Chasing the Devil

by Tim Butcher

  During the war a military hospital and barracks had been built above the gun emplacement, further up the flank of Mount Aureol, a site chosen deliberately to lift convalescent patients above the ill humours of the city centre. It commanded wonderful views over the estuary and the peninsula, and when the war eventually ended the old wards were converted into halls of residence for Fourah Bay College’s new campus. Up until the civil war began in 1991 the college had done well, gaining university status after forming a link with Durham University in Britain. Leo Blair, whose son Tony was to become British prime minister, worked as an academic at Durham and he came out to Freetown to serve as an exam invigilator several times in the 1960s.

  I had been introduced to Prof. Jones during my reporting trips to Sierra Leone, learning to value his erudite and authoritative perspective. When I arrived at his home on a cloudless February morning in 2009, the eighty-four-year-old retired academic spoke with the same warm chuckle I remembered and he began by reminiscing about arriving with the first intake to use the new campus in the abandoned military base.

  ‘I can remember how we slept in the old hospital wards before they were converted. There was military equipment everywhere and when they were preparing to throw away some of the old machinery from the barracks kitchens I acquired it and we have used it ever since in our garden.’

  We were sitting on his lawn and he motioned his hand vaguely towards the herbaceous borders. Peering closely I could see what he was referring to. Large cauldrons on cast-iron pedestals that were once used to prepare meals for legions of British servicemen had been rust-proofed and painted before being decoratively filled with flowering plants.

  The professor’s house was in the village of Leicester, one of the first communities set up for ‘recaptives’, high up on Mount Aureol, a mile or so above the university. If his village had strong historical links, his own bloodline read like the genome of Sierra Leone’s freed-slave history. His father’s family were ‘recaptives’ from Nigeria and his mother’s birth certificate described her as a ‘Maroon, Liberated African’. Born in 1925, he had been brought up during Freetown’s golden age when, still under British colonial rule, it was establishing itself as a city many compared to Athens.

  ‘I was born in a nursing home down on Sackville Street at a time when it was normal for all people in Freetown, black and white, to have access to maternity care. Of course it was not all easy back then. My mother had ten children but only four of us survived to adulthood,’ Prof. Jones explained as we sat in the shade of a tree. His wife of fifty-six years, Marjorie, clucked round him constantly, making sure he was not in the direct sunshine and that our water glasses were full. He continued in the declamatory style of someone well used to lecturing.

  ‘I went to a grammar school where I was taught by African teachers. And I married Marjorie, whose father was a trained barrister from Sierra Leone who had been recruited to work in another West African country, Gambia. Back then Freetown was the source of professionals who were the pick of the region, taking their skills and expertise from country to country. I studied at Oxford and when I came back to Freetown in 1953 I went to Fourah Bay to teach English literature and never really left. I eventually became Principal in 1974 and served until retirement in 1985.’

  I asked about the war. The breezy, hilltop location of Leicester overlooking Freetown appeared wonderful in peacetime but it must have been dangerously exposed when the rebels advanced on the city.

  ‘We had it all here. There were child soldiers on the road outside, dragging through the dirt guns that were bigger than they were. And at one time we had Nigerian peacekeepers firing from one side and rebels firing from the other. Our neighbour’s house was hit in the crossfire but we escaped unscathed. During all the years of war we only ever left for two weeks when the army, the Sierra Leone army that is, told us to move a mile or so down the hill for our own safety. When we got back some of our property had been stolen and I am pretty sure it was the army that did it.’

  There was an air of optimism about Prof. Jones that you rarely find in Freetown and I found it uplifting. Outside the walls of his compound, the road was as pitted and the village as decrepit as many of Freetown’s downtown shanties but inside his house was no different from a much-loved home in British suburbia, albeit with slightly more exotic plant life in the garden. The lawn was trimmed, the borders beautifully arranged and the veranda laid out for maximum enjoyment of a stunning Atlantic panorama.

  ‘The war was a nightmare, an awful period and it made me feel we had failed as a nation, but we had such strength before that I know we will rise again. We have a history that goes back two hundred years so the nightmare period of war lasting ten years or so is not the norm, and I feel certain we will come good again. The people of Sierra Leone were all over West Africa once as teachers, lawyers and civil servants. They were in demand and they can be in demand again. Yes, there is corruption here and we see it often today but tell me a country where there is not corruption. I know what Sierra Leone has been and I have faith it can be the same again.’

  Marjorie was not in complete agreement.

  ‘Come on, darling. When did we last have power? It’s been three years now, I think, and I cannot remember when we last had water. And both of our children went to live overseas.’

  I left them squabbling as warmly as newly-weds. As I walked through their house I had a familiar feeling, as if I were back in the home my grandparents retired to in Kent in the 1970s. The walls were crowded with ethnic pictures and hangings – African for the Joneses, Indian for my mother’s parents – and no surface was free of prized ornaments and knick-knacks. Just as with my grandparents, the whole place felt a tiny bit time-worn as, with age, they struggled to keep on top of the dusting and the maintenance.

  In the office a picture on the wall caught my eye. It was a college photograph from Corpus Christi, Oxford, foxed in places by tropical damp and a little washed out in others by sunshine. The year was 1951 and at first glance the students looked very much alike in their stolid tweed jackets and collared shirts. Row after row of faces made lean by rationing looked out from under meticulous partings, many wearing horn-rimmed spectacles, a few racy individuals daring to sport a cravat. And among the ranks of pimply Adam’s apples my eye was drawn to the chubby face of a young Eldred Jones.

  ‘I was lucky to get one of the first scholarships to Oxford from Sierra Leone, studying English literature as an undergraduate for three years at Corpus from Michaelmas 1950. I had a wonderful time enjoying student life to the full. I acted in the university dramatic society – acting was one of my great loves. And then there was the cricket, another passion from my childhood here in Freetown. I loved cricket so much that when I left school I took a year out and chose a job with the government printing service because it started early but finished early giving me more time for cricket practice.’

  I had studied at Oxford myself in the 1980s and, like generations of its students before and since, had felt like I had briefly taken ownership of the place. I had close friends at Corpus and, as a journeyman cricketer, spent many long afternoons playing at the college ground, scene of a turning point in Eldred Jones’s life.

  ‘I wore glasses at the time but for some reason I had brought the wrong pair that day. We rode our bikes down to the ground as normal. You know how you have to cross the railway to get to the ground, so we parked our bikes on the gravel and crossed the railway on the footbridge.’

  I smiled at the thought of the Venn diagrams of our very different lives intersecting. Many times I had used the same footbridge as Eldred Jones to play the same game on the same pitch.

  ‘My love was batting and that day I went for a pull shot. I am not sure if it was because I could not see properly because of the glasses but I got a top edge and the ball shattered the socket of my right eye. That was the start of my vision problems.’

  His sight got steadily worse over the next three decades and by 1986 he was completely bli
nd. I left his house with its academic theses on Shakespeare, Oxford memorabilia and cherished knick-knacks, and went outside, back into the post-war Freetown of potholed roads and decrepit slums. Perhaps it was a blessing Professor Jones could not see what had become of what had once been dreamed of as the Province of Freedom.

  Later, on close reading of my first edition of Journey Without Maps, I found Graham Greene had actually met Prof. Jones’s father during the stopover in Freetown in January 1935. The reference had been excised in later editions by Graham Greene, presumably to save space, and Prof. Jones, who had spent his career teaching English literature, had never seen an original edition so did not know of his father’s encounter with one of the most illustrious English authors of the twentieth century. His father had served as a customs inspector at Freetown harbour, the most senior rank then attainable by a native employee under British colonial rules, and had spent time with Graham Greene clearing the disembarkation of the expedition’s equipment. In the original text Graham Greene writes glowingly about Mr Jones, the customs inspector, describing him as one of the few ‘perfectly natural Africans whom I met in Sierra Leone’. It was a feeling I echoed one generation later.

  CHAPTER 3

  Looking for Bruno

  Graham and Barbara Greene in Liverpool embarking for Africa, photographed for the News Chronicle, January 1935

  It took over a week in Freetown to make ready for the trip. David, my travelling companion, was staying in a house his father had had built up in the hills and was spending his days breaking in new boots on training hikes through the jungle that still covers much of Freetown peninsula. We met almost every day to plan all the obvious things: what gear to take and what to discard, what we would do about clean drinking water and food, how we would get ourselves out of trouble. And we studied our maps to settle, as far as was possible, on the route the Greenes had taken. Most importantly of all, the meetings allowed us to start to get to know each other.

  David is tall and thin, with the calm confidence that is common in Englishmen who, like him, have been to private school and Oxford University. At twenty-four, he was just over half my age but he appeared older than his years. His father had been based in Freetown on and off since 2000, so David had come here several times for holidays, giving him a rather different perspective from the one I had gained during my visits as a war correspondent. He was fully up to date on the city’s better beach bars, newest night clubs and most competitive money-changers. When I told him how, during my years as a journalist in the Middle East, I had learned to love smoking water pipes, or narguileh, he immediately took me to a restaurant where the Lebanese owner claimed to offer the best narguileh in West Africa. As we sat down to smoke, David was greeted like a lost son by the manager and all the waitresses seemed to know him by name.

  In recent years Sierra Leone has sought to reclaim its status as a tourist destination, placing great emphasis on a coastline so beautiful it once drew thousands of European visitors each year. Back in the 1970s its perfectly palm-fringed beaches were chosen as the location of a famous television advertisement for Bounty, a coconut-flavoured chocolate bar, under a slogan that promised ‘The Taste of Paradise’. And since the war ended in 2002 early efforts have been made to lure tourists back, with the first guidebook dedicated solely to Sierra Leone being commissioned, and a few modest beach resorts springing up close to Freetown. But mainstream tourism in Sierra Leone is yet to take off and foreign visitors tended, like David, to be young, energetic and with some sort of connection to the country.

  Surrounded by apple-scented narguileh smoke, David told me more of himself, about his years as a scholar at Sherborne, an upmarket private school in Britain, and how during the holidays he, his brother and mother would travel out to whichever exotic location his father’s military career had taken him to. After school he studied theology for three years at Oxford, specialising in Islamic studies and finishing his degree in 2007 before starting a series of jobs in London.

  ‘I chose theology because I was curious about faith and its impact on human history. It was not a vocational choice as I am not the most religious person, but trying to understand a little about Islam seemed to me a pretty important thing in the post-9/11 age. My problem is that I don’t yet know what I want to do long term. I have been working in finance in London for the past few months and just about the only thing I know for certain is that I do not want to be doing that for the rest of my life.’

  From the outset David displayed an admirable tact, something that immediately put my mind at rest. I can be competitive to a fault and a journey with someone who might challenge my ego-driven Alpha Male status could be a problem.

  ‘I have been to Sierra Leone loads of times but never really gone much beyond Freetown. And I’ve never really done this sort of overland journey in Africa before, so if it’s OK with you, I will simply fit in with whatever you arrange,’ he said.

  I found it touching to spot our generational differences. When it came to finances he explained he carried a small amount of cash but had printed out a list of money transfer offices in the provinces of Liberia where he planned to receive top-ups. His faith in virtual information was not one I shared. I knew the towns on the list barely existed let alone had functioning cash transfer offices. The internet has a way of homogenising the world, giving you results for online searches that look complete enough on screen but without accurate context. In many parts of the world such processing might work but not in remote West Africa. I assured David that between us we would be carrying enough dollars in cash to cover all our costs.

  I could tell he was keen to get going but I urged patience. Friends of friends, who months earlier had made vague promises to provide guides, needed chasing and before we started out I wanted to make sure I had up-to-date names and details for contacts in the more remote areas. A major concern was that our journey involved three border crossings: from Sierra Leone into Liberia, from Liberia into Guinea and back into Liberia again. I spent days meeting local drivers, diplomats and aid workers asking mostly about the conditions around our first frontier crossing, but while I could find plenty of people who knew the area in general, nobody had crossed the border exactly where we needed to.

  Sierra Leone has the roughly circular shape of a clockface and we needed to go from coastal Freetown, at nine o’clock, over to the far eastern edge, at three o’clock, a road journey of roughly 250 miles. In that area, the official border crossing to Liberia was near the remote Sierra Leonean settlement of Koindu, where a narrow dirt road provided, in the dry season at least, a functioning if modest artery for cross-border traffic, mostly aid convoys. But we wanted to follow the Greenes’ route via the tiny and even more remote border village of Dawa, about 15 miles south of Koindu. During the war it had seen more than its fair share of action as it had been one of the busiest transit points for rebels entering Sierra Leone from Liberia, but in 2009 I could barely find a soul who had ever heard of Dawa and nobody could tell me if its nearby border crossing was open.

  I was also closely watching developments in Guinea, still in flux after the coup prompted by the death on 22 December 2008 of the long-serving president, Lansana Conté. Many had assumed the presidency would pass to his son, Ousmane, a thuggish army officer notorious for ordering soldiers to open fire on opponents of his father’s regime and for close links to Colombian drug smugglers using Guinea as a transit point for cocaine shipments to Europe. But Ousmane was outwitted by a cabal of junior officers who staged a coup and had him arrested. They would later parade him on national television confessing to playing a central mobster-like role in cocaine smuggling. The transfer of power to the soldiers had been bloodless but Guinea remained volatile and I was anxious to know what impact the coup might have on the remote part of the country we needed to transit.

  A new and even more unexpected potential problem for our journey had also emerged: a plague of insects. Described by UN experts as ‘army worms’, they were in fact not worms b
ut caterpillars, tiny, voracious little brutes reported to have appeared by the million in Lofa County, the northern district of Liberia we would soon be heading through. What made them particularly worrying for me was that medical specialists warned their faeces made streams, rivers and other water sources highly dangerous for humans. The Liberian government was taking the insect invasion so seriously it had announced a State of Emergency on 26 January 2009, just two days before David and I flew to Freetown. As soon as I heard the news, I headed to a pharmacy and sought advice but the owner, another member of the Lebanese business community, had never heard of army worms. I ended up simply buying yet more water purification tablets.

  The days spent in the city served another very useful purpose in that they allowed me to acclimatise to West Africa, resetting my body to a mode of near continuous sweating and my mind to one of conserving effort. A power cut during my first night meant the fan in my room stopped working and within minutes I had wrestled myself awake in a fretful bundle of bedclothes. Discarding the sheets, I tried to starfish myself to sleep, spreading my limbs as far apart as they would go, but it did not work. Every contact point between skin and mattress was uncomfortably clammy and I lay awake fretting how I would cope up-line, where the West African hinterland enjoys none of the coastal cool of Freetown.

  Slowly I began to recalibrate. Exploring town on foot I toned down my normal purposeful gait to more of a lope with longer, slower strides, as if walking through imaginary glue. And I learned to ignore the sweat drenching my shirt and to pause in every available puddle of shade. A guzzle from a water bottle would soon wash out of me so I took to nursing water, drinking more often but in tiny sips.