by Tim Butcher
In spite of its squalor, Freetown offers up snatched moments of raw beauty. I would wake most mornings at dawn and take a cup of tea onto my balcony where a breeze was strong enough to move the mosquitoes on. Through light softened by smoke from nearby cooking fires and rubbish pyres, I would watch the mist lift over the coves separating Murraytown from the city centre. I was there during Harmattan, the season named after the dusty dry wind that blows outward from the void of the Sahara, making the leaves of cotton trees fall so their spreading branches look like fingers stretched out on terrified hands. One morning I watched a banana boat creep across an otherwise motionless bay raising an arrowhead of ripple and thought how little had changed since the days when rum-swilling pirates rowed the same inlet two hundred and fifty years before. I was rarely alone for my morning vigil. A vulture with feathery shoulders as bulky as a padded-up gridiron player would often watch me from its roost high on a palm tree. Its hooked beak would be silhouetted against the morning sky as its scaly neck cranked its head suspiciously from side to side, never quite taking its eye off me. When Graham Greene passed through Freetown in January 1935 he described counting seven vultures at one time from his downtown hotel window.
The Greenes hired three ‘boys’ in Freetown for the trip – one cook and a servant each – so I went in search of their descendants, asking an old journalist friend, Kelvin Lewis, to publish an appeal in the Awoko newspaper he edited. One morning I went to its offices in one of the frayed tower blocks off Siaka Stevens Street in the centre of town, to see if he had made any progress. Like newspaper offices the world over it was a muddle of old and new, with untidy piles of back copies on sub-editors’ desks precariously frozen in mid-slither, under a web of power cables giving life to blinking internet modems, laptops and mobile phones.
‘I am sorry but we have had no response to the request. I guess all of the relatives of Mr Greene’s people are long gone.’ Kelvin was shaking his head but I was distracted by the front-page picture of that day’s edition. It showed a motionless lorry, axle-deep in muddy ruts, next to a story about how the road to Kailahun, the main town in the far east of Sierra Leone, was a national disgrace and how the government had pledged millions of pounds for its repair. Driving to Kailahun was the first part of the trip I was about to undertake.
During our ten-day stopover in Freetown I took several walks along Lumley Beach, the long stretch of sand on the westernmost edge of Freetown, going over the final details of the journey in my mind. It was along this beach in 2000 that I jogged with Phil Ashby, a British major from the Royal Marines who had just pulled off an amazing escape from RUF rebels. While serving as a UN military observer his upcountry compound had been surrounded by hostile gunmen and, fearing that rescue was unlikely, Maj. Ashby had slipped over the perimeter wall under cover of darkness with three other observers to escape on foot, a feat that earned him the Queen’s Gallantry Medal. I met him after he made it safely back to Freetown but the thing that stuck in my mind were his comments about how enervating the climate and terrain were upcountry, and how, after one day, his march had left him disorientated with exhaustion. The poor man had become so tired that when he collapsed asleep in the bush he accidentally nudged the power switch on his satellite phone, running down the battery. And after returning home to Britain he lost the use of his legs, paralysed when his spinal cord was infected by a mystery virus probably picked up during his footslog through the jungle.
One of my beach walks took me to Lumley’s golf course where I was interested to see what had changed since my last visit during the war. Back then, with rebels threatening the city, I had written a piece for the Telegraph about the bullet-holes in the roof of the empty clubhouse, the marauding monkeys waiting to pinch balls on the eighth fairway and the lack of an eighteenth – laid out between tidal mudflats and thick bush, the course only had space for seventeen holes. All this gave it a slightly fantastic, surreal air, as if it were a setting used in Julian Barnes’s book A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, where a heavenly golf course turns into hell as a golf lover practises so much over eternity he can boringly hit a hole-in-one every time.
On this visit the clubhouse terrace was packed, the car park full. There were jeeps with diplomatic plates and others with the initials of aid groups stencilled on the side. In the shade of a tree I got talking to one of the club pros and he told me that the eighteenth hole was still missing and the monkeys still a menace. But when I tried to enter the clubhouse to check on the bullet-holes he barred my way and said: ‘Members only, sir, members only.’
For Freetown’s moneyed elite, such as senior government officials, foreign aid workers and well-connected businessmen, the city can be more than comfortable. Restaurants offer stunning seafood – I saw shellfish offered up as prawns that elsewhere round the world would be described as lobsters – and on the weekends the display of powerboats and jet skis along some of the beaches would not shame Saint-Tropez. A sushi restaurant had opened recently and every so often on the clogged roads of Freetown I would see high-end, luxury vehicles such as Hummers. For the vast bulk of the population, of course, this world is utterly unreachable and people are forced to struggle along in desperate poverty with little realistic hope of development – the stone being rolled along the riverbed, to borrow the analogy of my NGO friend John.
But I find there is also something unremittingly seedy about Freetown that reaches beyond the poverty and the squalor, the disease and the decay. Corruption seems to corrode all levels of life, from the boardrooms of the few functioning businesses in the city where backhanders have to be paid for contracts, to taxi customers on roads leading into the city where police, supposedly employed to fight corruption, set up illegal checkpoints demanding tolls.
The government of Sierra Leone goes through the motions of fighting corruption. Posters greet visitors at Lungi airport warning against illegal use of foreign currency and billboards stand next to some main roads with public service announcements urging all patriotic Sierra Leoneans to play their part in the fight against corruption. Indeed the Anglican cathedral that Graham Greene describes as such a landmark in 1935 Freetown is today overshadowed by a large office block snug next door that houses the country’s Anti-Corruption Commission.
But the truth is corruption has become a way of life in a state as failed as Sierra Leone. Schools inflate the number of teachers on their staff roll to con the government into paying additional salaries that can then be stolen. Spot checks have to be carried out by government inspectors who arrive unannounced at schools to count how many teachers are actually on duty. A major post-war project to rehabilitate a rich iron ore mine at Lunsar involved the laying of a new railway track that would carry the ore to the coast. But no sooner had the new track and cabling been laid than it was stolen, taken to Freetown and loaded into containers for shipment overseas as scrap. The scale of the theft was so large it needed officials at the docks to be in on the scam. And when the plane carrying cocaine was seized at Lungi in 2008, the Minister of Transportation and Aviation lost his job on suspicion of involvement in the smuggling operation.
One of the most heartbreaking stories I heard came from a foreign professional whose company had tendered for a post-war government contract in Sierra Leone, a multi-million-dollar scheme to help in the humanitarian sector. When he told me what happened I thought about the billboards that picture senior government officials earnestly telling the poor and the needy of Sierra Leone to help in the fight against corruption.
When the final round of the tendering process came, each competitor was invited one-by-one into a boardroom in one of the tattered tower blocks in the centre of Freetown within walking distance of the Anti-Corruption Commission. There they faced a panel of senior government figures who asked them one final question before deciding the contract: ‘How much are you going to give us in cash to be given the deal?’ The most generous bribe won.
Similar stories were legion, with aid money being diverted and govern
ment spending not going where it should, jeopardising any hope of meaningful post-war economic development. In a country like Sierra Leone corruption feels like sand in an engine. No individual grain is going to do much harm but taken together over a long time the grains grind the engine to a halt.
Down on Lumley Beach the systemic poverty of Freetown was evident in the large number of prostitutes, pimps, pickpockets and chancers. During one of my walks there I recognised a man who had been on my flight from London. We had struck up a conversation at Heathrow airport and I remembered his rather vague account of why he was coming to Sierra Leone. Something about setting up a trading company, I had written in my notes. He was white and on the elderly side of middle-age with hair the colour of aubergine from clumsy self-dyeing. I had the setting sun behind me so he could not see me as I watched him lying on the edge of the beach up against a grassy bank, leering inappropriately at a Sierra Leonean girl in her late teens, plucking at the strap of her bikini top. It was a scene Graham Greene, the diviner of all things seedy, might have enjoyed.
If there is one central characteristic to Greeneland, the landscape created by Graham Greene through his writing, it is seediness and when the author reached Sierra Leone he found plenty of material to work with. Journey Without Maps was his first published work of non-fiction, but it reveals an interest in seediness as keen as in any of his novels. He describes the physical and moral ‘shabbiness’ of colonial Freetown, a city infested by vultures with ‘horrible tiny undeveloped heads’ and framed by forested slopes of mountains that were ‘a dull uninteresting green’. He mocks the twee etiquette of colonialism which was racist without being brave enough to admit it, preventing whites from going to the only cinema in town as it was frequented by blacks, and from associating publicly with members of the Lebanese business community. He writes that Freetown in 1935 had only two venues for a white man to ‘do a pub crawl’: the bar of the Grand Hotel, where the Greenes stayed for their four nights in Freetown, and the City Hotel. Both venues, he writes disparagingly, were full of whites pathetically trying to recreate England in Africa.
It was Graham Greene’s description in the first edition of Journey Without Maps of a riotous Freetown evening with a drunken, time-serving colonist he named as ‘Pa Oakley’ that almost cost him his career as an author. After the book was released in 1936, a letter was received by the publishers, Heinemann, threatening a libel action on behalf of Sierra Leone’s medical services director, a Yorkshireman called Philip Douglas Oakley. Graham Greene later wrote he did not know such a person existed but the similarity of name meant both he and Heinemann were dangerously exposed. In the company’s archive I found a previously unpublished letter from Charles Evans, chairman of Heinemann, to Graham Greene hinting at the potentially dire financial consequences of the libel action.
He [the company lawyer] seems to have good hopes of being able to settle the matter for a not too ruinous sum. Let us hope that he may. Did I tell you that the insurance company gave us a week’s notice to cancel our policy and took us back only on condition that we paid double the premium and bore ourselves the first third of any costs or damages in forthcoming cases.
A hefty libel bill could have blighted Graham Greene’s writing career before it had really started, but the two sides eventually reached an agreement that was not too ‘ruinous’ and the book was withdrawn from sale. It would be republished more than ten years later with all references to ‘Pa Oakley’ removed.
The Grand has long gone but I took with me to Freetown a photograph of Graham Greene outside the City Hotel. In Journey Without Maps he describes its bar as the most lively in town, ‘… crowded and noisy because there’s a billiard table; people are rather more dashing, get a little drunk and tell indecent stories; but not if there’s a woman present’. In the photograph Graham Greene, hands in pockets, feet in sandals, leans on the stone balustrade at the bottom of a flight of steps leading up to a veranda shaded by a floor above supported on pale stone columns.
The hotel ceased functioning during the war and was gutted by fire in 2000 but I wanted to see if the façade was still there and maybe have my own souvenir photograph taken leaning on the same balustrade. I was four days too late. A gang of men was just completing the demolition of the building. Without cranes or power tools they had proceeded in the most basic way possible, knocking it down stone by stone with sledgehammers. In spite of the hard labour and dry-season heat, the foreman, in a floppy tweed cap that made him look like a 1920s American golfer, had not a drop of sweat on him as he clambered down from the mound of masonry to speak to me. In the wreckage I spotted one of the distinctively shaped capitals that topped the columns behind Graham Greene in the picture.
I tracked down the old owner’s grandson, Victor Ferrari, a mixed-race Sierra Leonean who spoke perfect English and rolled his ‘r’s with the faintest of Krio lilts when he explained what happened.
‘We had to knock it down. The government started making announcements by radio that all abandoned buildings in the city centre must be replaced so I arranged for the demolition. It is sad because it is part of my family history but times must change.’
Later, over drinks and a longer conversation at the Ferrari family home, Victor brought the hotel bar back to life for me with a collection of old photographs. There was no power so we had to sit outside in the twilight as he told how his grandfather, Freddie, an Italian-Swiss from Lugano, arrived in Freetown as a child in the 1920s before taking over the City Hotel and running it for decades. Victor, now thirty, had grown up there, its bar his childhood playroom. The pictures were taken from the 1950s onwards, some time after Graham Greene first visited, showing customers – all white men – enjoying a drink. Fashion changes were obvious, with the men in the older pictures wearing collared shirts and ties, their hats hanging behind them on hooks, while in the more recent snapshots there were T-shirts and sunglasses. But the bar appeared just as crowded as in Graham Greene’s description, with bottles of iced beer set up on the bar’s curved counter, the faces of the customers sweaty with a mix of alcohol-infused conviviality and climate-induced torpor.
Graham Greene had met Freddie, describing him in a 1968 newspaper article on Sierra Leone as the ‘ kindly sad Swiss landlord’. Victor recounted stories of granddad Freddie’s passion for Sierra Leone and how he would travel across the entire country on hunting and fishing trips, falling in love with a local woman and starting a family. Later in life he was involved in diamond dealing and took to keeping a gun behind the bar to protect the safe in his office. At the age of seventy-seven Freddie fell over on the hotel stairs breaking his arm so badly he had to go hospital. He died a few months later in 1993.
The decline of the Ferrari family’s fortunes illustrates a reversal of the flow that originally brought freed slaves from Britain to Sierra Leone. Like thousands of others fleeing its recent chaos, now the grandson of one of the country’s most established hoteliers lives in London.
The exodus of those fleeing poverty and post-war chaos in Sierra Leone today is one of the country’s most serious problems. I saw a half-page advert in a newspaper warning people not to be taken in by criminals pretending to work for the UN and offering Sierra Leoneans the chance to resettle overseas in exchange for money. ‘Beware of these Conmen!!!!!’ was the message of the advert.
Many risk everything by taking to open boats from the African coast hoping to make landfall in Europe, a hazardous exercise that can end in mass drowning or death from dehydration. Other would-be emigrants are more sly. In 2002 most Sierra Leonean athletes attending the Commonwealth Games in Manchester did a bunk and sought a new life in Britain. Four years later, exactly the same thing happened at the games in Melbourne. But the case that touched me most was that of three young Sierra Leonean men who worked at the Freetown railway museum set up after the war by a British army officer and train enthusiast. Steve Davies worked alongside the young men for over a year as they painstakingly restored antique rolling stock and refurbish
ed a tatty old railway-yard shed into a museum. As a thankyou, he arranged visas for all three to visit Britain’s National Railway Museum in York. Two of them used their visas to abscond.
Graham Greene normally saw virtue in seediness, but in Freetown his compass switched, describing with a pejorative edge the ‘seedy civilisation’ planted in West Africa by British colonials and contrasting it with the purity of all things African.
Everything ugly in Freetown was European: the stores, the churches, the Government offices, the two hotels; if there was anything beautiful in the place it was native: the little stalls of the fruit-sellers which went up after dark at the street corners, lit by candles; the native women rolling home magnificently from church on a Sunday morning …
The book’s criticism of colonial Sierra Leone is so strong that Graham Greene later felt obliged to offer an apology. Journey Without Maps was written after spending only a few days in Freetown, but during his year-long wartime service in Freetown with MI6 he learned a greater affection for the city. Writing in 1946 he referred to Journey Without Maps, saying, ‘I can look back now with a certain regret at the hard words I used about Freetown …’
It was based on his time as a spy in Freetown that Graham Greene wrote The Heart of the Matter, an account of an adulterous police officer in wartime British colonial Africa tortured by guilt at his infidelity and blackmailed by a diamond smuggler. By the time the book came out in 1948 Graham Greene was enjoying success not just in publishing but in cinema, and a film of The Heart of the Matter was released in 1953. Filmed on location in Freetown, it has Trevor Howard playing the lead, stalking purposefully around the grid of streets centred on the Cotton Tree, rattan cane tucked under police-uniformed arm. The film has a wonderfully authentic West African air, with Howard’s permanent, tell-tale slick of sweat in the coin-sized dip where his collarbones meet.
