suspicion so by throwing a rock he was simply telling you, a stranger, to back off.’
Under Sierra Leonean law it had been illegal since 1972 to kill or capture chimpanzees, but it was only after the war that serious efforts could be made to enforce the law. As rural communities learned more about the legal protection enjoyed by chimps, so more animals were handed over, pushing the population at Tacugama past eighty. The chimpanzees were split into new family groups under different Alpha Males, more rooms were built, new enclosures were set up behind electric fences where the animals could spend their days and more research was carried out by primatologists who came from all over the world. None of this research, however, prepared Bala and his colleagues for what happened early on Sunday 23 April 2006.
Bruno was by then the leader of a thirty-one-strong group of chimpanzees who lived together in the same accommodation block. The animals had been given breakfast and, as normal, allowed out into their forest enclosure, which is connected to their room by a 15-foot-long caged tunnel with two lockable doors, one where the tunnel is connected to the room and the other where the tunnel is connected to the enclosure. After the animals had all moved into the enclosure, a member of staff double-locked the door by the fence using a metal padlock and, for added security, a wooden block shaped perfectly to fit into the groove where the door slid to open. With the block in situ the door could not be moved even if the padlock was not in place.
Following routine, the staff member crawled through the tunnel to clean it. The animals had dispersed into the bush and he noticed nothing out of the ordinary as he finished in the tunnel and turned back to start work in the accommodation block. He did not do anything he had not done before but with hindsight he made two crucial errors – leaving open both the tunnel door, where it joins the accommodation block, and the main door, the one used by humans to access the accommodation block. Clearing up a night’s mess from thirty-one chimpanzees is a serious task that takes at least an hour and it was in this window of time that Bruno’s group found a way through the locked door where the tunnel joins the fence.
First the animals smashed the padlock. This was not easy as it hung awkwardly for them to reach, behind iron struts and wiring. Somehow they managed to get at it and crack it open with rocks. They then faced the second security measure, the wooden block – and this is where Bala and his colleagues were truly amazed. The chimpanzees had fashioned pointed sticks with which to fish the piece of timber out of its blocking position. They had broken off branches from trees in the enclosure and then sharpened their ends before using them to reach through the wire fence and free the block. After the incident, sixteen sharpened sticks in a range of sizes were found near the door. Bala is certain the tools were prepared in advance as there was not enough time to make them spontaneously.
The first the cleaner knew of the breakout was when he heard chimpanzees screaming behind him in the accommodation block. He turned to see two very excited and therefore very dangerous adult chimps. Not surprisingly the man ran, raising the alarm. The standard protocol at Tacugama in a breakout is for all the staff to first make themselves safe and then worry about the animals. With the cleaner fleeing, all thirty-one members of Bruno’s group made their way through the tunnel and the accommodation block, out into the open.
Bala was not there that morning so control of the incident fell to his senior staff member, Moses Kappia, one of the longest-serving guides. Moses recalled the initial chaos as the chimpanzees celebrated their freedom by crashing around the treetops, climbing on the roofs of the buildings and screeching as if to wake the dead. But after the initial furore the animals began to calm down while staff members made sure all the humans were accounted for.
‘You have to remember they had never been out of their accommodation blocks before so they were in unfamiliar territory. In a situation like this chimpanzees tend to stick to what they know so there was a high chance they would stay together and not leave,’ Bala explained.
The staff members are trained in the use of blowpipes with darts that can put a chimpanzee to sleep, but with thirty-one out at once they simply could not cope. Since opening in 1995 Tacugama had only ever had a single breakout and that involved just one animal.
Moses meanwhile was growing anxious about getting a message down to the village at the bottom of the road to stop people coming up to the camp and running into the escaped chimpanzees. He waited for a quiet moment, slipped outside and set off down the steep road towards the village. He thought he had got away with it but then he glanced over his shoulder to see Bruno running after him. Remembering his training, Moses ripped off his clothes and shoes as he ran and dropped them on the dirt road, giving Bruno cause to pause and sniff them. It bought him enough time to get away but instead of sticking to the road, Moses, now fully naked, took a short cut through the forest towards the village. On that decision a man’s life turned.
Driving up the forest road at exactly that moment came a taxi. In it was a Sierra Leonean driver, Issa Kanu, three Americans who had been working as contractors building a new US Embassy in Freetown and their local contact, Melvin Mammah. By taking the short cut, Moses missed the car as it drove up the track.
The exact details of what happened next are a bit unclear but what is certain is that Bruno appeared in front of the taxi, forcing it to stop. Melvin told me the occupants did not know anything was wrong at this point and the Americans started taking photographs until Bruno grabbed the bumper of the car, an old Peugeut 305 estate, and started heaving the vehicle up and down. The driver tried to reverse but got lodged up against a boulder and it was at that moment Melvin knew they were in trouble.
‘I was sitting in the middle of the back seat and I shouted for everyone to wind up the
ir windows and drop their latches,’ he remembered. ‘The chimp came round to the left side of the car and I started to push the American who was next to me into the boot over the back seat so he was out of the way but the chimpanzee then broke through the window and grabbed my left arm. We had a tug of war – he was trying to pull me out and I was pulling like crazy the other way. We were not going anywhere so he calmly bit my left thumb straight off.
‘I can remember his black teeth and my first thought was about tetanus. He chewed it a bit and spat it out and then bit off my left forefinger. I was pulling all the time, punching him in the face with my other hand as he pulled the other way. His strength was amazing. I could do nothing about it. When he bit the forefinger off his teeth got a hold of my middle finger too, pulling it out so it was left hanging by just a bit of skin. There was blood everywhere. I could see it coming out of me every time my heart pumped but the animal would not let go.’ Melvin lit a cigarette as he recounted the story, using his right hand to light the lighter and pincering the cigarette between the two remaining fingers on his left.
The driver then got into gear and shot forward but only as far as a gate across the road near a reservoir which he smashed through before the car got stuck again. In the confusion, the car had to be abandoned. As Melvin struggled to get away, Bruno grabbed him by the right leg and bit into his ankle. One of the Americans, Gary Brown, stopped, grabbed a heavy branch and came back for Melvin.
‘Gary was shouting, “Get Off Him, Mother Fucker!” time after time and hitting him with the branch until the animal stopped and walked away. I don’t know what would have happened if Gary had not helped me.’
The Americans stayed with Melvin but the driver had fled on foot. Instead of continuing straight down the road he turned up the short but steep final drive to the main entrance of Tacugama. He must have thought this was the quickest route to safety but instead he ran into a large and panicked group of escaped chimpanzees.