I spent nearly two months in Sierra Leone in 1987, working as a 'consultant' to UNICEF, helping to develop visual materials for use in their Expanded Programme of Immunisation. Some of the time, I was up country at Njala, where workshop participant Sonny Beaboy introduced me to the joys of early morning (9.30 am) palm wine, usually drunk with village chiefs in villages where we were pre-testing our EPI images. But now's not the time for that.....
The reason my thoughts had turned to Sierra Leone was that yesterday was polling day there in the first national election organised by Sierra Leoneans since the end of the civil war. Most of the peacekeepers have left the country, too. Allafrica.com showed pictures of amputees struggling to put their ballot papers in the boxes in the 2002 election, and reported that queues had started at dawn yesterday at polling stations. There are three main candidates, all men. Solomon Berewa is, I think, the favourite. He's known as 'Solo B', is from the Mende ethnic group and is the preferred choice of President Kabbah, the man elected in 2002. Solo represents the Sierra Leone Peoples Party (SLPP). Ernest Koroma, a Temne nicknamed 'Mr. Clean', stood for the All Peoples Congress (APC) in 2002 when he got 22% of the vote as compared to Kabbah's 70%. The third main candidate is Charles Margai of the Peoples Movement For Democratic Change (PMDC). Charles is the nephew of Sierra Leone's first prime minister and son of the second.
It will be interesting to see who comes out on top. Whoever it is won't have much spare time - there's a lot to do. Allafrica.com is displaying several articles about current affairs in Sierra Leone, for obvious reasons. One, entitled 'Elections Bring Hope For A Former Failed State' and written by journalist Donald Steinberg reads "Absolute levels of poverty and suffering in Sierra Leone remain staggering. The country ranks second to last among 177 countries in the UN Development Index". We haven't yet heard any reports of violence, so let's hope it stays that way...
In the meantime, I thought this was a good time to add 'Lion Mountain Rag' to my blogsite. I wrote it in 2004 after a short and, sadly, unsuccessful trip to Freetown to try to arrange a workshop for Health Images. Here it is.....
Diamond Jubilee
It is sixty years since The British Council started work in Sierra Leone. It is their Diamond Jubilee. I went to Freetown with the help of a Diamond Jubilee Travel Grant, awarded to me by a nice gentleman called Rajiv Bendre who had previously been posted to Jordan, Iraq and Nigeria.
Diamonds have, of course, been at the root of much trouble, violence and corruption in Sierra Leone for many years. When I was there in 1987, I was told that the IMF had just offered financial assistance. The usual conditionality applied – free market economics, reduction of public spending, that sort of merciless punishment of the poor. One additional condition was applied, on that occasion. That was that government ministers had their passports confiscated for a while. It was they who were smuggling diamonds out of the country, for personal gain.
From the airport at Lunghi I took the hovercraft across the mouth of the wide river, in the dark, into Mamy Yoko. It’s run by a company called Diamond Airlines. Around town there are lots more references to diamonds. A hoarding reads “Diamond Rum”, a sign says “Diamond Drilling”. The country is, indeed, rich in natural resources – bauxite and other minerals, as well as diamonds. In theory, agriculture should be successful. The climate is like the inside of one of the big greenhouses at Kew Gardens. And there are fish in the sea, right off the empty, palm-fringed, singing-sand beaches. The Koreans are catching them now. When I was last there it was the Russians. With all these natural riches, the country is one of the very poorest in the world. As it was in ’87. In between times, there’s been 8 years of a very African civil war. Over diamonds.
On the way into town from Mamy Yoko, I got a lift with a relative of the woman I’d sat next to on the plane. To my surprise, the car was a shiny, new Mercedes Benz. Lionel Ritchie’s “Hello” came from the sound system as we drove past shanty towns of rusty corrugated iron and tarpaulins. I’d never before noticed the Wes Montgomery style guitar solo on “Hello”, using octaves. “Is it me you’re looking for?”
I asked about the guy’s job. He said he was in banking so I tried hard to think of some polite conversation. What do you say to a banker, after all? Lend us a fiver? I asked a pathetically general question about how the economy was doing after the war. The answer was staring me in the face as poor people came up to the car every time we stopped. “Is it me you’re looking for?”. “Things are picking up”, he said. “We’re exporting minerals again now”. During the rest of my visit, I was to learn that the economy was not picking up for most Sierra Leoneans. The price of basic foodstuffs like rice and palm oil were going through the roof.
Friday Prayers
I only spent one Friday in Freetown on this trip, which meant that I only missed one guitar session in the barn at home. “Imagine no religion, it’s easy if you try”.
The waterfront in Freetown is a scene of dilapidated go-downs, markets, traders sitting on bags of spices, women and children carrying six or eight baskets of charcoal, one stacked on top of another, on their heads, and other cargoes. I drifted through it all to cries of “White Man”. Nearby were the Portuguese Steps down which slaves had passed on their way to the trading post of Bunce Island, a few miles offshore. A very dark mentally ill woman sat as still as a statue, perched on a crumbling brick wall in front of the police headquarters. Dark like a poor Indian.
At the eastern end of the waterfront can be found a large and spacious old mosque. This is the New Mosque. A busy, bustling Friday morning, people walking fast, the faithful responding faithfully to the instructions of the tinny voice coming from a holy green loudspeaker. At the top of the steps into the mosque were a few stalls, like a market. One sold little muslim hats, many of them in a sort of reflective white, like a pearloid scratchplate on a Stratocaster. Another sold only Korans. Their covers were decorated with the complicated and intricate patterns of fine lines weaving in and out of each other, reflecting, perhaps, a labyrinthine content.
In front of and on the steps were a couple of dozen beggars. Young boys led their blind fathers by the arm, women sat displaying hands deformed by leprosy, pained and pitiful exaggerated expressions on their faces. Affluent worshippers stuffed 500 leone notes into the hands of those who possessed them.
Coming back down the steps on my way out, a man on crutches held out the stumps of his arms to me, in supplication, as if to say “Look, no hands”. I did not give him alms, thinking that, had I done so, I would have been mobbed. I feel bad about that now. Next time I go I should take a wad on 500L notes and distribute them.
There are many people in Sierra Leone now with no hands. Some of them have no feet. Cutting off hands and feet was a favourite punishment dished out by the rebels, usually for no real reason. Another trick was to get people to execute their own family members. I have been trying to imagine what life with no hands would be like. No playing guitar on Fridays – eating, writing, scratching, making love.
I have talked to a couple of organisations about doing art therapy work with people traumatised by their experiences in the war. It made me think of those Christmas cards made by people holding the paintbrush in their mouths or between their toes. Or Ramadan cards.
Another place where hands and feet were chopped off was, of course, nineteenth century Congo. That was punishment for not collecting enough rubber during a day's work. Somewhere I have seen a photograph of a large pile of severed hands. Two or three wheelbarrows full. In "King Leopold's Ghost” there are similar pictures. A particularly sad image shows a man sitting on the ground gazing at the small hand and foot of his 5-year old daughter. They were cut off by the militia of the Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company.
The Cost of Living
Rather unusually, for an African country, the staple food in Sierra Leone is rice. Six days of rice and, if you’re lucky, fufu on a Saturday night. Fufu is cassava stodge, not a bar-girl. In ’87 I had some freshly harvested rice up in Njala. It’s really delicious, like new potatoes. A bit before that time, I think I’m right in saying that Sierra Leone had been self-sufficient in rice. On this visit I saw bags of rice imported from China and India. The locals don’t like this imported rice but often there’s no choice now.
In the provinces, the war more or less destroyed everything. I was discussing this one day with Fatmata, one of the waitresses at the Korean Guesthouse where I was staying. She believed that the main reason for the drop in rice production was that so many people in the provinces had had their hands or feet cut off that there were not enough people able to work on the land.
“One cup rice 400 leones” was a cry I heard often. 400L is about 10p. At home we can buy a cup of very good Basmati rice from Tesco’s for 20p.In relation to average earnings, Sierra Leoneans are now paying twenty times as much for their rice as we are. Large numbers of people are unemployed. I had a drink with a bloke at a street kiosk in Brookfields one evening. Opposite the Youyi building, one of the biggest in Freetown. “Youyi” apparently means “friendship” in Chinese. It was built by the Chinese and used to be the home of UNICEF, for whom I worked on my previous visit. For old times sake I wandered in there one day and passed by stagnant offices and dereliction. It was still being used as one or other government ministry but none of the staff had been paid for months. Looking into one office I saw a fat man asleep at the wheel, in the next a jolly bloke listening to music on the radio and reading the newspaper. Broken air conditioners hang from the walls by their wires. The air was soporific. Sorry, I digress. Back to the beer kiosk. The man kept showing me a battered photocopy of a City and Guilds certificate that he had obtained some years earlier through a postal course. He asked me if I knew the examiner who had signed his certificate. After all, he was English too. “Even with this”, he said, sadly, “there is no work”. “No work, man”, said his friend. Somewhat unhelpfully, I bought them another beer at 1500L a bottle. The Africans who work at my guesthouse earn around 80,00L per month – about £4 a week. I think the majority of people earn less.
Palm oil and petrol are other basic commodities that are shooting up in price. On my last day there, my taxi driver twice went into petrol stations and came away without buying any. Petrol was due to go up the following day from 7600L to 10,000L per gallon. So petrol stations were hoarding it and motorists were trying to panic-buy it and everybody was becoming bad-tempered. This is the free market of Tony and his cronies at the GATT/World Bank/IMF. But people can take just so much. Everybody has a breaking point. The better off may have to stay in their mansions before long, the sunlight glinting off the broken Coca Cola bottles set into the mortar along the tops of their walls. Downing Street has railings.
Angry Young Men
One day I got a ride back from town in a shared taxi. The driver charged me 4000L, while other people who got in and out were charged 500L. At one point I turned round to the two young men in the back and said “He’s charged me 4000 leones”. They looked at me unsympathetically. One said “That is between you and de driver”. I said ok but I still thought it was a bit much. “It shoulda bin ten tousand. You people colonised dis country”. “I didn’t fuckin colonise anybody” and so on. A slightly heated argument during which I pointed out that they had been independent since April 27, 1961 i.e. forty three years ago.. They were reluctantly impressed that I knew the exact date. This was because, a few weeks before, I had turned up at the Sierra Leone embassy in Oxford Street to hand in my visa application form, only to be told by the security man that the place was closed because of Independence Day.
Anyway, we continued arguing. One of them said, in a voice full of hatred, “If I had de power I would kill dis president”. Rather shocked that he should say this after the years of brutality, I said “So you think violence is the answer?”. He was a bit taken aback and agreed that more violence was not really needed. Displaying my ignorance, I said something about democracy. “There is not democracy here”, they both shouted at me. “Corruption, corruption. Corruption, no work, life is rough here.For most people life was better durin de war. Yea, man, better dan now. Better still in de time of Johnny Paul- he in London now”.
John Paul Koroma had led a coup in 1997, after which the war got even worse, Sierra Leone was expelled from the Commonwealth and an oil and arms embargo put in place. Koroma’s group is referred to as a junta in the Rough Guide to West Africa. A rough guide. They were driven out of Freetown with the help of British arms dealers Sandline, who had broken the arms embargo while Tony looked the other way and said a prayer - “Oh God…”.
“Look at dis place” said the young man, with disgust. “It just like village but it is de capital. Look – rubbish everywhere” he continued, pointing to piles of garbage at the roadside being sifted through by the poorest of the poor. I encountered this kind of loathing of their own country from several of the poorer people in Freetown.
The taxi stopped and the angrier of the two men, who had not known each other, got out and strode off, his muscles rippling. The other continued to tell me, slightly more calmly, more about how awful life is there at the moment. I thought about this episode later and assume that they were supporters of the RUF (Revolutionary United Front). Of course they are angry. Of course they are right to refer to the inequity of colonial rule. I even agree that it shoulda bin ten tousand. My attitude towards taxi fares changed after this and I was grateful to the angry young men for telling me so passionately about their lives. That was when I got real on this trip.
Keepers of the Peace
On the Sunday I decided to take a taxi up into the centre of the peninsula, into the hills. My destination was a village called Regent. I had been there 17 years ago, it would be cooler than Freetown and it would be better than sitting around at the guesthouse with other people sitting around watching other people sitting around. The climate down in town is such that just lying on a bed makes you feel tired. There was an awful lot of sitting around going on at the Korean guesthouse. I was able to observe several different styles of sitting and slumping among both Africans and Koreans. I was the only guest at the guesthouse all week. I got better at it but I never really developed my sitting around skills to any great extent. I was sitting aroundly challenged, to be honest. One day I said to Mr. Kang, one of the guesthouse family, “So what are you doing today, Mr. Kang?” He hesitated before replying and then said, with a nice smile, “Today lest”.
We drove up into the hills at the back of the rickety rickety town and passed through the village of Hill Station where the colonial folks used to live in large wooden houses of a unique design, now occupied by lots of local families. A mile or so up the road, I spotted two figures in shorts running up a hill. They could only be British. As we overtook them I admired their closely shaven heads, their stocky muscular bodies, their pointed English noses. Out for a Sunday morning jog before a pint of Stella in the pub. A little further up we came upon the IMATT gulag. A walled fortress of blue-grey concrete complete with gun turrets at the corners and signs saying “Military Area No Parking No Waiting”. Like if you were walking past and stopped to light a lucifer (if you had hands) you would be shot at. Cheers lads, pint of Stella? Any crisps? I think IMATT stands for “International Military and Training Team”. Get your ‘air cut, son.
The British forces are actually very popular in Sierra Leone, since it was they who drove out the rebels in 2000. The scale of the fighting diminished drastically although, as the guidebook puts it “sporadic clashes with rebel forces were finally halted in February 2002”. Most people think that it is because the Brits are there that the peace is holding and most are keen for them to stay. Several people I met said things like “You are our colonial masters – you must stay and stop us fighting each other”. Bai Burreh must be turning in his grave. He was a nationalist hero who organised a large uprising against the colonial power in 1898 and fought a guerrilla war to resist the imposition of the ‘Hut Tax’, a sort of Thatcherite poll tax. There’s a very weird, life-size statue of Bai in the National Museum. It’s badly proportioned and crudely painted so that Bai’s eyes look fairly crazy as he stares madly into the room opposite at a nice photo of the young Queen Elizabeth meeting the mayor of Freetown circa 1960. I believe that the IMATT mandate has now been extended from December 2004 to June 2005.
The United Nations is also helping to keep the peace. In what is said to be the largest and most expensive peacekeeping mission in its history, the UN has something like 18,000 troops there and nearly as many white four-wheel drive Pajeros or Land Cruisers. Peace is great business for motor manufacturers. It’s not a problem that you have to have a war first. The UN troops have their duck-egg blue helmets and when off duty their duck-egg blue baseball caps, a sort of pro-American Freudian slip. In recent years a new process of colonisation has taken place in Sierra Leone, involving baseball caps and hip-hop music.The mission is called UNAMSIL – you’ve got to have an acronym even if it’s ungainly. The United Nations Mission to Sierra Leone. Their headquarters is what used to be the very expensive Mamy Yoko hotel down near the beach in Aberdeen. I had a chat about nothing much with a Ghanaian soldier in his baseball cap over the river at Lunghi to background noises of crickets and very loud bullfrogs. There must be a role for them in hip-hop. Like most of them who are not in the Mamy Yoko, this guy was camping in a khaki tent. Six months tour of duty then back to Accra.
I was supposed to have a meeting with the UNICEF IEC officer on Monday May 31 but it was cancelled because he had decided to attend the opening of the ‘Special Court’ which has now been set up to try to deal with war criminals. It will be a big task and, no doubt, will drag on for years. Charles Taylor, ex-President of Liberia and ally in diamond deals with rebel leader Foday Sankoh, will have to be nabbed. They let him slip through their hands when he was in Ghana ayear or two ago. Johnny Paul Koroma is another and lots more – some still in positions of power in Sierra Leone.
Beyond IMATT we carried on to the village of Regent, through spectacular hilly countryside covered with primary rainforest. War is evidently good for rainforests too. By the time we got to Regent the taxi driver was convinced that I was a complete nutter as I wanted to take snaps of some of the houses there. And not even the new houses – the old ones! He was impatient and in a hurry even though I was paying him a generous hourly rate. A townie. He moped around near his car, kicking his heels, while I wandered slowly and very happily up the laterite path to the white church of St. Charles on top of a small hill above the village that looked like something out of Mark Twain. Just at the moment I got to the top beautiful singing with great harmonising began. It took me completely by surprise. It was a sort of magical moment, religion being magical by nature. “Lamb of God”, they sang, “Take away our sin”. Delightful. Scarey. War. Chaos.
I then wandered back down to the village, noticing a sign which read “Hot Sweet and Jumpy Relaxation Guesthouse Wine Beer and Provisions 100 yards”. I was tempted but it was still a bit early. I soon met a young man who took me to his house to say hello to his dad, who was not Lionel Ritchie. In fact, both of them were called David Pearce. They pointed out a nearby hillside where the rebels had had a base and showed me the bullet holes on the outside walls of their house – theirs was a new house. David the younger went inside and brought out the casing of a large shell that had also hit the house. His dad said, with an air of incredulity, that the rebels had used shells made to bring down aircraft to shoot at houses and people. They showed me one hole where a bullet had gone right through their thick metal kitchen door. I get quite a shock when the cat comes through the catflap unexpectedly!
In Ingoland
Rajiv pointed out to me that local Sierra Leonean organisations are called NGOs as distinct from international organisations which are called INGOs. It was really interesting to meet a number of INGOs and one NGO and to hear about the work they are doing now. Most had programmes going before the war came. Unfortunately nearly all the good work that had been done was spoilt, destroyed or terminated by the war. It was sad to hear people describe how years of work was wiped out and how, at this point in time, they are starting from scratch all over again. As well as community health work, there’s a certain amount being bone on rehabilitation and rebuilding of houses, hospitals and wells and some work on detraumatisation of both war victims and ex-combatants, who were often street kids when they joined the rebels.
The Christain Health Association of Sierra Leone works all over the country on community based health care. They’re also doing some detraumatisation work, training people in counselling skills. We might collaborate with them on using art therapy in this context. Concern Worldwide, an Irish INGO, is doing community health stuff in Magburaka, in the north-central region. Annie Devonport, their health programme officer, told me about the difficulties of working up-country. There has been so much devastation of infrastructure and people.
Ellie Kemp of Oxfam explained how they were working on community development and health in about fifty communities in Kailahun, a south-eastern province on the border with Liberia and not far north of the dreaded diamond mines. The peace there is kept by Pakistani UN troops. I told her how I thought things in Freetown looked pretty bad for people, poverty-wise. And she said “You wait till you go into the provinces”. Like “You ain’t seen nothing yet”.
Peter Beckley of Action Aid has worked in an inspired way with poor communities, both urban and rural, using participatory video to help people look at the issues that they want to look at and plan how to change things. They’re also trying to get an ICT project going in the south.
Dennis Williams of Sightsavers International (formerly The Royal Commonwealth Society for the Blind) was an older-style INGO director. I’ve always been interested in their work, generally, since the days I when I worked on xeropthalmia in the Bombay slums. The idea of using visual aids to help save days I when I worked on xeropthalmia in the Bombay slums. The idea of using visual aids to help save vision is appealing. Soon after I started to describe our work to Dr. Williams, he interjected, stating “Yes, this is Training of Trainers. We would be very interested to be involved. This could be very useful for us.” Training of Trainers is the old, ineffective, top-down way of working which I have spent my life trying to avoid! Earlier, as I had been waiting in the Sightsavers office, I had heard him shouting in a terribly authoritarian way at his colleagues. His administrative secretary, his closest co-worker, was required to knock timidly on his office door and wait until Dr Williams shouted “Come in”. Most of their work seems to be on cataract and glaucoma. They are also concerned with River Blindness, which is an area in which we might usefully collaborate, as long as he doesn’t shout too much.
The Egalitarians
I was keen to hire or borrow a guitar. But no music shops no sign of guitars anywhere. One day I asked my taxi driver to help so we checked out a few places, had a chat about S.E.Rogie and Palm Wine Music, and ended up meeting Eddie Kwalu, owner of a Tele-Centre in Walpole Street. Eddie’s Tele-Centre is a wooden kiosk, painted green, standing on the pavement, the words ‘Tele-Centre’ brushed on the side in the style used in England on signs advertising car boot sales or horse muck – not exactly Gil-sans, in other words. Eddie’s equipment consisted of four different makes of mobile phone, from which members of the public could make, or try to make, local or international calls. It was a bit hit and miss, as one couple trying to phone Dakar discovered when I was in the kiosk one time.
Eddie, a tall guy of about thirty, with a closely shaven head, told me he had a band and would, of course, lend me a guitar. “No problem”, he smiled. He kindly promised to bring it over to the Korean guesthouse that evening – quite a distance from town. Sure enough, that night Eddie arrived with a guitar, having phoned me three times on the journey (he was definitely into mobile phones!). I was really pleased to see it, music therapy, and although it was more or less unplayable, even by the keenest guitarist, it was great to fiddle about on. At the twelfth fret the strings were approx. one centimetre above the fretboard. The strings themselves were so old and dirty that the low E gave out no more than a near-inaudible, incredibly unbright sound. It was an Eko and its weight suggested it was made of extremely dense wood – I think it was mahogany. Just what I needed.
Eddie and I had a couple of beers and chatted and I kept waiting for the conversation to turn to the cost of hiring the guitar for a week. In the end I wanted to resolve it, and avoid later complications, so I asked how much. “No, man”, said Eddie. “You are a musician, you need to have a guitar with you. I am just lending it to you”. He told me about the band, The Egalitarians, and I began to see what a lovely bloke he is. It’s a struggle for everybody in Sierra Leone, including musicians. He said he could borrow another guitar but it only had five strings on it. I asked if you could buy strings in Freetown and he said there is one place but you have to buy a whole set, they don’t sell string singly.
Despite the difficulties, they have managed to record some tracks for an album. Eddie brought me two compilation albums of Sierra Leonean music with one Egalitarians track on each. Not bad at all, although rather spoilt by the inability of the studio to record live guitar – so it’s all done on a keyboard which gives an artificial sound so much less attractive than acoustic guitar and bass. I said I would design the cover for their forthcoming CD, if they wanted, so a couple of nights later Eddie brought round the two other main band members, Warren and Latimus, for a photo-shoot outside the guesthouse. When I got my little camera out, they immediately struck various poses and adopted slightly mean expressions, which was a bit difficult as they are so nice. The photos have come out quite well and hopefully we’ll get a reasonable cover out of it.
After the photo session we all sat on a bench outside the guesthouse under a bush. While I got eaten by mosquitoes, The Egalitarians performed a short acoustic set for me. It was great, tuneful voices harmonising together with guitar and bass. One of the songs reminded me very much of Desmond Dekker. We went for a beer afterwards and it turned out that Latimus is the driver for a German psychotherapist, Marguerite, who I had met the day before at CHASL. Small world, music therapy, heavy Eko…Eko…
Money in Football
A number of times in the last few years I’ve overheard myself speaking like a right old fart.”There’s too much money in football these days. It’s ruined the game”. That sort of thing. Well, I mean.
Down the street from the guesthouse was one of those large, once-grand concrete mansions with balconies and rough-cast balustrades and that black stuff running down them that give them an interesting texture and must be some sort of algal or fungal bloom. (Incidentally, I’ve got a fungal bloom on my neck from Freetown’s climate). I’ve washed that stuff off the walls of our house using diluted Domestos. Around that big house a wall, of course, similarly run-down. Some not very well off people and kids wandering around the ‘garden’. A scene of moderate dereliction with, incongruously, a large satellite dish on one of the balconies visible through the frayed banana trees and ragged palms.
Leaning against the gatepost, a small blackboard with words in white chalk “England vs. Japan k.o. 6.30. 500L”. It’s a place where they show football matches on telly to interested young blokes who can afford the 12p entrance fee. I didn’t go to the England match but later in the week thought I’d pop down to check out France vs. Turkey. (These were friendlies in advance of Euro 2004).
The building in which the matches are shown is at the bottom of the garden. It has a timber framework, the roof and door are made from brand new silvery corrugated iron and the walls from large sheets of ‘tarpaulin’, complete with eyelets, with the UN logo and the letters UNHCR printed on it in duck-egg blue. There’s a place on the way to Aberdeen called ‘Amputee Camp’ where there’s a market. Many of the stalls there have piles of UNHCR tarpaulins for sale.
I never saw France vs. Turkey as, in spite of the impressive satellite dish, the technology, as is its wont, failed and frustrated everybody. Instead I had a long conversation with two fellow football fans. They were teachers and we discussed the vexed question of how on earth Sierra Leone will ever get on its feet and how long this might take. Our entrance fee was refunded.
Bobson
Getting around to different INGO offices in Freetown, I spent a lot of time in taxis, some shared, some not. The roads are in pretty bad shape and were, to me, surprisingly full. It would often take me half an hour to get down Wilkinson Road to the Congo Cross roundabout, a distance of a mile or so. At Congo Cross there’s a garage with hand-painted hoardings saying things like “Havrix – lubrication for the older car” and “Change your oil not your car”. “The older car” can be roughly translated from advertisingese to “a car that is a falling apart beaten up wreck kept running by desperately poor people through amazing mechanical ingenuity against all the odds”. Driving around I saw a minibus, absolutely stuffed full of people, driving along with a completely flat front tyre. I also saw a ‘pickin’ or child cross the busy road at Congo Cross and very nearly get mown down by a minibus. Poor little thing was really scared and just made it to the other side, straight into the path of an adult who immediately started shouting at her and smacking her for nearly causing an accident. This seemed to symbolise something about Sierra Leone.
My most regular taxi driver was a man called Bobson – no relation – who lived near the guesthouse. He had a beard under his chin and on his neck but not on his face. I noticed that this was a style for some men there – the lazy shavers? He drove a hard bargain and was very surly most of the time. I don’t really know why I kept hiring him but he did soften somewhat by the end of the trip (not much actually). There was a low patch on Wilkinson Road that collected water (this was the start of the rainy season and it absolutely bucketed down several times when I was there), making this stretch even worse than the rest of the road. One day as we drove along there, I noticed that there were workmen mending the road, filling in potholes with a rough mix of sand and ballast that they shovelled out of old wheelbarrows into the holes. I said, rather chirpily, to Bobson “Ah, at last they’re mending the road”. He carried on looking straight ahead and said “No, dey are makin it worse”. On closer inspection, I could see what he meant. They were putting the wet mortar/gravel mix more or less straight into puddles and in the dry areas had not flattened things very well. Subsequently, it was the bumpiest stretch of road.
“Na look dere dese one”, Bobson said one day, pointing at a blue-uniformed policeman at the roadside.”You mek one small small mistek dey no giya chance. Tek ya straight to de polis station – ya ha to gi dem money”.
I got to quite like Bobson – we got close at times, especially when he leant across me to close the passenger window by turning a pair of pliers on the stump where the winding handle had been. He gave me a hard time, though, on what I thought was to be my last night. I had booked him to take me to the hovercraft on my journey back home. We agreed on 10,000L. When we got there I discovered, to my slight consternation, that the flight was delayed by at least a day. So he drove me back to the guesthouse, where I was met by a family of surprised Koreans to whom I had bade farewell less than an hour earlier. I paid Bobson the 10,000L whereupon he said “What about the return journey”, meaning that our agreement was that he would take me to the hovercraft for 10,000L but we had said nothing about him bringing me back! I felt that, under the circumstances, this was a trifle unreasonable and said, raising my voice a little, “I didn’t know I was coming back”. Add to this the fact that, on other occasions, I had hired him by the hour at the rate of 9000L per hour and we had, on this occasion, taken less than an hour, I said I thought he was being unfair. He said he could see my point but it was not the agreement we had made. Mr. Kang joined in on my side and Bobson reluctantly accepted the 10,000L.
On my last trip in his taxi, I got a good photo of him standing next to a great piece of graffiti that I had been wanting to photograph. There he stands next to a low concrete wall on which is written, in big letters, “Deathrow Lovers”, a weird concept and a wonderful name for a band. What kind of music they’d play I’m not sure. Grateful Dead covers?
One-hour business
I was walking along Lumley beach one day, minding my own business, recalling a swim I had had there in 1987 when I had been body-surfing and turned over by a wave and dragged along the sea floor. It was like having a sheet of coarse sandpaper rubbed quite hard down my back. I met another man walking and struck up a conversation. His name was James. He told me he was an artist. We went for a beer at one of the beach bars whose only other customers were a group of pink Russian blokes in swimming trunks. I showed James some of my graphics, which I happened to have with me, and he explained that he was a woodcarver and had a stall not far from the Mamy Yoko. He had grown up right there in Aberdeen.
Along came a young woman wearing a floppy hat with what I think is calle a ‘burberry’ design on it. Also on her head was an enormous tray of fruit. Her name was Anna, she was a friend of James, having also grown up in Aberdeen village. She was most insistent that I buy something so I gave her 1000L for four bananas. We somehow got onto the subject of condoms and she said she would give me Creole lessons if I wanted. I declined the offer and James helped her put the tray of fruit back on her head and she carried on down the beach. A terrible shame what such poverty can do.
Another day I was down by the waterfront when, on entering the Big Market, a woman shook a polythene bag full of woodchips at me, saying “jiggy-jig”. She told me that the contents enabled you to make love for a long time, traditional medicine’s answer to Viagra. I said “No thanks, I haven’t got a girlfriend”. “You can have me”, she replied. Her fellow saleswoman confirmed it. “Yes, you can have her. She is girlfriend”.
Now and again, the room next to mine at the guesthouse was used by a large lady who had lots of curves and a big West African bum. Her trade was an old one. The Koreans called it “one-hour business”. The only time it really disturbed me was in the middle of the night when I began to hear the unmistakable sounds of jiggy-jig. Forunately, almost as soon as it got underway a huge storm blew up. Very high winds and lashing rain that, to my relief, more or less drowned out the noise of my neighbours’ exertions. I slept the sleep of the righteous.
God Is God
The guidebook says that there are about eighty churches and two dozen mosques in Freetown. The oldest place of worship is St. John’s Maroon Church. The Maroons were five hundred or so Asante slaves who escaped their slavery and set up an ‘independent state’ in the mountains of Jamaica. They arrived via Nova Scotia in Freetown in the early 1800s and the little white church in the centre of town was built around 1820.
One day I visited the Maroon Church, pushing open the stiff churchyard gate which felt as if few people had passed through it in recent times. I went into the church – nice and light and full of pews. Four young children, ranging in age from about 3-8 years old, were lying on and underneath the pews, naked except for underpants. On seeing me they jumped up looking half frightened half amazed. After a little while they came over to me, huge eyes wide open like Bai Burreh’s statue, and held my hand and felt my arm. The oldest said “White man”. I said “Yes, white man”. Then they got happily excited and started to laugh and cry out. Their mother appeared at the back of the church. We introduced ourselves. She told me her name was Christianna (honest) and that her childrens’ father had been killed in the war. We chatted for a few minutes while I nosed around a bit. She invited me to the Whit Monday service. Not being a Methodist, I didn’t think I would attend. I gave her 500L for the kids and wandered off into the busy Siaka Stevens Street.
There are no mosques in the old commercial centre of Freetown, although there are sixteen or so churches. Plenty of mosques around the town, though, of various shapes, colours and sizes. On Wilkinson Road, there’s a Muslim Institute. On the long white wall outside it, painted in green letters, it says “The prophet Mohammed (praise his name) wrote that ‘Seeking Knowledge Is Compulsory To Every Muslim’”. The religion of many of the taxi drivers I met during my stay.
Minibuses advertise their owners’ religious convictions by the slogans painted on them. “God Is Great”, “God Is Good”. I kept expecting the ultimate tautological nonsense “God Is God”. The first morning I was there I saw, in quick succession, “Allah Is Supreme” and “Christ Is Lord”. Others read “God Bless Islam”, “To Allah Be The Glory”, “Destiny” as well as secular ones that, personally, I preferred – “Don’t Give Up”, “Thinking Ahead”, “Mother Blessing”.
I met a lady at the airport on the way back by the name of Haja Madina. It happened to be her 60th birthday that day. During an eight hour overnight wait in the airport canteen, she told me that the majority of people, 65%, in Sierra Leone are Muslim. She said that this is not widely known because most of them are “illiterate” and don’t have a voice to proclaim their faith (or something similarly garbled – I didn’t quite follow it). She asked what had been my business in Sierra Leone and,
after I had told her, she said, as if quoting the prophet Mohammed, praise his underpants, “There is no point teaching illiterate person about health – it is just like sending a blind man to the mirror”. It was nice to hear this sort of wisdom but I’m afraid that, having spent a large part of my life trying to help non-literate people in various countries learn about health through pictotial media, I was unable to agree with Haja Madina on this point, even though it was her 60th birthday. Apparently, her daughter works for DFID and visited Sierra Leone not long ago to check out nineteen health centres that DFID are building. Her mum says she wears a ‘hijab’ to work. I’m planning to try to contact her to say salaamu alekum.
Check-in Cashpoint
Sierra National Airlines does not, sadly, own any aeroplanes. On the way over, we flew in a crate owned by Slovakian airlines. The pilsner beer was tasty but the air hostesses were rather stern.
My flight home was delayed by a day and a half because the Slovakian plane had conked out at Gatwick. SNA eventually managed to strike a deal with a French outfit and sent an airbus to bring us home. The airport was littered with photocopied letters of apology from SNA. I quote:
“We at Sierra National Airlines wish to express our sincere regrets for the delay of our flight LJ 053 of 1st June 2004. As you are aware, this was due to a technical problem relating to the aircraft’s Auxiliary Power Unit (APU) which was beyond our control. As we believe you are very important to us, and we cannot tolerate any further delay or further inconveniences to our customers, we have leased a replacement aircraft from France, at a very high cost to our own company, to operate our flight whilst the technical problems on our own aircraft are being rectified. We thank you for exercising patience and understanding through the period of the delay and the stress this has brought”.
Later it says “Contrary to rumours you may have heard, SNA has concluded a long term lease for a high quality aircraft to support all of our scheduled flight services.”
There were far more of these letters, piles of them, than passengers on the packed flight.
The check-in procedure lasted from 11 pm to 1am the next morning. It was nice and warm in the terminal building, designed by some architectural masochist to induce even more perspiration than usual. To check in you had to go through five distinct stages. A middle-aged Sierra Leonean lady, who lives in High Barnet, turned round to me and said “It gives them five chances to take money from you”. One of several dodgy looking passport checkers scrutinised the passport of this woman’s niece and conclude, theatrically, that the photo did not look like the girl. She was led off into an office. I didn’t see her again but assume she eventually got out by paying an exit fee. Pretty weird at one o’clock in the morning to have someone tell you that a photograph of you is not actually you after all. Too late for philosophy – just give us the cash.
At the other end back knackered in Gatwick our exit from the plane was painfully slow. Immigration officials were checking documents zealously at the end of the tunnel from the plane to the terminal. In front of me a man showed the young female immigration person a Liberian ID card. “You don’t seriously expect me to accept this do you?” she scoffed in her East Croydon accent. The downtrodden Liberian feigned incomprehension. “You must be joking’ continued Miss Croydon. Turning to one of her terminally serious looking male colleagues, she held out the ID card and said in a long suffering sarcastic way “’Ere, “av a look at this”. I don’t suppose she was too well up on the recent history of Liberia or even cared that all the poor sods still in the tunnel had been up all night before boarding the plane for a seven hour flight.
So, for a while I have seen the last of signs that say “Camp Womens Training Centre”, “Fatty Dums Enterprises”, “My Pretty Woman Boutique”, “Sweet Looks Hairdressing Salon” and “We Sell Cool Water Here”. No more needing three shirts a day, nobody asking me at breakfast time “Tea? Copy?” No more laughing, singing brightly coloured people in the street saying “Good evening-O” or “How de self?” No more thoughts of home from a long way away. For a while.
Written (mostly) June 2004
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