Chasing the Devil

by Tim Butcher

  After deciding to push on we waited for Sammy to drop off the other passengers before he kindly delivered us to a spot on the main highway where he told us we could find a ride further east. His advice was perfect as it was here, in a roadside shack, under an awning providing protection from the midday heat, that we found a willing driver called Michael Ngebeh. He had his head tipped back and was swallowing lager from a can.

  ‘Sure I will give you a ride to Kenema,’ he said. ‘The drive costs me a lot in petrol so I always wait here and have a few drinks before I pick up passengers who will pay for the ride. If you pay me 30,000 Leones [about £6] we can go now if you want.’

  ‘How many of those have you had?’ I asked, indicating the can of Heineken in his hand.

  ‘This is my second,’ he said earnestly, before adding, with a grin, ‘I think.’

  We loaded our gear into his old Mercedes and set off on the 40-mile journey to Kenema, passing a large construction site on the edge of Bo with a perimeter wall bearing a sign written in large, red Chinese characters. The English translation gave the name of a corporation, owned by the Chinese government, announcing a project to build a football stadium and rehabilitate part of the main highway. This was proof of China’s twenty-first-century Scramble for Africa and how it impacted even on relatively small countries such as Sierra Leone. The surging Chinese economy meant Beijing had begun investing heavily in bilateral projects all across Africa as a way to persuade local governments to grant favourable terms for the purchase of raw materials, which were then shipped to mainland China. Sierra Leone’s iron ore deposits, rich in geological terms but expensive to get at because of a dilapidated infrastructure, were enough to generate interest from China. Some in Africa embrace the colossal injection of investment, saying it will allow the continent to turn its back on aid handouts from the West, but Michael was not so sure.

  ‘I have seen these Chinese turn up with their digging equipment and their vehicles and their surveyors,’ he said, draining his beer can and dropping it casually out of the car window as we drove along the ever-worsening road. ‘The odd thing was they did not employ many people here in Bo. They brought their own labour force with them, their own cooks and even their own food. It’s like they do not want any contact whatsoever with Africa.

  ‘And now as the demand for iron and steel falls around the world we have already seen they have stopped working. It does not feel like an investment in Africa at all, just short-term opportunism.’

  In his thirties, Michael was a teacher of economics and computer skills at a secondary school in Kenema so his analysis sounded convincing enough. Born in Bo, where he spends his weekends, he picked us up on his Sunday commute back to his workplace. He had a chumminess about him and within no time was boasting of his wife in Bo and his ‘mamas’, or mistresses, in Kenema. His boisterousness also extended to drinking and as we made our way to Kenema he talked enthusiastically about the virtues of ‘poyo’ or palm wine, an alcoholic drink created through the fermentation of sap that gathers in the flowery head of a certain variety of palm tree and which, depending on how long it has been left, can be formidably potent. To me it tastes like watery, rancid yogurt. Several times he slowed his car when he saw sellers on the roadside holding old bottles and jars filled with the white, milky substance.

  ‘There has been an outbreak of lassa fever in Kenema in recent weeks so it is not safe to drink the poyo from there. I have to make sure I buy it out here, in the rural areas, where it is safe,’ he explained.

  Lassa is one of the world’s deadliest diseases and not one to take chances with. It is a viral haemorrhagic fever, similar to ebola, that inflicts a slow and painful death on its victims by destroying blood vessels and causing bodily extremities to swell with excess fluid, like balloons filling with water. In extreme cases blood can gush from nostrils, eye-sockets, ears, even fingernail beds, and victims often die from drowning as their lungs fill with liquid.

  What makes lassa so dangerous is that all secreted fluids can carry the virus, so family members, nurses or doctors looking after a victim can easily become contaminated. Entire families can be wiped out and the fatality rate among health workers, especially in the undeveloped world, is often terribly high. When scientists handle the virus in research facilities in the developed world they apply the highest safety standards, known as Biosafety Level 4 (BSL-4), wearing sealed suits inside special laboratories where the air is not just filtered but kept at a pressure lower than atmospheric pressure, so that if there is an accidental leak the air inside the chamber cannot readily leak out. If caught early enough – something that requires sophisticated clinical testing – lassa fever is treatable with antiviral drugs, but by the time it is identified in rural areas of Africa, for example, where testing is limited, it is often so advanced that treatment becomes a battle of fluid levels as medics try to stop the patient from bleeding out while at the same time stopping themselves from becoming infected. Kenema lies in the border area between Sierra Leone and Liberia, a region with the unfortunate distinction of being one of the world’s lassa hotspots. It is most commonly spread by infected rats, through urine trails which they have the unsavoury habit of dripping everywhere as they move. Michael’s mention of the disease reminded me to steer clear of rats as much as possible.

  After a few false starts Michael found what he was looking for, a seller with poyo harvested from a tree that morning. He bought four pints: enough, he said, to last three days.

  A few miles later we crossed a road bridge over the Sewa River, one of the longest and most important in Sierra Leone, with headwaters up in the north-eastern highlands close to the border with Guinea. Water, as insipid as tea made with skimmed milk, lazed in the midday heat between forested river banks as, initially, my attention was drawn to a damaged rail bridge a hundred yards or so downstream, one that the Greenes’ train would have passed over. Michael stopped the car and when I got out the humidity, insect noise and the collapsed span brought to mind the film The Bridge on the River Kwai. But Michael then pointed out the way the sandy river bank was not smooth but pockmarked, as if chewed away by outsized weevils. The reason for these cavities was, in large part, the explanation for Sierra Leone’s troubled modern history – diamonds.

  Diamonds were first found in Sierra Leone in January 1930 by a British geologist named J. D. Pollet in the gravel of a stream close to the Sewa River. Until then, mining in West Africa had been focused largely around Mali and Ghana, with Sierra Leone viewed as geologically barren. All that changed when Pollet’s survey team found not just significant numbers of gem-quality diamonds, but also indications that other deposits lay in riverbeds spread across a huge swathe of the eastern part of the country.

  These sought-after gems are forged deep under the earth’s crust, an anomalous molecular coming together of carbon atoms brought on by unimaginably high temperatures and pressures, a process taking millions of years. While forming they float about like superheated croutons in a molten rock soup and the only reason we, up on the earth’s surface, know about them is that, every so often during the planet’s four billion years of existence, the soup has burst upwards through cracks between the shifting plates in the earth’s crust. These structural weaknesses allowed diamond-bearing magma to spew out in explosive eruptions that eventually cooled to leave behind carrot-shaped columns, known as pipes, of gem-rich volcanic rock reaching back down into the earth from whence they came. It was in Kimberley, a tiny community in a remote desert region of South Africa, that such a pipe was first identified in the late nineteenth century on land owned by a family called De Beers, a name still held by the world’s largest diamond mining and trading company. Kimberley itself gave its name to the diamond-bearing volcanic rock and henceforth the commercial hunt for diamonds became largely the hunt for kimberlite pipes.

  From a commercial mining point of view the best way to exploit diamonds is to find where gem-rich kimberlite pipes breach the earth’s surface and dig down. If you secure
the area, build a meaningful perimeter fence around the top of the pipe and bring in the necessary earth-moving and processing equipment, diamond mining can be orderly, efficient and transparent. It becomes a matter simply of digging out the kimberlite and sifting it to recover the stones.

  Sierra Leone’s curse is that the elements have already done much of the sifting, spreading diamonds far beyond the tops of the original pipes. Over time, the action of water, through seasonal rains and ever-changing river systems, skimmed off the heads of the country’s pipes dotting the east of the country, washing away the valueless kimberlite but spreading its valuable diamonds far and wide, albeit in smaller concentrations, within gravel along river banks and streambeds. After Mr Pollet’s discovery in 1930 it was not initially possible to locate Sierra Leone’s kimberlite pipes but this was largely academic – profits could still be made as river gravel in many places was rich enough in diamonds to be worth processing.

  The problem was that under these conditions control of diamond mining here has been effectively impossible. The authorities could not bar people from all the gem-rich riverbeds as they could not fence off the entire eastern region of the country and new arrivals did not need expensive processing equipment because it was not necessary to dig deep in order to strike lucky. A spade, a sieve and access to a promising-looking stretch of riverbed was all that was needed for a person to become a diamond miner. It has been this lack of barriers to entry that has made Sierra Leone’s diamond industry so problematic over the years.

  From the moment Pollet’s discovery became known, the British colonial authorities struggled to control Sierra Leone’s diamond industry. Smuggling was always a problem and indeed during Graham Greene’s wartime service in Sierra Leone, he was under orders to stop unscrupulous Arab dealers smuggling stones to Germany for use as industrial diamonds in the Nazi war effort. And later the mostly Lebanese diamond dealers of Sierra Leone acquired such a reputation for hardheadedness that Nicky Oppenheimer, current head of the De Beers diamond giant, was sent here as a young man to hone his trading skills.

  But it was not smuggling that made Sierra Leone’s diamond industry so damaging. The country’s poverty meant that when diamonds were discovered they prompted a social revolution, ruining any chance of the economy becoming sustainable. Tens of thousands of young men left a life of poorly paid toil on farms and headed east to the diamond fields. So significant was the loss of young men from the agricultural sector in the 1940s and 1950s that a country which used to make profits from the export of rice was declared bankrupt as farm output collapsed, forcing it to rely on handouts to pay for food imports.

  It was this diamond-skewed economic mess that Sierra Leone’s new government inherited on independence from Britain in 1961, a challenge it was incapable of dealing with. Throughout the post-independence era diamonds were built up as the country’s potential saviour, an asset that would lift the country once and for all out of poverty. But corruption, shady deals and the fact that the extensive diamond fields were still so difficult to run efficiently meant the promise of a diamond-bright future for Sierra Leone remained folly.

  Diamonds were the major driver behind Sierra Leone’s civil war and a significant reason it festered for so long. The relative ease with which diamonds can be recovered from river gravel meant all the RUF gunmen needed to do was drive government forces away from the east of the country in order to get access to a regular money supply. This was a period of medieval cruelty in eastern Sierra Leone, a time when villagers were forced to scrabble through riverbeds at gunpoint in the search for gems that the rebels would then smuggle across the border into Liberia and eventually on to the world’s diamond-dealing markets, such as the one in Antwerp. Evidence given in recent war crimes trials described mayonnaise jars filled to the brim with rough diamonds from Sierra Leone being trafficked through Liberia. Money earned from the sales would be spent on more weapons used by the rebels to secure yet more territory and enslave yet more people to search for yet more stones. It was a self-sustaining cycle of violence. The term ‘blood diamonds’ feels an entirely appropriate name for gems mined, smuggled and traded to sustain the conflict.

  Hollywood took on the subject convincingly with the 2006 film Blood Diamond starring Leonardo DiCaprio. It is a wartime story of a white diamond smuggler joining forces with a desperate black Sierra Leonean villager to snaffle a priceless stone from under the noses of rebels and mercenaries out in the country’s chaotic hinterland. For me, the film captures the overwhelming but dangerous allure of diamonds, how ordinary people can be dazzled by the promise of vast wealth. It is a promise that is rarely fulfilled and often comes at a terrible price but it is a promise that is hard to resist.

  After the war finished in 2002 I visited the diamond town of Koidu, which lies about 50 miles north of Kenema, right in the middle of the country’s diamond fields. There I saw the pathetically simple but back-breakingly grim reality of mining. It is such an inefficient and disorganised industry that much of the digging today takes place in river gravel that has already been worked over several times, with experience telling the miners they still might find something missed by their predecessors.

  So, like dogs gnawing an old bone in the hope of finding a passed-over lick of marrow, they toil away using nineteenth-century methods to find twenty-first-century stones. Without heavy equipment it takes long, sweaty days to shovel away valueless topsoil, before reaching the beds of ochre gravel where diamonds might lurk. Post-war attempts have been made to organise the industry but it has proved as difficult as ever to fence in the richest deposits and defeat artisanal miners who keep arriving in large numbers. The language they use comes from an earlier age, almost as far back as Sierra Leone’s buccaneering past, as the miners speak of digging as ‘tripping’ and use ‘fathoms’ as their measure of depth. And with foul-smelling water welling up from below, they pan the gravel, spadeful by spadeful, sluicing it through a wire mesh sieve, backs bent, eyes straining at the swirl of grit and dust, hoping to catch sight of a life-changing gemstone.

  As I left Koidu a teenager approached whispering secretively. Would I like to buy a stone, he mouthed, his eyes anxiously flicking around to make sure we were not overheard. Selling rough diamonds without a licence is a criminal offence in Sierra Leone, although it is a rule more honoured in the breach than the observance. Licensed buyers, mostly Lebanese, offer such low prices that diggers often look for other buyers. The boy’s hand dipped into the pocket of his threadbare shorts and there, suddenly, on his palm was a marble-sized stone, pale grey in colour with the foggy texture of scratched glass. I had no idea if I was looking at a genuine rough diamond or a fragment of old car windscreen but I can remember the momentary tightening in the stomach, the dizzying rush of temptation. Dangerous things diamonds, I thought, as I forced myself to walk away.

  Graham Greene’s spirits rose the further away he got from Freetown but my feelings were a little different. After the passed-over decay of the capital I had hoped to find at least some evidence of progress out in the provinces, but I was disappointed. It started with the roads that got worse the more distance we covered, like narrowing blood vessels in a diseased liver getting more sclerotic and ineffective. We were hoping to make Kailahun by nightfall, a notoriously wild frontier town where the Greenes spent their last nights in Sierra Leone before trekking into Liberia, and although we were travelling in the dry season, when the roads were at their most passable, we only just made it.

  As agreed, Michael dropped us in Kenema, a tatty town similar to Bo, although with more diamond dealers. Cheery to the end, he shook our hands before driving off mumbling something about ‘being thirsty’. He had left us at what passed for Kenema’s main bus station, an open piece of ground on the edge of town crowded with unconvincing-looking poda-podas, many with doors missing, shattered windscreens, and bodywork patched with crudely welded shards of metal. To my amateur eye a cream-coloured Mazda appeared the soundest of them all and the message stencille
d in black letters above its front bumper felt somehow reassuring. It said ‘if God gree’, the Krio for God willing or Inshallah, a message that felt like a good hedged position in a region that was part-Christian, part-Muslim.

  The minibus had seats for eight passengers but the driver waited until he had squeezed in fourteen people, each paying £3 for a trip that spanned roughly a fifth of the country, before announcing he was ready to leave. The engine fired and we lurched across the dusty field but only as far as what amounted to a service station. A hand-operated pump delivered fuel from an old barrel on the ground next to what looked like a car-boot sale of old pipes, valves and gas cylinders, all vaguely attached to one another. With a single tug on a hand crank the ensemble came to hissing life like an ill-tempered viper. I had never before seen the insides of an air compressor but this alfresco arrangement worked well enough and our bald tyres were soon inflated to the driver’s satisfaction.

  After setting off I remembered the article I had seen in the newspaper office in Freetown, the one that described the 50-mile stretch of national highway between Kenema and Kailahun as ‘deplorable’. Ruts churned up by trucks and jeeps during the last rains had been baked hard by the dry-season sun, creating an assault course that destroyed axles and gearboxes. The elephant-ear fronds of roadside banana trees were not just rusty now but deep red with dust thrown up by passing traffic, and often I saw the skeletons of vehicular road-kill, abandoned trucks and vans that had reached the end of their road in Sierra Leone’s wild east. A fellow passenger could sense my astonishment at the road surface so he leaned forward and tried to emphasise the positive: ‘You think this is bad? You wait until the rains come and then the mud and the broken bridges and the fallen trees will block this road completely for weeks on end. The road might seem bad to you but it is a blessing for us that we can get through without having to walk.’