by Tim Butcher
There were a few wobbly moments but our canoeist eventually delivered us dry and safe from Liberia, an African country heavily influenced by America, to Guinea, one just as heavily influenced by its old colonial overlord, France. I jumped out and slithered my way up the wet river bank, half-expecting to find some immigration officer or representative of Le Pouvoir. There was nothing. All I saw were some fishermen, clearly curious at the arrival of two white men, and some very simple thatched structures. They were nothing more than lean-tos, temporary shelters on the river bank knocked up from branches and palm fronds at the start of the dry season. Fishing is a seasonal business and the fishermen knew this area would be inundated during the rainy season so there was no point in building anything more substantial.
The fishermen were smoking the morning’s catch over a fire laid on damp soil. In the still air a skein of smoke filtered my view as David and I got ourselves organised, Johnson paid off the canoeist, and Chief Sumo, looking as if pride had been restored, set off confidently to guide us down a narrow but well-marked track. I struck the ground with my falloe’s stick and took my first steps into Guinea.
The rain returned and I felt wonderfully at home. For the first time since we began our walk the terrain felt familiar, almost as if I were home in England. Take away the occasional palm tree and I could have been walking through the countryside of my rural childhood. The footpaths were muddy and thick with wet leaves, the view was closed in by grey sky and for the first time I saw what might be called hedges on either side of the track marking areas recognisable as fields. It took me back to the woods and lanes of Northamptonshire, where I spent long days exploring the wilderness, childishly careless of the mud and wet.
My enthusiasm for walking long distances continued into adulthood, something I felt I shared with Graham Greene. He had worked as a sub-editor on The Times in his mid-twenties but then bravely resigned so he could focus full time on writing. The paper never really forgave him, huffy in its view that nobody could thrive after turning their back on ‘The Thunderer’. Within a few years he was indeed facing serious financial worries, living with his wife in a small rented cottage in the Cotswolds and writing novels that generated only a diminishing income. It got so bad that in 1932, when his brother, Hugh – whose journalism career would include service as a foreign correspondent for the Telegraph and later as Director-General of the BBC – invited himself to stay for four nights in the Cotswolds, Graham Greene wrote back saying he was on the verge of bankruptcy and could only afford to host him for two.
Money worries aside, Graham Greene developed a Cotswolds routine of writing each morning and then heading off after lunch on prodigious walks along the lanes of Gloucestershire and beyond. He once told his mother that he had clocked up 127 miles in a month and would soon be able to challenge the ‘village postman’s record of mileage’.
It was a little over two years later that he set about the journey through West Africa and I felt certain his Cotswolds walking had been good training. He used his hammock only very occasionally and the distances he achieved between village stops were truly impressive, something that acquaintances back in London struggled to believe. Walter Allen, the novelist, met Graham Greene some years after the Liberian trek and described how deceptively frail he appeared.
… I remember thinking: how could this man have made such an expedition? He was very tall and thin; one felt a gust of wind would blow him over.
As I followed his route, blistered and exhausted, I learned to respect a very different part of Graham Greene’s character to his creative, literary side. He was not only determined enough to take on a genuine physical and logistical challenge, but he was sufficiently tough and practically minded to see it through. Barbara Greene describes how he would stride out at the start of each day, setting a cracking pace at the head of the column which would soon become strung out behind him through the jungle. When the lead group came to junctions in the track someone would leave a branch across the way to indicate the route taken to those that followed, and though the system worked well enough it was near the St Paul River that things went badly wrong.
Graham Greene and a small group of porters had, as ever, forged ahead, but his cousin and the rest of the bearers missed a crucial junction in the trail, becoming hopelessly lost. It was only after crossing the river by raft and entering Guinea that Graham Greene thought to stop, waiting for several long, anxious hours on the muddy bank as he considered what to do. If he did not re-establish contact with her group then he feared ‘we should have been permanently separated, for my cousin had no idea of the route I intended to follow’.
Forests can be terrifyingly disorientating. I remember that during my year in New Zealand I felt a morbid fascination as I read, in the country’s early history, of British settlers who set up cabin homes in the thick rainforest that covered the North Island long before it was burned away to produce the open sheep pasture of today. There were instances when those pioneers would step out into the forest, even for a purpose as mundane as going for a pee, and become confused by the identical tree-trunks growing so close to each other that they appeared as a single, solid wall. Several early settlers perished after failing to make it back through the maze.
Barbara Greene describes her sense of stoicism when she and her bearers became aware of their predicament.
Strangely enough I was not in the least worried. I had grown so stolid of late, so phlegmatic, and I simply decided that it would be a waste of precious energy to fuss till I was quite sure that my cousin had disappeared for ever.
With luck her group eventually reached the St Paul directly opposite the spot where the lead group was still waiting, a moment, she describes, of great relief.
There, on the other side of the river, sat my cousin and his men, waving their arms excitedly. Even Amedoo allowed himself to show some feelings for once, for his relief knew no bounds … It was a ridiculous situation. To happen to run across one another in that great forest as if it had been a village street.
Chief Sumo had agreed to lead us to Bamakama, the first major village on the eastern side of the border, where we planned to rendezvous with Mr Omaru and our luggage. Our walk from Zorzor to the river and into Guinea only took a few hours, but it was much too tough for Mr Omaru to manage on the motorbike.
The plan had been for him to take our rucksacks to the main road crossing into Guinea from Liberia and, once he entered the country, find his way to Bamakama via a long but driveable road marked on my map. If we all set off from Zorzor just before first light, I guesstimated Mr Omaru, who faced a time-consuming border crossing through both sets of customs and immigration, should reach the village about the same time as us, around the middle of the morning.
After our rest in Zorzor, I felt wonderfully strong on the rainy hike. African rain is usually something extreme, aqueous bullets pummelling the ground, taking out bridges and rearranging landscapes almost as if reasserting nature’s authority by clearing away traces of man, but that morning in Guinea its nature had become much more benign. It was so delicate as to have become little more than a sensation of damp, and as I swept my hand through the air I could not see individual raindrops but my palm and fingers still ended up wet.
The bush in Guinea had a greater sense of order than I ever saw in the Liberian jungle. The path took us through tidy plantations of low trees with fleshy fruit the size of avocados growing straight out from trunks and boughs. Yellow, orange or purple in colour, I recognised them from a newspaper story I once wrote about chocolate. They were cocoa pods. And the first forest village the chief led us through had something I had not seen on the other side of the border – a rubbish dump. The poverty of Liberia ensures there is nothing left to waste, but in Guinea, still a poor country, rural communities actually have things to throw away, an unexpected but convincing hallmark of affluence.
As we continued walking east we would occasionally pass Guineans on the trail who greeted us in French. The river frontier mi
ght have been an arbitrary division created during the colonial period, with members of the same tribe distributed on both sides, but a hundred and fifty years or so of foreign influence has turned it into a meaningful barrier. A few miles to the west and almost nobody would understand French; here Liberian English is barely known.
Chief Sumo would speak a few words of greeting to each person in their shared Kpelle dialect, the language of the tribal group straddling the frontier, and they would invariably respond politely. But when we reached a young woman walking with a friend something quite extraordinary happened. The chief raised his hand in greeting, muttered a few words and carried on without missing a stride but the girl collapsed as if felled by a gunshot, her bag tumbling to the ground from its head-top perch, spilling its contents of rice. In the few seconds it took me to walk up level with her she fell silent but this was only because she was drawing in breath for a wail of such anguish it made me panic.
‘Chief Sumo, Chief Sumo – what happened? What did you say to that woman?’ I panted, having run to catch him up around a corner in the track.
‘I told her that her mother has died,’ he said flatly before turning back to the trail and starting to walk again.
We could not see the woman any more but her keening was growing more intense.
‘What do you mean?’ David asked, gently grabbing the chief ’s arm, obliging him to stop. David was livid.
‘That woman comes from our village. She has been to Bamakama for a few days to buy rice and her mother fell sick and died. I just told her that.’
David persisted. ‘Do you think you should say something else to her – something to explain, maybe, something to comfort her?’
The chief hesitated as he looked into David’s face. It was the first time on the trip I saw my travelling companion truly assert himself. The stalemate lasted only a few seconds but from the glare in David’s eyes, I knew there could only be one winner. The old man shrugged his shoulders, laid down the bag he was carrying and jogged back around the corner to the woman. For a few moments her wailing grew quieter and we heard muffled voices. Then back into view came the chief. He shouldered his bag and we set off again, the sound of the woman’s grief following us far along the trail.
The night before we entered Guinea I had dreamed of storms washing away our trail but we reached Bamakama on foot without any major drama, as anticipated, around mid-morning. Mr Omaru and his motorbike, however, were not there.
The rain was stronger now so some villagers invited us to share a covered veranda in front of a small hovel while Johnson settled the guiding fee with Chief Sumo.
David and I shared lukewarm Coke bought at a roadside stall, my map of Guinea open on my lap. It was the best I could find but it was still rather pathetic, some photocopied pages from a Michelin guide. The Greenes’ account of their journey becomes rather unclear in Guinea, as they begin to leave out the names of some villages they passed through, but the last place they reached before crossing back into Liberia was Diecke, a name that survives to this day. According to my map, Diecke was three, maybe four days’ walk south-east of us and I was keen to start, hoping to reach the village of Galaye by nightfall, one of the rare overnight stopping places recorded by the Greenes. But without Mr Omaru we could go nowhere.
The hours passed and I began to feel chill. Motionless on the veranda I had none of the heat generated by walking to dry my wet clothes so in spite of putting on a waterproof my core temperature dipped. David was doing his visual aids routine, showing the villagers the map from Graham Greene’s book, as I began to worry. In my daypack I had water, a satellite phone, anti-malaria drugs, water purification tablets and some biscuits but no change of clothing and no bedding. We were more than 200 miles from our destination on the Atlantic and if Mr Omaru did not turn up with our gear there was no way we could complete the trip.
David finished his display and we began to discuss what could have happened. Mr Omaru might have had an accident somewhere along the trail, although throughout the time we spent together he had proved himself an ultra-cautious and skilful rider. Maybe the road was just longer than I had anticipated and it was taking more time than expected.
‘You know the most likely thing is that he has had a problem with the officials at the border,’ David suggested. ‘He is by himself and yet he is carrying gear for four people – you, me, Johnson and himself. That’s a hell of a load for one bike. If they spotted that and started asking him questions about it he would have problems. If he tries to explain he is travelling with two white guys who wanted to enter Guinea across a river in the jungle then we are all in trouble.’
In my heart I felt David was right. Our sense of good luck at having our passports stamped at the main border crossing now felt premature. Mr Omaru had most likely run into problems for trying to bring in our gear without us there to vouch for it. The question then became one of what we should do next. Sitting in Bamakama was not going to achieve much so I set a cut-off time of 1 p.m. If Mr Omaru had not appeared by then, we would go and find him ourselves, making our way back along the road we expected him to take, all the way to the main border crossing if necessary. As the hour approached, Johnson seemed to pick up my growing unease and he became increasingly animated. This was the first time our trip had run into a potentially major problem and he was desperate to sort it out.
‘Let me go back by myself,’ he suggested. ‘You stay here with Mr David and I will go and find Mr Omaru.’
Mindful of the way the Greenes had become dangerously separated, I wanted to avoid splitting our small group further and so as the cut-off time approached we prepared to move as one. Bamakama might be on the Michelin map but it is a tiny community of rain-scoured dirt roads and petrol sold on the roadside in old beer bottles. It took a while to round up three young men with half-decent motorbikes but then we were off along the road leading north, back towards the main border crossing.
For a half hour or so it was Wacky Races, as the riders tried to outdo each other on a bending, dipping forest track slick with surface mud. I kept shouting for them all to slow down but they ignored me. A broken ankle at this point would stop our trek stone dead. My falloe’s stick saved me and my rider on a couple of occasions as the bike pitched to one side and I stabbed the stick down like a crutch to stop us toppling. After a few sharp jabs in his ribcage my rider finally got the message to slow down.
David was some way in the lead, about to go round a corner at the bottom of a hill, when I saw him raise his arms in triumph and his biker slide to a halt. From out of the trees phutted Mr Omaru on his trusty Yamaha AG, his recently purchased black baseball cap on his head. He was going slowly and carefully, his expression as imperturbable as ever.
‘What are you doing out here on bikes?’ he asked.
‘We were worried you might have had some problems so we came to help,’ I said.
‘The road was slow and a bridge had been washed away so I had to take everything off the bike and ferry it across by canoe. It took a long time to pack everything properly again. But I said I would see you in Bamakama so you should have stayed there. I always do what I say I am going to do.’ As he revved his engine and shot off, in his body language there was clear irritation at our doubting him. ‘Good Old steady-Eddy Mr Omaru,’ I thought as my biker turned round and began racing his two friends once more. I was so elated with relief that I gave up punching him in the ribs.
Once we had all safely reached Bamakama, I got out my map sheets and agreed with Mr Omaru on Galaye as our preferred overnight stop. The locals said a long route looping to the south and east would deliver Mr Omaru to the village while David, Johnson and I could use a more direct footpath. Confident that Mr Omaru would find his way we left him drinking coke and eating biscuits while the three of us set off through plantations of coffee, cocoa and, for the first time on the trek, rubber.
The palaver over Mr Omaru’s border crossing seemed to have an energising effect on all three of us and we made good
progress along a well-marked track, guided by a young man from Bamakama. The forest was as thick as in Liberia but, in contrast to its neighbour, the farming here was much more systematic and we started to see signboards announcing landowners’ names and even the occasional piece of farming equipment like a tractor. Without the full-blown conflict that blighted Sierra Leone and Liberia, Guinea had been developed in relative peace, albeit at a glacially slow rate of economic growth, since becoming independent from France in 1958. A socialist dictator had ruled until 1984, followed by a more market-orientated successor, President Conté, whose death just before Christmas 2008 led to the coup and Captain Camara’s unexpected rise to power.
Successful coups might take just a few hours but this only ever involves securing a few key strategic targets such as the national army headquarters, state media and the country’s main international airport. To take full control of a nation, to put your own people in charge of all government departments and to see off your rivals, takes much longer. We were fortunate to reach Guinea in that honeymoon period when the impact of the coup outside Conakry, the capital city of Guinea way over on the country’s Atlantic seaboard, was only marginal.
It was only five weeks after the coup when I had collected my Guinean visa at the shabby embassy in Freetown. It is one of Guinea’s most important diplomatic missions and a main point of contact with a key regional neighbour but the loyalties of its staff soon became clear. They all owed their jobs to the old regime and were now facing a slow professional death, replaced whenever Capt. Camara’s people eventually got round to dealing with the diplomatic corps. Above the consul’s desk an official photograph of their country’s leader did not show the new man but the recently deceased leader, President Conté. This honeymoon period in Guinea would last only nine months until September 2009 when a large crowd gathered in Conakry demanding clarity about the country’s future, in particular the holding of elections. Troops commanded by the new regime ran amok, raping women at gunpoint and shooting dead at least 150 unarmed civilians, killings that brought out deep divisions within the ruling junta. A few months later Capt. Camara himself was shot in the head at pointblank range by another soldier and then whisked out of the country for emergency treatment in Morocco, leaving Guinea, a country that for so long had been a rare example of stability in West Africa, inching towards chaos.