Chasing the Devil

by Tim Butcher

  The coming of peace meant roads in the east of Sierra Leone have been opened, a clear improvement on the civil war when fighting made many of these areas unreachable. But the traffic using the roads was opportunistic and piecemeal. What chance meaningful economic development when traders had to factor the regular destruction of vehicles and season-long delays into their pricing?

  The driver, a lean, elderly man wearing a flat cap, had the disconcerting habit of removing the minibus key from the ignition as we drove and spinning it by its fob looped round his little finger. David and I spent six hours wedged up together on the front passenger seat but I never worked out how the engine kept going when he did this. The appalling road surface was for him such a normal feature of life it was not even worth commenting on. Like an expert skier who can see a route down a mogul field he picked his line through the rock-hard mud, nursing his overladen Mazda forward, the whole ensemble crowned by a bulging tarpaulin-wrapped hulk of luggage lashed to the roof rack.

  He had the air of a train driver keeping to a timetable, as whenever passengers joined us at a stop he would give a single warning cry before setting off. The teenager responsible for the overhead luggage was in constant danger as the driver did not wait for him to get down from the roof. Several times the poda-poda set off before he had clambered back down, meaning he had to swing gymnastically by one arm to make it safely back into the passenger compartment. He was obviously not the complaining type. There was no seat for him and he passed the six hours of the drive on his haunches.

  More significant for our driver than the awful road conditions were police checkpoints. For optimists who believe official corruption has been done away with in post-war Sierra Leone, I recommend a drive along one of its main rural arteries. A rope strung across the carriage-way and a uniformed figure sitting outside a mud hut nearby shows how the canker of corruption eats at the country’s advancement. The police know that everyone knows they are up to no good, but for the sake of appearances the officers still go through the motions of discretion. The driver is summoned inside the hut so the size of the bribe can be arrived at out of earshot of others. The presence of two white faces in a poda-poda spells trouble for the driver as the policeman sniffs the chance of a larger fee – the assumption being that the driver will have fleeced the foreigner so it is only fair for the policeman to upwardly adjust the fleecing of the driver. Several times in Sierra Leone I felt drivers look at us cursing as they disappeared under a hut’s thatch for their police shakedown.

  The far east of Sierra Leone is higher than the central plateau and for the first time on our journey across the country I felt a sense of elevation as we started to climb gently over undulating hills separated by ravines and gullies, although there were still no major breaks in the bush. The country used to have large pockets of high rainforest but most of the monumental trees, such as the mahoganies and cotton trees, have been cut down by loggers and only one sizeable remnant remains – the Gola forest, straddling part of the border between Sierra Leone and Liberia. The resulting scrub that covers most of Sierra Leone is lower than rainforest but every bit as impenetrable and difficult to navigate. With the Liberian border getting closer all the time and, with it, the moment when we would have to start walking, I was reminded of how crucial it would be to find reliable local guides.

  The road continued to follow the route of the old railtrack so, when we passed villages, traces of the railway were occasionally visible, an old sign here, an abandoned telegraph room there. We stopped briefly at the old terminus at Pendembu, end of the line for the Greenes in 1935 and the place where they had to board a truck for the final, bone-shaking pull to Kailahun. I remembered seeing an original map of the Sierra Leonean rail network that meticulously marked Pendembu as lying 227½ miles from Freetown, but after being badly damaged in the war the town was in many ways more primitive today than when the Greenes passed through. Few of its buildings were habitable and the central crossroads consisted of a few roadside stalls set up by hawkers selling cheap dry-goods, things that did not need expensive refrigeration – biscuits, batteries, cans of fizzy drink. A radio broadcast live coverage of an English premiership soccer game (a scoreless draw between Arsenal and Tottenham Hotspur).

  During Graham Greene’s service with MI6 in the 1940s he came back up here by train but found standards had already begun to slip. He thought the government guesthouse too dirty to use, so he set up camp between the rails, a scene described in one of his volumes of autobiography, Ways of Escape.

  One took one’s ‘boy’, one’s own supply of tinned food, one’s own chair, one’s own bed, even one’s own oil-lamp to hang on a hook in the compartment when dark fell. The little train stopped for the night … and thence chugged laboriously uphill to Pendembu. At Pendembu there was a rest-house, not very well maintained by the local chief, so I preferred to take my evening meal on the railway line, my camp table set up on the track.

  The sun set soon after our poda-poda left Pendembu but on we ploughed. The key-spinning driver continued at an ever-slowing pace, his one functioning headlight enough to pick his line through the ruts on slopes that grew steadily steeper. A fullish moon rose as we crested an open hilltop and for a second I could see a wide vista of West African forest in negative, the treetops outlined in watery silver under the sky’s wide shadow. Evening mist then gobbled up the moon and we continued in complete darkness for several more hours.

  It was in Kailahun, a district capital with a population of 25,000 people, that the Sierra Leonean civil war had its crucible, the first large town to fall to RUF rebels invading from Liberia. It would be fought over repeatedly and after the war it became the focus of tens of millions of pounds in foreign aid and development work. Peering out into the darkness I was expecting to see a large town come into sight and perhaps even to spot some new buildings. But, six hours after leaving Kenema and without fanfare, the driver suddenly stopped in the middle of an apparently empty road and announced we had reached Kailahun.

  Hungry, dusty and tired we got out of the minibus and there, in the shadows, were the glowering shapes of broken buildings and vehicles. Round a corner we found light spilling from a shack onto white plastic tables under which chickens pecked enthusiastically. Just as enthusiastically, David and I took our places at the Peace Garden, Kailahun’s only restaurant, and were served with large plates of rice and what the landlady called beef. The sauce was great but the meat gritty and tubular. I turned off my headtorch, thinking it best not to investigate too closely. Aid workers were the only people wealthy enough to eat at the Peace Garden, where an evening meal cost £2.50, and when I paid, the landlady routinely handed me a pro-forma receipt. ‘So you can claim from your expense account,’ she said.

  By daylight Kailahun looked as if the waters of a tsunami had only just retreated. It was seven years since the war had finished and yet as the morning fog lifted the town felt like it was still in a state of shock. It was not just its architecture of war, the rutted roads, the ankle-high outlines of destroyed buildings, the bare-branch hovels roofed with plastic sheeting. An even stronger sense of trauma unhealed could be seen in the eyes of schoolgirls fallen to prostitution to earn money for textbooks; the menace of young men – former child soldiers – leaning idly over the handlebars of the okada motorbike taxis they had been given in exchange for laying down their arms; the desperation in the pleading of people queuing up for jobs outside aid groups’ headquarters, the only source of employment in a moribund local economy.

  These NGO offices were among the few buildings in town with any sense of order and there were dozens of them, built behind high perimeter walls with guards manning iron gates. Lawlessness meant that the presence of computers, generators, satellite communications and, of course, jeeps, inside the compounds made them ready targets. The concentration of aid groups’ signboards in Kailahun outdid even that in Freetown. They stood in thickets, the older, rustier ones indicating that many of the groups had got here shortly after the w
ar ended in 2002 and still had not completed their operations. Marie Stopes, the sex education group, appeared to have just arrived in town, its signage conspicuously pristine.

  Kailahun is about as far from Freetown as it is possible to travel and still be inside Sierra Leone. Its position close to the country’s three-way border junction with Guinea and Liberia had, in its day, been a blessing, ensuring cross-border trade and a sense of wide horizons, as outsiders passed through, bringing with them different languages, customs and faiths. There had been Mandingo traders, the wanderers of West Africa, who stood out with their flowing gowns and brightly coloured fezzes. Their Islamic zeal and desire for profit cared little for international boundaries drawn up by colonial cartographers. And there were ambitious Krio administrators from Freetown who came out to the provinces with their textbooks and college degrees, determined to drag rural Africa into the modern world. And there were white missionaries, who sought to seed Christianity in the heathen hinterland of Africa, and who worked alongside assorted colonial administrators.

  This was the Kailahun the Greenes saw in 1935, a remote, colonial trading town that was undergoing development, albeit incrementally slow development. They spent two nights at the government guesthouse, drank warm beer with a jittery Scottish engineer sent all the way out here to build a bridge, and dined with a book-loving district commissioner. In the first edition of Journey Without Maps Graham Greene noted how pleased he was to see his worst-selling novel in the commissioner’s collection, ‘rotting among the others on the shelf’, although the reference was removed from later editions.

  The Greenes were not the only ones to use Kailahun as a jumping-off point to explore Liberia. The train-lorry combination through Sierra Leone had already been used by numerous explorers, missionaries and prospectors wanting a backdoor into Liberia. Indeed, while in Kailahun the Greenes met one of them, a young German man with a shaven head and a grubby vest, someone Greene initially suspected of being a diamond prospector. In fact, he turned out to be an academic anthropologist with years of experience in the region, familiar with the trails from Kailahun into Liberia, and he ended up guiding the Greenes safely across the border. Graham Greene describes him as having ‘an aristocratic air in spite of his beachcomber’s dress’, while Barbara Greene writes he ‘looked startlingly like the usual pictures of Jesus Christ with his carefully cut beard, softly smiling eyes and gentle face’.

  The strategic location that had brought the Greenes, the German anthropologist and all the other outsiders to this small but prospering border trading town has, in more recent years, been its curse. When Charles Taylor, then a warlord seeking to take power in Liberia, set about stirring up conflict in Sierra Leone in 1991 it was through Kailahun that rebels and guns poured, with Taylor allowing his proxies to launch their grab for the nearby diamond fields. Government troops, police, teachers and civil servants all fled, and for years the town of Kailahun was the epicentre of one of the world’s most brutal, chaotic conflicts.

  The ghost of the Greenes’ anthropologist guide looked after David and me as we were given lodging at a guesthouse run by GTZ, the German government’s international development arm. It was basically a shell of a building undergoing what the caretaker rather extravagantly called ‘refurbishment’. I have travelled a fair bit through Africa and found it perfectly acceptable but I was interested to see David’s reaction. There was no power, the insect screens over the windows were torn and the water supply was not working – but, fortunately, he was clearly not the complaining type. By the light of his headtorch he got on with suspending his mosquito net from some nails in the ceiling above a bed and then sat down quietly to write his journal.

  The overland journey had been straightforward but to follow the Greenes’ route from Kailahun would be a different matter. While the region’s aid traffic and commercial trade entered Liberia north of Kailahun at Koindu, we would have to head due east for about 15 miles, through a region with no marked roads, to the Sierra Leonean village of Dawa, close to the border with Liberia, and then try to cross on foot. Dawa is the village that no one back in Freetown had heard of so, after breakfast of plantain and chicken back at the Peace Garden, we headed to the Kailahun mayor for advice.

  ‘Of course I know Dawa,’ came the answer in a tone just shy of booming. Tom Nyumah clearly liked to use his voice to reinforce his authority as town mayor and chairman of Kailahun District Council. ‘I am a Kailahun man, born and bred in the country, from the Kissi tribe. I know every road, village and town in the area.’

  I probed a little more, wanting to know if there was a functioning border crossing at Dawa.

  ‘Well, I have never actually been there,’ he replied. ‘But everything is at peace now so I don’t think you will have any problems. There was a lot of fighting, you know, around Dawa. Those rebels hit us hard in 1991, in three places at the same time along the border, and Dawa was one of them. We lost Kailahun quickly and it was four years before we won it back again. I hope you don’t meet any trouble out there.’

  He asked us about our plan to follow the Greenes’ route and David and I performed a little routine we had developed, which entailed me telling the story of us following in the footsteps of a famous English author, while David provided what he called the ‘visual aids’, holding up the map-page from my paperback copy of Journey Without Maps. When I told Nyumah I hoped to write a book about our trip, his interest stirred.

  ‘I am a soldier boy at heart, you know. Sure, I made it to the top but my boys knew I led from the front and they always stood behind me. I know all about the war and all the secrets of what went on. I even met Foday Sankoh, face to face, back in 1996 at peace talks in Abidjan. I should have killed him there and then but he said he regretted what he had started in Sierra Leone so I forgave him. I was Born Again in 1991 so I had God on my side. Don’t you want to write a book about me?’

  I smiled politely and said I would certainly consider his idea.

  His description of making it ‘to the top’ was no exaggeration. In 1992 Tom Nyumah, then only twenty-two years old, was one of a junta of disgruntled young army officers who staged a coup. For four years the National Provisional Ruling Council junta ran Sierra Leone, although ‘ran’ hardly seems an appropriate description for the feuding, bloodletting, attempted coups, executions and political paralysis of this period. Nyumah served as defence minister and it was under his rule that the Sierra Leone army collapsed so calamitously that RUF rebels took control of the eastern half of the country and white mercenaries were brought in to defeat the rebels, paid for by the promise of diamond revenues. After other members of the junta were either killed or arrested, Nyumah slipped out of the country and spent nine years in the United States studying at university, having a family and working for an insurance company. But the fact he was back, elected to office, suggested post-war politics in Sierra Leone were not so fundamentally different from before the war.

  As we were leaving his office I asked him about his family and why his five children had not come back to Sierra Leone with him.

  ‘It’s much too dangerous for them here,’ he said without any sense of irony.

  There was one person I met in Kailahun whom I struggle to forget. To protect her I will change her name to Bendu but I will not alter anything that she told me. Across Sierra Leone today victims of the war are so common that for me there are times when they lose definition. I met them everywhere, in shops, bus queues, bars, town centres, rehabilitation camps, but somehow the horror of what they underwent as individuals became lost in a single numbing brand of Sierra Leonean suffering. For years the dominant image of this country had been of young people with their limbs cut off, victims of the barbaric RUF practice of not killing civilians but forever marking them, by cutting off hands (long sleeves, as the attackers put it in cruel euphemism) or arms (short sleeves).

  While other warring factions committed numerous atrocities, the cutting of arms was something the RUF specialised in, although there
was no clear reason for them doing this. Some said it was to punish those who had taken part in elections the RUF did not approve of. To show they had cast their ballot, voters would have their hands marked with ink by election officials, so by cutting off hands, some said, the RUF stopped them ever voting again. Others said it was an RUF ploy to stop the civilians from mining diamonds for themselves, something the RUF sought to control when it overran the diamond-rich east of the country. Others said it was simply a terror tactic to intimidate the civilian population. Whatever the reason, the spectacle of otherwise healthy Sierra Leoneans with stumps for arms became a grisly national hallmark.

  During the war one of the first things outsiders saw when they arrived in Freetown was a camp for amputees on the main road into town. The image dominated this country to such an extent that I know of aid groups who offered journalists online testimonies from victims along with sets of photographs so these reporters could put together graphic accounts without ever actually coming to the country.

  The scars Bendu bore were not visible. When we met in Kailahun she was resting in the shade outside the single-room mud hut she called home wearing a school uniform that could have been out of Britain circa 1960, with a green felt hat tied with a ribbon, pleated skirt and white blouse bearing the crest of Kailahun’s Methodist School. She looked much too old to be a schoolgirl but the local aid worker who introduced us, Sarah Smart, had already explained that while Bendu was probably in her early twenties nobody knew her age for sure.