by Tim Butcher
George drove through the city centre where the main artery, Siaka Stevens Street, passes under the spreading boughs of the Cotton Tree. Such 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 the first group of freed slaves arriving from Nova Scotia, as they sought God’s blessing for their new life in Africa. They used it as a centre-point 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 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 not a city that wore its age well. There were several tired-looking tower blocks in the city centre, many with their own generators noisily providing a private electricity supply for businesses wealthy enough to afford them, separated by streets crowded with hawkers and tatty with rubbish. 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.
I later visited the cathedral and found the guest book. It had lost its spine and its pages were grubbily dog-eared, but despite being almost fifty years old it was still not full. The first signature was ‘Elizabeth R’, dated in the Queen’s hand ‘November 26 1961’, and the second was ‘Philip’, the Duke of Edinburgh, marking the royal visit just after independence.
As we continued to drive west we began to pass some of Freetown’s older shingle houses, built in nineteenth-century settler style with walls made of overlapping lengths of roughly hewn timber. The passage of years and ravages of rainy seasons meant the square-cut wooden frames had settled higgledy-piggledy, giving them a naive, pre-modern look, as if they were fairytale houses a child might picture in a magic forest.
In the early years, settlers who were thought by British officials to come from the same parts of Africa were grouped together, setting up their own satellite villages some distance from the town centre and its cotton-tree hub. Slaves from the Congo, almost 2,000 miles south-east of Sierra Leone, set up Congotown, and Yoruba tribesmen from Nigeria set up Aku Town. These names survive today, although the chaotic growth of the city means the communities have long been absorbed into a single, unbroken sprawl.
Originally laid out for a population of a few thousand, the city is now home to more than a million people. As the only large city in Sierra Leone it has traditionally been the main economic magnet for people living up-line, the Krio term for the provinces derived from the days when the railway was the main artery between city and country. When the civil war began in 1991 the city was further inundated, this time by terrified refugees, and although the war officially ended in 2002, Freetown still has the feel of a city overwhelmed. Each year shanties reach higher up the flanks of the mountains behind the city, where once-thick forests have been thinned for firewood to such an extent that in recent years people have been killed by rocks sluiced off the deforested hillsides during the rainy season.
I stayed in the relatively smart suburb of Murraytown with an aid worker friend employed by Oxfam GB, a British charity with a long history of involvement in Sierra Leone. She explained how Murraytown had been chosen for the Oxfam base specifically because the official residence of Sierra Leone’s deputy president was also there, resulting in a greater likelihood of the suburb having mains electricity. That might have been true but during my visit there was not a single day without a power cut.
I saw the deputy president, or, rather, the deputy president’s motorcade, while I was there. Turning on to the road outside our house was a new 4 × 4 jeep with tinted windows, led and followed by military-looking vehicles carrying uniformed men and with blue lights flashing and sirens howling. The convoy did not even slow as it manoeuvred past a large crowd of women and children gathered around a standpipe spewing water onto the road. Murraytown might be one of Freetown’s better areas but, long after the war, its residents still have to queue by the roadside to fetch water by the bucketful.
I had hoped to see significant improvements in Freetown since my first visit. It was seven years since the then president, Ahmed Tejan Kabbah, had famously declared an end to the conflict by announcing in Krio ‘da war don don [the war is finished]’ and in those years hundreds of millions of pounds had been provided in bilateral donations and foreign aid, mostly from Britain. But the truth is that Freetown remains a creaking, crowded, chaotic mess, with families washing in polluted streams in the city centre as basic municipal infrastructure fails to cope. Some modest repair work had been carried out on buildings damaged during the war but in the face of a growing, impoverished population the work seemed like tokenism.
Despite the squalor, it is possible for members of the Sierra Leonean elite – along with NGO workers, diplomats and well-paid expatriates – to live well. These are the people who could realistically consider buying the villas with ‘boys’ quarters’ I had seen advertised back at the airport. But for the vast majority of Sierra Leone’s population this sort of lifestyle is unimaginable. The lack of local production means that shops, still mostly owned by Lebanese immigrants, are stocked with expensively imported goods. Members of the elite retreat with their shopping to houses with high security walls, where the only way to guarantee power is to arrange for your own generator and the only way to ensure regular water is to arrange for your own plastic reservoir tanks. Since 2000 the main cosmetic change I noticed was that the outsides of these large perimeter walls were covered with adverts not for beer or milk powder as before, but for the many local mobile phone companies which had boomed since the war. Instead of printed billboards many of the ads were skilfully hand-painted by locals. Using the template of a page torn from a glossy magazine carrying the advert, the artists would stand in the sunshine meticulously magnifying each image onto the cement walls.
Along many of the main arteries in Freetown I saw clumps of signposts marking the headquarters of aid groups, ranging from the leviathans of the UN, with their multi-billion-pound annual turnovers, to tiny faith-based, private organisations. But there was still scant evidence that the efforts of the aid groups were truly bringing the country on. During my visit a ripple of exasperation passed through the foreign aid community when a survey of all public hospitals in Sierra Leone found only one working X-ray machine serving a country of roughly six million people. And a few weeks later the government had to issue a public statement when survivors of an oil pipeline explosion were taken to Connaught Hospital, one of the largest public health centres in Freetown, only to be told the pharmacy had not a single painkiller or antibiotic.
I got my own sense of Freetown’s developmental problems on my way to meet John, a senior official responsible for some of the best-funded humanitarian programmes in one of the world’s most aid-dependent countries. I could not spot a single new road built in Freetown since the war and yet the number of vehicles had ballooned. I saw new-looking jeeps, owned almost always by aid groups or Lebanese businessmen, but the vast majority of the extra vehicles on the roads were not new at all. They were beaten-up jalopies shipped to Sierra Leone from northern Europe to see out the end of their days as taxis. Many still had white national-identification discs with black letters – B for Belgique, F for France, D for Deutschland – and plenty had ski racks on their roofs, something that even the enterprising cabbies of Freetown had not worked out a use for. Most had had their bodywork customised with painted messages addressing Jesus or Allah dep
ending on the faith of their new owner. ‘Blood of Christ’ was my favourite.
The lack of new roads combined with the surge in car numbers could mean only one thing: traffic-jam hell. Rather than fold myself into a slow-moving, oven-hot poda-poda, I started out on foot for John’s office, turning towards the sea at Congo Cross and walking down past King Tom, a promontory still named for the Temne chief who signed the treaty creating the Province of Freedom more than 200 years ago. The Greenes visited this area when they passed through Freetown in 1935 and Graham Greene was impressed by the simplicity and elegance of the native huts among the palm trees. Seventy years later and those huts had multiplied into a vast shanty town where the normally sweet scent of Sierra Leone was spoiled by foul-smelling smoke from fires lit on a massive open tip and stagnant water in a river so clogged with sewage and rubbish it seemed to have stopped flowing altogether. The only apparent movement in the riverbed came from a large pig, swilling through the stinking gloop.
‘The truth is that in spite of all these years of work Sierra Leone still scores lowest on almost all the major development indicators – infant mortality, maternal death in childbirth, life expectancy. By many standards Sierra Leone is the poorest country on earth, even though it receives so much help. It feels like a stone being rolled along the riverbed, too heavy to ever float upwards,’ John explained over a cup of tea. His office fridge was not working so we used powdered milk.
‘After all the money and all the years, does that depress you?’ I asked. ‘Do those dismal performance indicators not sap your enthusiasm for the job?’
John paused. His headquarters were located high up on one of the Freetown peninsula’s hill ranges with impressive views towards the Atlantic. For a moment he looked out to sea.
‘Strangely, it doesn’t. The greatest achievement of these past few years has been peace. Those indicators tell you nothing about the fact that one of the worst wars in Africa’s history, one the cruellest, one of the nastiest, was brought to an end. Christ, during the war do you think it was even possible to gather meaningful data? There have been two presidential elections since the war ended, peaceful elections that is. And in one of those elections the president not only lost, he handed over power without a single gunshot. You have got to remember that for Sierra Leone that represents huge progress.
‘The achievement of these years has been no war and to the extent that aid programmes have helped with that I think we have every reason to be proud.
‘But the reality is that Sierra Leone is not out of the woods. This place is very, very fragile and the biggest threat comes from a source nobody would have predicted a few years ago – Colombia and its cocaine barons.’
In July 2008 the extent of Sierra Leone’s involvement in international drug smuggling was revealed when a twin-engine Cessna 441 Conquest made an unexpected landing at Lungi airport. The crew asked the tower for permission to land saying they were low on fuel, which was true as they had just flown all the way across the Atlantic from an airstrip in Venezuela close to its border with Colombia. What they failed to mention was that on board they had 703.5 kg of refined cocaine packed in Bible-sized blocks. And what the tower failed to mention in return was that the Sierra Leonean police were on to them. The first the crew knew that something was amiss was when the airport fire tender drove towards them erratically as they taxied. It made the three crew members panic, shutting off the engines, jumping to the ground and trying to escape on foot. They were chased down by policemen while officers hiding on the fire engine secured the plane and its contraband. The Sierra Leone security forces then moved to round up the reception committee, smugglers who had gathered at Lungi waiting for the plane to arrive, and their accomplices on the other side of the estuary in Freetown.
There was a series of chases as jeeps driven by smugglers roared away from the airport but the potholed roads of Sierra Leone are not made for quick getaways and several of the smugglers dumped their vehicles. One bright police officer gave the order that any non-black person found travelling by poda-poda in the north of the country should be arrested and over the next few days all the gang members were picked up.
After a four-month-long trial, one of the longest in Sierra Leone’s criminal justice history, fifteen people were convicted of drugs-related offences. Three of the convicted, American passport-holders, were of sufficient value to the US authorities to be deported to New York to face fresh drug-dealing charges. Back in Freetown, the cocaine, which had been kept as evidence in the trial under the supervision of British soldiers from an army training team, was disposed of by burning in a ceremonial bonfire. The authorities insisted all 703.5 kg went up in smoke.
While the Sierra Leonean authorities can be congratulated for the way in which they dealt with the case, the worry is that other flights might have got through. Only one other cocaine flight is known to have reached Lungi, one that landed in December 2007 before being allowed to continue so that the authorities in Britain could track its onward smuggling route. It is likely there have been other flights the authorities never knew about. There is no real demand for cocaine in Sierra Leone and the smugglers are only interested in the country, along with others in West Africa, as transit points to move their product north into Europe. Their assumption is that weak, corruptible governments in the region can be bought off.
The scale of the threat that drug smuggling poses to Sierra Leone was spelled out in uncharacteristically direct language by Ban Kimoon, the UN Secretary-General, speaking after the plane seizure. He described cocaine trafficking as ‘the biggest single threat to Sierra Leone’.
John added his opinion about the scale of the threat: ‘Don’t forget that the war in Sierra Leone went on for ten years or so, killing tens of thousands of people, largely because rebels could get a hold of a few million dollars from diamonds way out in the east of the country. The sums of money the drug barons can offer are many times bigger and that can buy you a hell of a lot of rebels.’
I headed back to my NGO house with its high security walls, private generator and kitchen where breakfast cereal had to be stored in Tupperware boxes to deter cockroaches. I struggled not to let John’s portentous analysis get me down. I was keen for a more positive vision of Freetown and for that I would have to go and speak to a blind man.
To get to Professor Eldred Jones’s house I did what I had been strongly advised against. I rode pillion on a motorbike taxi. Known as ‘okadas’, they buzz through the catatonic Freetown traffic, providing an effective if hazardous means of transport. My driver came from the fearless school of okada riders, nipping through gaps I never thought he would get through. Several times I closed my eyes, squeezed in my thighs to make our outline as narrow as possible and prayed. I was about to embark on a long trek through the African bush and I would need my kneecaps in working order.
It took some time but I eventually relaxed enough to reopen my eyes. We passed lines of schoolchildren wearing uniforms lifted straight from the 1950s, girls in felt hats and stiffly pleated skirts, boys well into their teens squeezed into short trousers. Quite how their families kept the uniforms so immaculate when living in the derelict shanties of modern Freetown was beyond me. At Congo Cross, a notorious choke point for vehicles, a policeman on traffic duty waved his arms energetically at the stationary traffic. His black beret, blue tunic and creased serge trousers seemed to come straight from the era of National Service in Britain. He looked like an extra in an amateur drama society production.
As the road began to climb a hill the bike slowed, its engine racing against my body weight and the steep incline. Near a bridge over a mountain 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. A group of women and children did not seem to be paying the sign much attention as they carried out their ablutions in the watercourse. This stream was close to the catchment of King Jimmy brook, once a source of fresh water so sweet it brought eighteenth-century sailors
here from across the seas. The stream still flows today, indeed there is a market named after the King Jimmy stream down on the city waterfront, but today it is a disease-ridden open sewer and the once sandy beach is one great vermin-infested mat of discarded rubbish, rhythmically rucked by the estuary surf.
The road continued to climb, passing abandoned Second World War emplacements where naval guns had once been installed to cover the approaches to Freetown harbour. As a British colony, Sierra Leone had played a modest part in the defeat of Germany. With U-boats menacing re-supply convoys to and from America, allied ships would cling to the African coastline and creep all the way from Britain down to the Sierra Leone River estuary, where the Freetown harbour provided an excellent location to gather convoys in preparation for the trans-Atlantic run. And with the Mediterranean blocked to allied shipping, freighters heading to the Indian Ocean were obliged to take the longer route all the way around Africa, often putting in to Freetown. The harbour got so busy that the older generation from Freetown remember it at times as a solid, grey mass of military shipping.