Chasing the Devil

by Tim Butcher

  The boat-owner listened patiently to my pitch, which basically amounted to one simple question: how much would it cost to take David and me from here to Monrovia? In a canoe with an outboard motor this represented a one-way journey of about seven hours. He was bare-chested and while we talked every muscular fibre in his torso was being worked as he mended a net hooked over his toes. Leaning back to strain the mesh as taut as possible, he gripped it firmly with one hand while working a large, threaded needle with the other. He paused for a long time before giving his answer. My interest represented a rare opportunity to earn extra money but he did not want to overplay his hand and ask for too much. After several moments mumbling about the crew and extra fuel for the outboard engine he came up with his price – $1,200.

  He had blown it. This was way too much and there was no point even starting a negotiation at that price. If he came down halfway, that would still be more than I could afford. I thanked him for his time and shuffled out through the sand under the plastic roof of his shack. Buchanan’s beach was a place for industry, not leisure, and even though the palm-fringed shoreline would have been gobbled up by tourism developers in the Caribbean, in Africa it was put to much more prosaic use. I watched as men and women took turns to walk down to where the sand was churned by ankle-deep surf. They then squatted down and defecated.

  Finding an affordable boat ride to Monrovia was a frustrating process. After fruitless hours spent trudging through the sandy, malodorous alleys of the fishing community, an aid worker friend suggested, as a last resort, speaking to one of his contacts, the Liberian owner of a medium-sized fishing canoe crewed by Ghanaians. The owner was said to be working in the old LAMCO harbour, the one built for iron ore shipments back in the 1960s, so I set off to find him in my friend’s air-conditioned jeep. It was only a mile or so along a rutted road but by the time we arrived my body was already relishing the cool. When I opened the door and felt, once more, the suffocating heat outside I could scarcely believe that less than twenty-four hours earlier I had been willing to trudge on foot through the same conditions.

  The coastline of Liberia is notorious for its lack of natural harbours and its hazardous coastal currents. There are plenty of river mouths but, unlike the estuary of the Sierra Leone River where Freetown was established, the river currents are rarely strong enough to wash away sandbars deposited by Atlantic rollers, so approaching them by sea is very hazardous. Only tiny boats such as canoes have a shallow enough draft to avoid being trapped on the sandbars. Furthermore, the rips and undertows in local inshore waters claim lives regularly. Since the war ended, numerous foreigners, NGO workers mostly, have drowned in Liberia’s benign-looking but lethal sea.

  LAMCO’s construction of a large harbour in Buchanan offered a rare sanctuary along a treacherous coastline. It is a simple enough design with two rocky breakwaters reaching out into the Atlantic and a few wharves, but in the absence of any other major ports in the area it became known as the place for ships to go to in times of trouble. Today a huge Soviet-era trawler from the 1980s, so large you can see it clearly on Google Earth, rots quietly in the tropical sun where it was run aground next to the old commercial wharf after limping into the harbour. Nobody could tell me quite how long it had been there but it must have been many years. A seed that had germinated on one of its upper decks had had enough time to grow into a mature tree and the rust near the old Hammer-and-Sickle emblem was so advanced it had perforated plate steel into a brandy snap-like wafer. A diving expert told me that over the years dozens of trawlers, coasters and other ships had made it into the lee of the breakwaters only to sink, so ArcelorMittal, the new de facto owner of the harbour, would not be able to start shipping iron ore using large cargo vessels until safe passage through the underwater wrecks had been established.

  A small Nigerian boat, shallow enough in draft to use the commercial wharf, was loading up with large yellow blocks of latex when I got there. It took some time to talk my way past the ArcelorMittal security men at the gate but eventually I managed to extricate the Liberian businessman I was looking for, Mr Gree, from the stevedores, guards and hangers-on gathered noisily next to the ship. Armed security was needed because the wharf, a simple enough block of stone and concrete, represented a major national asset in Liberia. With so few other ports along the coast, whoever controlled the wharf controlled a potentially lucrative source of income. It was from this wharf that illegal timber was smuggled out of the country in large quantities during the war. Hardwood trees from the high rainforest were cut down upcountry, cleared of their branches, and then dragged by truck and tractor all the way to this harbour before the bare trunks were loaded on ships and taken overseas to be made into flooring, furniture and fittings. Alongside the smuggling of Sierra Leonean diamonds, unregulated shipment of timber from upcountry Liberia was one of the major sources of income for Taylor’s regime.

  Mr Gree beckoned me over to the shade provided by a brokendown gantry crane and politely listened to my request to use his fishing boat. We chatted for a while and I explained the connection with the Greenes and how, if we were able to leave the next morning, we would be sailing by coincidence on exactly the same calendar day, 3 March, when they had sailed in 1935. This symmetry seemed to rather appeal to him so, after a few minutes’ consideration, Mr Gree said for the right price he would be willing to send his fishing boat all the way to Monrovia. His crew would be under orders to drop us off first and then work their way back along the coast, fishing waters rarely reached by the Buchanan boats. With luck the catch would generate significant additional earnings. We danced a bit around the price for our passage, with him suggesting $500 initially, me responding with $300 and then us both agreeing on $350. But when we shook hands, I felt sure that I had finally found a way of reaching Monrovia by boat. He needed $200 upfront to buy fuel, so I handed over the money with the promise of paying the balance on reaching our destination.

  Mr Gree suggested we make contact with his Ghanaian crew, so back along the beach I drove, to a section of beachfront known as Fontayn Town. Down among its temporary huts I met two brothers, Kofi and Kojo, who by the time we got there had already been informed by mobile phone about the deal. Ghanaian men are traditionally given first names according to the day of the week when they are born so Kofi – just like Kofi Annan, the former UN Secretary General – was born on Friday, while Kojo was a Monday child. They walked us down to the water’s edge and pointed at an uncovered banana boat, called The Skipper, moored just beyond the surf.

  ‘That’s the boat we will take tomorrow,’ Kofi said. ‘Make sure you are here by five-thirty a.m. and we will have a chance of getting to Monrovia in the early afternoon.’

  I left them making arrangements for the fuel and headed back into town where David insisted, presciently, on stopping off at the Lebanese store to buy two umbrellas as sun shades. Excited at the prospect of nearing the end of our journey, we were even happier to be invited into the ArcelorMittal compound to eat at the company cafeteria, a well-stocked establishment run by a meticulous French-Moroccan chef. Feeling sheepish in our filthy walking clothes, David and I tried to appear as nonchalant as possible when we reached the building, with its polished tables and clean floors. But there was no hiding our thrill when we saw a buffet offering braised steak, crumbed fish, chicken curry, endless salads – and all in limitless quantities. Small groups of expat employees sat eating in near silence, clearly used to this array of choice but David and I nattered away excitedly about our selection as the chef freshened the trays of food and told us that every last ingredient had to be imported.

  The sight that really threw me, that really drove home the chasm between the rural Liberia I had seen and the Liberia as experienced by this foreign company, came at the end of the meal. On a huge platter quivered the richest crème caramel I have ever seen, oily with syrup and crowned perfectly with a luscious tan layer of caramelised sugar.

  I have a weakness for crème caramel and could not help myself spooning
out a large bowlful. Ambrosia itself could never have tasted finer for the Gods of Mount Olympus. But my body had been changed somewhat by weeks of village food and my stomach could not cope with the deluge of rich food. Somewhere on the bloated stagger back to our digs in Buchanan, I threw up the lot.

  Pre-dawn the next morning and Fontayn Town looked like a photoshoot for a Robert Mapplethorpe masterpiece. It was almost pitch black but in the feeble beam of my headtorch appeared the heaving, muscular forms of numerous naked men. Good to their word, Kofi and Kojo had roused the crew of The Skipper early and the fishermen were making certain they kept their single set of clothes dry as they waded backwards and forwards to the boat, carrying all the gear needed for the trip. First went the outboard engine, balanced precariously on the head of the tallest of the crew, then drums of fuel, sacks of charcoal, a large sack of rice, tub of palm butter, barrels of drinking water and, finally, clothes folded neatly with other personal items in large plastic margarine containers with sealable lids. It should take us only a day to get to Monrovia but, if the fishing was good, the crew could take as long as a week to work their way back to Buchanan.

  One of the crew offered to carry me but I preferred to wade out unshod, soaking my trouser legs before clambering up and over the coarse timbers of the boat. David passed me our rucksacks, which I stowed, before the pair of us settled on a thwart trying to keep out of the way. The boat was about 25 feet long and felt rather crowded when the last of the eleven-strong crew jumped on board, flicked the saltwater off their lower limbs and dressed.

  Kojo had stayed ashore so it was Kofi who took command from the sternpost. The design of the boat could not have been simpler – an open, planked canoe with a draft of less than two feet and gunwales standing only three feet above the water level. The anchor was a rusted driveshaft from an ancient truck engine, the shape sufficiently angular to snag the seabed. A wooden flange stuck out from the right-hand side of the boat near the stern and on it the single outboard engine had been mounted, fed by a fuel line worming up from the bottom of the boat where the petrol drums were stored.

  Everyone fell silent in the darkness except for Kofi who gave commands to unmoor. With the engine barely ticking over, he then nudged us free of a web of mooring lines attached to other Buchanan boats. The sun had yet to show itself but the shaggy skyline of palm treetops on the beach could just be made out against a glow from the distant ArcelorMittal compound. The town itself, unlit and unreconstructed since the war, slipped away unseen as Kofi, happy that we were clear of all other obstacles, gunned the engine and set us on our way.

  In the early-morning chill I soon understood why the crew had taken such care to keep their clothes dry. Trying to shelter from the wind below the gunwales I felt truly cold for the first time since flying into Freetown thirty-five days earlier. From a rarely visited corner of my pack I retrieved a grubby fleece, put it on and discussed with David what the Greenes went through when they covered the same stretch of sea seventy-four years earlier to the day. They too had taken passage on an open boat, similar to ours although a little bigger, carrying a large group of opposition politicians to Monrovia for a political rally. Recently bought second-hand, its new owner wanted to make as much money as possible on his first trip so, even though the boat was already dangerously low in the water, he invited the Greenes and their three Sierra Leonean servants to pile on board. Graham Greene writes that most of the passengers got ‘roaring drunk’, nearly tipping the boat over in their staggering inebriation, and Barbara Greene’s account is just as riotous:

  I fell asleep, and when I woke up a few hours later nearly every one was drunk …The captain looked as if he too had indulged in a few drinks, and I was glad, for the sake of my peace of mind, that I could not see the engineer. The boat chugged on its staggering way hour after hour. The sun beat down, and on every side I was pressed in by intoxicated politicians.

  Our crew were a more sober lot. With only one man needed at the tiller, Kofi and his nine other colleagues were all asleep within moments of unmooring and it was only long after the sun was up that they stirred. First, the youngest crew member, a cabin-boy, albeit one with no cabin, leaned over the side and used seawater to scrub clean a large pot. He then placed some charcoal in a cast-iron stove on an empty thwart, lit it and prepared a massive heap of rice. Only when it was fully cooked did Kofi order the tillerman to seek out another fishing boat.

  Since first light I had noticed that we were never truly alone on the sea. We were always within a mile or two of the beach and throughout the journey it was possible to spot in the offing other fishing boats, varying from tiny, hollowed-out tree-trunk canoes crewed by a single man to larger versions more like ours.

  With the rice pot steaming, we came alongside a three-man canoe with the message ‘Mother Blessing’ painted on the side. Its crew was busy dragging in a net and unpicking small fish trapped in its mesh. From the tip of their boat poked a length of wood, a mast, round which was bundled a sail made of sacks sewn together. The bags in which food aid is delivered by the UN and NGOs had been found to make excellent sailcloth if unpicked and reassembled as a single canvas, so several times during the journey I saw canoes under way beneath patchwork sails bearing the names of food donors. Without a single word being spoken, the men in the smaller boat started to throw some of their catch over to ours. After a few minutes Kofi was satisfied and he ordered The Skipper to head on its way. I was curious to see that no money had changed hands so Kofi offered an explanation.

  ‘Almost all of us fishermen here on the coast are Christians, many coming originally from Ghana. We believe in sharing, so if fishermen come up to you with nothing, you offer them whatever you can. I have never met those men before but they know that if they meet us on the way back from Monrovia they could have the pick of our catch.’

  The cabin-boy then fried the fish with onions in red palm oil. The stove was mad hot and it took just a few minutes before he pronounced the meal ready. The engine was turned off and we drifted in the gentle heave of the oily Atlantic as the crew ate en masse. Gathered around the single rice pot with its garnish of the freshest fish, they helped themselves to handful after handful, balling the rice and fish into sticky gobbets, chewing contentedly and every so often ejecting bones from their mouths onto the top of clenched fists. After my crème caramel experience I did not feel up to eating, preferring to nurse on bottled water bought at the shop in Buchanan.

  The coastline acted as a handrail for our journey. As long as it was in sight, to our starboard, we could not get lost. Between Buchanan and Monrovia there are no meaningful coastal towns so the view was unchanging, a broad blue canvas of cloudless sky and calm sea divided in two by a wavering but unbroken line of butter yellow sand and green palm trees. The sense of moving without any effort felt wonderful after the footslog through the jungle and no matter how slowly the boat phutted along, I kept telling myself we were making better progress than anything we could have managed on foot. As the sun grew fiercer David’s umbrellas proved their value and during the dead hours of the journey I sat under mine, twirling it every so often like a promenading Edwardian dame.

  The green thread of this coastline was used by Conrad in Heart of Darkness to set the scene for clumsy colonial aloofness. As Marlow steams towards his upriver rendezvous with the mysterious Mr Kurtz, he describes a French warship at anchor near here, riding the Atlantic swell and settling some pointless tribal dispute by firing her guns aimlessly towards the tree line: ‘…there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent.’

  Life was to imitate art when, in 1918, a German U-boat surfaced off Monrovia and began to fire into the city without causing any major damage. The country’s links with America brought on this feeble display of German military power and drew Liberia into the Great War in spite of its remoteness. When the allied powers gathered for the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, Liberia took its place alongside France, Britain and the United States, the only black-ruled African nati
on to attend.

  Our voyage took a little longer than expected but some time in the early afternoon I noticed first proof that Monrovia was in range – my mobile phone found a signal. Then I saw the occasional beachfront property among the palms, then a radio mast with a bright red warning light on top and then began an unbroken line of huts and shacks slowly growing in size and sophistication along the foreshore. The city reached further than I remembered but eventually I spotted an unmistakable squat, rectangular shape rising above the single-storey buildings: the John F. Kennedy Memorial Hospital, a place all journalists visited in 2003 to measure the human cost of the rebel advance that finally did for Taylor.

  But the thing that I wanted to see most, that had me closing my parasol and taking a seat at the prow of the boat studying the shoreline intensely, was not the hospital. It was a stretch of beach a short distance further on, and as it got nearer I began to feel more and more agitated. It was the site where a friend of mine, a newspaperman, had an experience that changed him for ever. There he watched thirteen men put to death.

  When I first joined the Telegraph in 1990 it was a paper rich with mavericks. One of the quirkier members of staff was a lifer called Brian Silk, a single man who had worked his entire career at the paper. His reporting days included a golden period when he was entrusted by the editor with the prestigious role of ‘fireman’, jetting round the globe whenever a dramatic news story broke. An occasionally gruff individual, he was the one who volunteered to work Christmas and Bank Holidays, a person with the appearance of having no family other than the Telegraph. By the time I arrived he was approaching retirement and had long since taken up the position of Night News Editor, coming in at teatime and working through to 1 a.m., making sure late-breaking stories were covered to the exacting standards of what he referred to, only half-jokingly, as ‘Her Majesty’s Daily Telegraph’. He was old-school, meticulous and, on first acquaintance, rather odd, with a sense of humour that convinced him jokes improved only through repetition. Around midnight, as late-shift reporters headed home he would never tire of calling across the newsroom, ‘Take the rest of the day off’.