OxTravels

by Mark Ellingham

  Down 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 against the damp air. At their feet were baskets heaped with produce to be sold that day on the streets of Freetown; 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.

  After an hour or so enclosed in our cloud capsule there was movement down on the car-deck. The motorbikers had begun fidgeting with their kick-start pedals and the women were standing, stretching out of their lappa cocoons. The ones who had heavy loads to carry on their heads fashioned hand cloths into quoits to cushion their scalps. I peered 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. It was by ship that Greene first reached here in January 1935 and saw this same view, one that he would later describe as ‘an impression of heat and damp’. As we crept closer, the mist dissolved and 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. From a distance it looked like ports the world over, a bit old perhaps, but a functioning port nonetheless. I knew this sense of normalcy to be an illusion.

  As the ferry reached the Kissi ferry terminal, the lowering front ramp scoured the concrete slipway to a standstill and the passengers spewed out as grain spills from a split sack. After the relative cool of the early morning crossing, I stepped off the ferry and felt the true mugging weight of West Africa’s climate. By the time I found a taxi, an old Mercedes estate still bearing 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, leant across and slapped the flat of his hand against my window with such force he could shudder the glass pane downwards.

  Traffic oozed like treacle along clammy, narrow roads stiff with pedestrians, livestock and hawkers. Street-sellers had plenty of time to catch up with scarcely 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 wind-screen but George kept up a sotto voce commentary on local landmarks, almost all of which were connected to Freetown’s peculiar history as a laboratory experiment for early British philanthropy. After centuries of active involvement in slaving, it was here, at the start of the nineteenth century, that Britain sought to redeem itself. Britain would not just end its own involvement in slavery but do everything in its power to stop other nations’ slaving by unleashing the Royal Navy. Britain’s maritime might would be used to intercept slave ships crossing the Atlantic and, for want of anywhere else to bring them, the freed slaves would be brought here to a settlement whose name celebrated the act of liberation – Freetown.

  We inched past Cline Town, one of the larger suburbs, named after Emmanuel Cline, a freed slave originally 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 pinkish-coloured stone that is common on the Freetown peninsula, it would, in its day, 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 floors concertinaed into a heap of broken masonry and its walls scorched with fires lit by squatters who overran it during the civil war.

  George followed the drove through the city centre where the main artery, Siaka Stevens Street, passes under the spreading boughs of a cotton tree. Cotton trees are common across West Africa but this huge specimen in the heart of Freetown commands a special position in the history of the country, protected as a national monument. It was under this tree, in 1792, that a service of thanksgiving was held by an early group of freed slaves, as they sought God’s blessing for their new life in Africa.

  They used the tree as the centrepoint when they laid out Freetown’s original grid of streets leading down a gentle slope to the shoreline of the Sierra Leone River estuary, a grid that remains largely unchanged today. As we drove slowly by I looked up and saw thousands of large bats, each the size of a rat, hanging from its branches in furry, twitching bunches, unmoved by the street noise below.

  War and decay meant Freetown was a city that did not wear its age lightly. There were a few tired-looking tower blocks in the city centre, many with their own generators noisily providing a private electricity supply to make up for the lack of mains power. Rivers – the ones that brought those early sailors here to replenish fresh water – were clogged with raw sewage and discarded rubbish, vermin-infested mats of filth rucked occasionally by large, malodorous pigs. Near a bridge over one stream I saw a sign that said nor pis yah. As so often with Krio I had to speak the words out loud before I could work out what they meant – ‘do not urinate here’. A gaggle of women going about their ablutions in the streambed suggested the ordinance was not much heeded.

  Statues erected to Sierra Leone’s post-colonial leaders, the ones who guided her through independence in 1961, were in dire need of attention. Noses had fallen off, lettering had faded and ceremonial fountains had dried up. One of Freetown’s oldest buildings, St George’s, the Anglican cathedral built of red laterite which Graham Greene described as dominating the city centre, is now dwarfed by hulking 1960s structures hung with rusting air conditioner units, paint flaking from the walls.

  And down on the water’s edge stood Connaught Hospital with its nineteenth-century foundation stone bearing an inscription that spoke eloquently of the British imperial chutzpah behind the creation of Sierra Leone. It said: ‘Royal Hospital and Asylum for Africans Rescued From Slavery by British Valour and Philanthropy’. Looking around the ruined hospital, that boast rang hollow. The Connaught’s pharmacy had been raided by corrupt civil servants and its roster of doctors had been emptied by a steady exodus to Europe, America and elsewhere. It did not feel like much of a ‘rescue’.

  AS A JOURNALIST I had covered the war that did so much damage to Sierra Leone between 1991 and 2002 but what I found disturbing was that since the fighting ended my various visits had shown scant sign of progress. The spirit to survive was strong in the million or so Sierra Leoneans who now live in Freetown’s crowded, unserviced shanty towns. But the spirit to thrive, to develop the city, was not.

  I turned, once again, to Greene and went in search of the City Hotel, a place he visited each time he came to Freetown and which he often wrote about, most famously when he used it for the opening of The Heart of the Matter. His City Hotel was a forlorn place of ambitions run to waste or, as he put it: ‘a home from home for men who had not encountered success at any turn of the long road and who no longer expected it’. Through Greene, the hotel became a literary leitmotif for the late colonial age not just in Sierra Leone but across Britain’s declining Empire.

  The hotel had ceased functi
oning in the early 1990s and was gutted by fire in 2000 but I wanted to see if the façade was still there. In my pocket I had a photograph of Greene taken outside the hotel, hands in pockets, feet in sandals, leaning on the stone balustrade at the bottom of a flight of steps leading up to a verandah shaded by a floor above supported on pale stone columns.

  The City Hotel in the 1970s (top) and (below) after the war in the 1990s

  I was four days too late. A gang of men was just completing the demolition of the building. Without cranes or power tools they had done it in the most basic way possible, knocking it down stone by stone with sledgehammers. In spite of the hard labour and dry season heat, the foreman, in a floppy tweed cap that made him look like a 1920s American golfer, had not a drop of sweat on him as he clambered about the mound of masonry shouting instructions to his colleagues. In the wreckage I spotted one of the distinctively shaped capitals that topped the columns behind Greene in the picture.

  ‘Can I help?’ The voice was friendly, with just the faintest of Krio lilts, as I turned and met a man who introduced himself as one of the owners of the site. ‘My name is Victor Ferrari – my granddaddy, Freddie, used to manage the hotel.’ I recognised the name immediately. Greene had written in the 1960s about ‘the kindly sad Swiss landlord’ who ran the ‘home from home’.

  Victor was the first person I ever met in Sierra Leone with a connection to Greene. He knew all about the author, had read everything he ever wrote about West Africa and even had a video of the 1953 film of The Heart of the Matter starring a very sweaty-looking Trevor Howard. Victor invited me that evening back to his home and brought the hotel bar back to life for me with a collection of old photographs. There was no power so we had to sit outside in the twilight as he told how his grandfather, an Italian-Swiss from Locarno, arrived in Freetown as a child in the 1920s before taking over the City Hotel and running it for decades.

  Victor, now thirty, had grown up there, its bar his childhood playroom. The pictures were taken from the 1950s onwards, some time after Greene first visited, showing customers – all white men – enjoying a drink. Fashion changes were obvious with the men in the older pictures wearing collared shirts and ties, their hats hanging behind them on hooks, while in the more recent snapshots there were T-shirts and sunglasses. But the bar appeared just as crowded as in Greene’s description, with bottles of iced beer set up on the bar’s curved counter, the faces of the customers sweaty with a mix of alcohol-infused conviviality and climate-induced torpor.

  In part there was sadness about his family story. Freddie had died in the 1990s, a year or two after Greene, and the business had fallen on hard times during the war. Victor himself had left Sierra Leone and set up home in London. But there was also a hint of rebirth, hope even, about his story. A city council decree had demanded all city centre buildings either be used or redeveloped. The fire had destroyed the City Hotel so the decision was taken to knock it down and the site’s owners were looking for potential investors for redevelopment.

  Hearing the spirit in Victor’s voice, the enthusiasm with which he dwelt on the Greene connection, with which he thought through ambitious ideas to take the site forward, I was left thinking, for the first time since arriving back in Freetown, not so pessimistic about the city. Now might be the time to free Freetown of its colonial baggage. Now might be the time to let Greene go.

  Heat of Darkness

  DAVID SHUKMAN (born London, 1958) has been a BBC television news reporter for more than three decades. He reported live from East Berlin during the fall of the Wall, and was the first journalist to film Soviet nuclear weapons. He became Science & Environment Correspondent in 2003, after years covering conflicts such as Northern Ireland, Bosnia and Tajikistan. He has authored several books, most recently An Iceberg As Big As Manhattan (2011), an account of his travels on the new frontlines of environmental science.

  Heat of Darkness

  DAVID SHUKMAN

  The sunlight vanishes, the temperature soars and a lot of hysterical screeching begins. I know that’s what’s meant to happen in rainforests and for years I have been vaguely sympathetic to the idea of saving them. But now I’m inside one, I’m uneasy.

  Up until this moment, everything I know about this cause has been second-hand – the singer Sting touring the television studios with the saucer-lipped chief of the threatened Yamomami Indians; the almost monotonous invocation of Belgium or Wales as the area logged every year; the wildlife documentaries with lingering beauty shots.

  Among the well-aired facts I’ve picked up is that one third of the world’s different species exist here, making the Amazon the uber-hotspot for biodiversity. The only hitch is that biodiversity means all creatures great and small, a wonderful thing and vital for a healthy planet, no question, but some of those creatures are, let’s face it, pretty revolting. You don’t hear much in the conservation conferences about fighting for the tape-worm or that squirmingly malicious little fish, notorious here, with a fondness for the odours of the urethra.

  What everyone knows about the rainforest is that it rains, often every day, sometimes almost all the time, rather like standing in a sauna under a hot shower. A soaking is preordained, as is the resulting soupy mess of rainwater mingled with sun block and insect spray and lots of sweat. On my first day, I realise that it’s uncomfortable doing anything other than inhaling air conditioning and, if none is available, then fantasising about it.

  But what no one tells you about rainforests is that they feature another form of rain as well: a gentle but constant precipitation of ants, bugs and assorted wrigglers tumbling from the dark heights. Whole ecosystems flourish in the canopies – their existence in the tree-tops is one of the wonders of the natural world – but, unfortunately, not all of them are very good at staying up there.

  On our way to a research camp, riding on the back of a quad bike, I happen to glance down at my shirt. It’s heaving with a mass of creatures, mostly tiny, but one particularly assertive ant seems the size of a paper-clip. And because I’m looking down while I frantically swat away these invaders, my neck is exposed and it becomes a landing-zone too. I react with horror and manically flick and brush. Initially I seem to be winning this struggle. But then I notice that a few of the pluckier arrivals are roaming freely over my hands, untroubled by the sheen of insect repellent.

  We stop at a tiny clearing. Suddenly I hear a loud yelp and spin round to an extraordinary sight. Cameraman John Boon is twisting in pain. Flavio, our guide, is thrashing him on the back with his hat.

  I run up, confused.

  Has John caused offence? Has Flavio been in the forest too long?

  The answer lies on the ground. Reaching down, Flavio picks up a red-and-white-striped insect the size of a wasp.

  It’s a type of mosquito, he says. It was on John’s shirt and trying to punch through. If it had stung him, you could forget filming for a few days.

  He points out the insect’s proboscis: it’s thick and sturdy like a hypodermic needle, so out of proportion with the insect’s body it’s like a child holding a rifle.

  We shudder, but time is short so we press on. But then we’re shaken again by another surge of primal fear as a familiar black shape scuttles towards us: it’s a scorpion, several inches long, tail poised.

  It’s okay, says Flavio. You only need to worry if it’s got a red dot. Otherwise it won’t actually kill you.

  I can’t tell if it has a red dot. All I know is that I’m sure the rainforests need saving – in theory. But saving this bit, in practice, right this minute, every creature? Up to a point.

  A BUMPY TRACK leads us towards what I’m told is a fresh example of deforestation. I think I know what it will look like – I’ve seen pictures of this kind of thing: the lone tree, the miles of bare dry soil, the forlorn trunk on its side. Deforestation has been in and out of the news for at least two decades so, as we lurch along in the heat, I wonder if there’s any chance of discovering a fresh angle. Can this new environment correspond
ent find anything new here?

  But as we turn a corner, I enter a scene where I realise my assumptions could not have been more wrong. Huge stumps lie in their thousands, many of them charred, and the red earth beneath them is churned into ugly ridges. The clearance is like a giant prairie heaped with junk timber. Nothing seems left alive. Amid the shattered trunks, their branches twisted, there are no birds. Countless wisps of smoke turn the sky grey. None of the images I’d seen before remotely captures the enormity of this destruction. And there’s something unimaginable in the Amazon: the insects seem to have vanished. Of course, I realise – there’s no canopy for them to rain down from.

  In one of my newspapers cuttings, a journalist had likened the deforestation to the horrors of the First World War, the fields ravaged by craters and trenches. Standing here now, I’m not convinced the writer had left his desk. The atmosphere, particularly the silence, reminds me more of urban warfare, battles waged in streets. The wrecked trees, even lying on their sides, are as tall as buildings and are grey like concrete. I recall the fighting for control of the scarred town of Gornji Vakuf in Bosnia. A mini-Beirut, its inhabitants were stunned after each spasm of violence. Like the destroyed forest, the town had thin columns of smoke twisting into the air, the whole place seemingly winded. What I’m looking at now resembles the same kind of carnage except that it wasn’t caused by tanks and artillery.

  It was bulldozers. Linked by chains.

  I’m with an environmental officer, Ernesto, one of a small band of officials trying to stop deforestation: seven men equipped with a handful of vehicles and just one week’s use of a helicopter every year to defend an area about the size of Britain and France combined.