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

by Tim Butcher

  The sanctuary staff said they did not see what happened but they heard screaming for a minute or so. And then silence. When they recovered the driver’s body, lying on the forest floor just a few feet outside the main entrance building at Tacugama, his genitals, face and several fingers had been bitten off. There have been cases before where captive chimpanzees have badly mauled adult humans, others where children have been killed. But the death of Issa Kanu is the first recorded incident of a man being killed by chimpanzees.

  It was three years since the incident but getting Bala to talk about it was not easy. The Tacugama sanctuary has been his world since he set it up in 1995 and the loss of life clearly grieved him. But the value of the project was too great for him to let it be closed down after one freak event.

  ‘We are pretty certain Bruno was not at the killing as he was down near the car and the exact animals responsible remain unknown,’ he explained. ‘It was a mob attack and an attack that makes sense in terms of the situation, because the animals were scared and confused, and wary of strangers. I am sure that in some countries, even America, the authorities would have simply ordered all the chimpanzees shot on sight but we are lucky here in Sierra Leone to have a government that took a more considered view.’

  Bala organised a sweep of the local forest by trained guides. They took with them armed members of the Special Security Division, an elite unit from the Sierra Leone police, deployed to protect the guides. Within a short time twenty-seven of the escapees were recovered. Three years after the incident four are still out there, roaming somewhere on the forested mountain peninsula behind Freetown. Bruno is one of them.

  ‘From time to time we get reports of sightings and we go out immediately to see what we can find but the time between sightings is getting longer and longer. The last one came when a soldier was jogging along a track near a shooting range way over on the other side of the peninsula. He suddenly became aware stones were being thrown at him so he turned round and saw a chimpanzee. Stone-throwing is not natural chimpanzee behaviour so we knew it must have been our guys. But by the time we got there the animals had vanished.’

  While Bala was clearly sad at losing contact with Bruno, an animal whose life he had saved and whom he had known intimately for more than fifteen years, I also detected a slight sense of contentment. Since setting up Tacugama Bala had worked hard towards rehabilitating chimpanzees, giving them back a life in the wild. He had had to contend with civil war and weak government, and struggle against entrenched African attitudes that saw chimpanzees as a food source. It had all meant it was not possible to release a single animal until the day Bruno and his group freed themselves.

  After driving back to Freetown I got the news I had been waiting for. An aid worker friend had finally tracked down the name and contact details of a guide in Liberia willing to try to locate the border crossing near Dawa and rendezvous with us there. My excitement at the news was sharpened by the exasperation I felt at Freetown’s failure to make more progress since the war ended in 2002. Perhaps out in the hinterland of the country I might find more meaningful development.

  David and I agreed on an early departure the next day but not before we had one last planning session. We met at one of my favourite places in the city, the old lighthouse built among the gun-metal grey rocks of Cape Sierra, where the Freetown peninsula reaches furthest into the Atlantic. The light went out years ago but a member of the local port authority still mans the look-out deck next to the lighthouse’s stubby tower, armed with a pair of binoculars and a walkie-talkie, announcing the arrival of any ship that comes into view.

  What I love most about the promontory is its clutch of bulky baobab trees, Jurassic-looking things with roots as thick as boa constrictors locked on for dear life to boulders wet with spray from Atlantic rollers. To my eye they are so unmistakably African they made a worthy starting post for our African journey.

  The bark of a baobab is grey and as tough as elephant hide, but as we approached late that afternoon, the lowering sun picked out initials and dates carved into the tree by visitors over the ages, now twisted and distorted by years of growth. I would love to be able to say we found ‘GG 1935’ but it was not to be. Instead, I had to make do with the thought that these baobabs, long-time sentinels over the entrance to Freetown harbour, would have been here when the ship that brought Barbara and Graham Greene dropped anchor.

  I turned to leave but not before taking a lungful of brackish sea air. If all went to plan, the next time we would smell the Atlantic would be on the other side of Liberia.

  CHAPTER 4

  No Provocation to Anger

  German newspaper cartoon depicting Barbara Greene as a beauty queen with her own handwritten assessment alongside. Caption: ‘As earlier reported, Miss Barbara Green, an Englishwoman who has won several beauty pageants, has recently set out on an expedition to darkest Africa.’

  The unlit streets were deserted as we made our way by jeep to the main bus station for the dawn departure of the daily service to Bo, Sierra Leone’s second city, which lies roughly halfway across the country, about 150 miles by road from Freetown. Crowded during daylight hours, at night the centre of the capital surrendered to silence and shadows because of the threat of crime. The only movement I could sense when we parked came from bats, large, ungainly shapes flickering above a decrepit skyline of rusty rooftops and non-functioning power lines.

  The Sierra Leone Road Transport Corporation had taken over Freetown’s old railway station as its bus terminus, meaning our journey would start exactly where the Greenes had begun theirs. Barbara Greene had felt horribly self-conscious as she walked the short distance downhill from the Grand Hotel to the station because she was wearing a rather revealing pair of hiking shorts. She had had them made during the stopover in Freetown to go with a pair of knee-length riding boots purchased at the last moment before leaving England. As she waited in the early-morning half-light for their luggage to be delivered to the platform, the shorts started to feel ‘very brief and unbecoming’. Throughout her writing she emerges as painfully self-deprecating, describing herself as physically ‘tall and hefty’ and by nature ‘stolid’. I have found only a few photographs of her on the trip and felt she rather did herself down. One was taken on the ship heading to Africa and it shows her as not much shorter than her tall cousin, her warm face framed by dark wavy hair worn tight on the scalp like the 1930s cartoon character Betty Boop. A British newspaper, the News Chronicle, described her as ‘tall, dark and beautiful’ when it reported her departure for Africa, while a German newspaper printed two cartoons that caricatured her as an English beauty queen about to take on the jungle. On the page of the family album where the cartoons have been kept, Barbara Greene wrote ‘Nonsense’.

  On reaching the station, the Greenes found the three staff taken on in Freetown – Amedoo to look after Graham Greene, Laminah for Barbara Greene and Souri, the cook – were already there, fidgeting around growing piles of baggage, making sure nothing went astray before the party finally boarded the train for Bo. For Graham Greene, still only thirty years old and travelling for the first time in Africa, pushing through the throng of onlookers at the station was like going through a door into a world of new experiences. He writes that from that moment ‘everything was strange’.

  The building of the railway in the 1890s had been a major moment in the development of Sierra Leone. For almost a hundred years the colony had consisted only of the Freetown peninsula but, during the Scramble for Africa at the end of the nineteenth century, Britain moved to stake a much larger piece of territory, declaring the Sierra Leone hinterland a British protectorate in 1896. Central to its development was the rail network, as it allowed troops to be deployed swiftly to disputed border regions, deterring territorial claims from the neighbouring French colony of Guinea. Over time it also allowed the dispersal of district commissioners, administrators, missionaries, traders, prospectors and all other camp followers of Empire. With the discovery of diamonds an
d iron ore still a long way in the future, the economy of the protectorate grew only slowly on the back of modest cash crops like palm kernels – the gunmetal-grey nut at the centre of the fleshy red palm fruit which can be milled to produce oil. And what little economic growth there was in the protectorate at the start of the twentieth century depended completely on the train as the principal means to move agricultural produce down to Freetown for export.

  When Britain unilaterally staked the protectorate it began levying fees from natives and the ‘hut tax’, as it became known, soon became a source of friction. The British argued the fees were due in payment for the benefits of British protection, although the benefits of this protection were debatable. In remote, rural Sierra Leone there was little evidence of the colonial power providing any meaningful improvement in quality of life. For years the ‘hut tax’ sparked skirmishes and conflict, with British soldiers routinely dispatched to trouble spots when protests turned violent.

  During the Second World War, RAF warplanes, broken down into component parts, were carried along the railway line as far as its terminus at Pendembu, out in the east of the country. The roughly 230 miles spanned by the Sierra Leone railway was crucial for these aircraft as it brought the battlefields of North Africa within their range. After being reassembled on an airstrip cleared from the bush at Pendembu, the warplanes would fill their fuel tanks and head out over the Sahara to reinforce British troops fighting the German Afrika Korps.

  But the problem with the train was always its size. The train in Sierra Leone was of a particularly narrow gauge – only 2ft 6in wide – limiting considerably the loads it could carry. It might have served its purpose in the late 1890s but by the time road transport developed in the twentieth century the Sierra Leone railway could not keep up. It limped on for a few years, loyal staff struggling to keep the old rolling stock in working order, but eventually it was scrapped for economic reasons in the early 1970s. The tiny, almost toy-town, character of the train was described by Graham Greene:

  Even the railway journey was strange. It was a small-gauge line; and the train nosed its way up-country with incredible slowness (it took two days to go two hundred odd miles) … I have never been so hot and so damp; if we pulled down the blinds in the small dusty compartment we shut out all the air; if we raised them, the sun scorched the wicker, the wooden floor, drenched hands and knees in sweat … the train rattled and reeled forward at fifteen miles an hour.

  With dawn still some way off I walked into the station. The tracks were long gone but the original cast-iron pillars were still in place. By the light of my torch I found an old foundry stamp bearing the name ‘A. Handyside’, a once famous company from Derby that produced ironwork for Britain at the swaggering zenith of its imperial age. In the late nineteenth century, bridges and buildings made by Handyside were shipped all over the world, to the ‘pink bits’ of Britain’s empire, and some of the firm’s most notable structures still grace central London: the Albert Bridge spanning the Thames, and the roof of the original exhibition hall at Olympia.

  My torch caused a stir at floor level so I looked more closely. Dozens of people, many of them cripples, were sleeping on the filthy ground. Among the squalor there was something very intimate about the scene – the arm of one man lying nonchalantly across the bare chest of another, one person’s cardboard mat being shared with a neighbour.

  A man moved. His upper body was huge, as muscled as a body-builder’s, but his legs were a withered parody of health. His face reeled away from the light and for a second I saw a look of shame as he lay prostrate before, unknotting himself from the other sleeping figures, he dragged his torso upright, using his old wheelchair for support, and finally heaved himself into the seat with a grunt. The chair creaked under his bulk, its bare wheel rims scrunching on the gritty floor, the rubber tyres long since stripped away. After manually arranging his legs and tucking away his cardboard sleeping mat, he looked up and I noticed the shame had gone, replaced by defiance. He moved the wheels forward, skilfully nudging past those still sleeping, and headed down towards the other end of the old platform.

  Stations the world over are hangouts for vagrants and drifters. Tucked away from busy platforms and ticket halls you commonly find human flotsam washed up in dark corners and basements. But what made Freetown station different was that the entire place was a doss house. No matter its tatty state of repair, the fact it had walls and a roof made it valuable in a post-war city overrun by the homeless and penniless. There was a tang of urine in the air and a fragrant echo of marijuana smoke as daybreak approached and slowly the place came to life. Against the back wall, a hawker opened his stall, hoping to catch the early-morning bus passenger trade, and turned on a disc player that boomed out ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ by the Rolling Stones.

  He sold packets of batteries, biscuits and plastic sachets that looked like the fruit ice-pops I used to suck as a child. But these ones contained alcohol, double shots of samizdat gin, whisky or vodka, 12 pence each. I had seen them before, during the war, when I ventured out of Freetown and came across a position held by troops belonging to the Sierra Leone army, many of whom were just boys. Empty sachets littered the jungle floor among the dead leaves, their job of numbing senses and blurring memories done.

  Outside it was growing lighter and I could see the minaret of a large, newly-built mosque growing sharper against the sky. Sierra Leone is one of Africa’s great meeting points between Islam, spreading down across the Sahara from the Muslim Maghreb, and Christianity, seeping inland after arriving on the coast with European missionaries, but, in an example to the rest of the world, the rivalry between the two faiths here has rarely caused friction. I met several people in Sierra Leone named Mohamed who had converted to Christianity easily enough, and Christian girls who married Muslims. In the nine years since my first visit, Islam had clearly made gains, with a visible increase in the number of large mosques functioning in the city, many of them funded by Iran. Links between Shia Iran and the Shia members of Sierra Leone’s Lebanese community meant the green, red and white flag of the Islamic Republic could be seen stencilled on noticeboards next to mosque building sites across the city, proudly announcing the source of the money for the construction.

  Back inside the station I walked across to where the tracks used to lead out for the journey across the country and I spotted the man in the wheelchair once more. He was in a group of other wheelchair-bound people loading up buckets with small plastic bags of water chilled overnight in a haphazard collection of rusty chest freezers. A power cable from somewhere outside brought the electricity needed to make them work so the water bags froze at night before being sold as refreshments the following day on the city’s street corners. After filling his bucket to the brim, the man placed it on his lap and began to wheel himself slowly out of the station and up the slope in the direction of the Cotton Tree for a long day’s hawking.

  A young man who had been sleeping on a raised bench suddenly woke, cursing. There then began one of those blathering tramp rows where drunken men shout incoherently over each other until their attention wanders and they eventually shut up. I looked at the wall where someone had daubed a list of what amounted to ordinances and fines designed to keep order in the doss house. ‘No swearing’, the graffiti decreed, ‘no fighting’, ‘no jamba [marijuana]’ and ‘no provocation to anger’.

  The bus for Bo left two minutes ahead of time with a former army truck driver, Sammy Conteh, at the wheel. He was neatly dressed with a pair of large-lensed sunglasses balanced on his forehead in readiness for daybreak, and he had the air of quiet competence I associate with regimental sergeant majors. A crowd had gathered around the door of the bus when Sammy first arrived, backing the coach skilfully between the Handyside columns. The bus was modern and in good condition, a stark contrast to the station, and it was painted in the green livery of the national bus company. Foreigners, often aid workers, use the bus from time to time so David and I were given no special attention
as the departure time approached. The fare to Bo was 15,000 Leones (about £3), a price that was unaffordably expensive for most of the population. For long-distance transport they would instead be forced to rely on cheaper, less reliable and more dangerous local taxis and poda-poda minibuses. So the crowd was made up mostly of hawkers and hustlers hoping to earn some Leones carrying luggage or delivering snacks to the travellers wealthy enough to afford seats. In the jostling crowd voices were raised, but the noise grew more out of boisterousness than anger. A transport company employee made sense of the chaos, checking tickets, efficiently allocating numbered seats and loading our luggage into the belly of the bus, 35 pence per item. Amid the hubbub Sammy stayed calm.

  ‘I drove for the army for thirty years,’ he told me after setting off, his vivid eyes flicking robotically between right and left side mirrors. He said he was fifty-five but he could have passed for twenty years younger. ‘There’s not a road in this country I do not know. I have been along them all. And during the war I was ambushed so many times I lost count.’

  Dawn had not yet fully broken and the city roads were still free of traffic so we made good time. We stopped for no apparent reason towards the edge of the city while Sammy went off to speak to someone, so I jumped down from the bus and bought some fried plantain from a child street seller for breakfast. It was delicious; crisp and dry, not spoiled by too much oil.

  David was quiet. We were two relative strangers about to embark on a long shared journey and I sensed he wanted to avoid unnecessary chatter. He returned the copy of Barbara Greene’s account of the trip that I had lent him and we talked briefly about the excitement the Greenes must have felt when they left the city for a journey that represented a genuine adventure into the unknown. My feeling was also one of excitement but sharpened with nervousness born of my experiences during the war. I might have had better maps and a fuller library of reading material than the Greenes had enjoyed, but the bloody turmoil in both Sierra Leone and Liberia meant this also felt to me like a journey into the unknown.