by Tim Butcher
‘After fifteen minutes or so all of a sudden there was no noise, no shooting. I lay still and waited, trying to bury myself in the leaves, in the wet dirt. I felt my pulse. It was seventy or eighty. I was in control and kept thinking, this is their territory and their climate – to survive I have to be smarter than them.
‘Then I heard them coming through the bush. There were voices and sounds of branches being broken and I just lay there, as still as I could, as low as I could. It was the worst moment you can imagine. They were searching for me and I knew they would kill me if they found me.’
The sound of the search came within a few yards of Yannis. He held his breath. Sweat trickled down his face but he dared not stir to wipe it away.
Slowly the sounds of the search passed, cracks from breaking foliage fading into the distance, but for a long time Yannis did not budge. When he heard the whistle of birds he worried it was the gunmen communicating with each other using the bushcraft of hunters, so still he waited. For an hour or so he did not move, thinking through what had happened. He felt certain Kurt was dead but did not know what had become of Mark or Miguel. Slowly he got the confidence to creep forward, all the time listening out for the sounds of the gunmen while trying to orientate himself, to keep going in a straight line away from the ambush site and not circle back to where he had begun.
‘It was then I heard firing, really heavy firing coming into the trees around me. What had happened was the army soldiers in Lunsar had heard the shooting from the ambush and were coming back along the road, back in the direction of Rogbere towards where I was. The problem was they were firing everything they had into the bush, not caring if they had a target to aim at. They had a fucking great gun, a 30-mm anti-aircraft gun and they were firing it into the trees. For me it was perhaps the most dangerous time. Branches were crashing down on top of me as bullets and shells flew over my head. I really thought a lot at that moment about dying and it went through my mind that nobody would ever find me and how bad that was and how the animals would eat my body.’
When this second wave of shooting died down, Yannis was able to think a little more clearly. He kept crawling forward and then stopping, waiting to hear if he was being followed, all the time scared that the ambushers could have set another trap. The time passed and while his mind was full of images of his friend covered in blood, he forced himself to focus on survival.
‘Two or three hours had passed since the ambush and I was suddenly beginning to feel dehydrated. It was as hot as hell under the undergrowth with no breeze or air. I knew without water I would not be able to think straight, so I turned to my right and made my way back towards the road. That was the only way I could find water for sure.
‘Eventually I got to the road. It was empty. There was nobody there but shell casings lay everywhere like snow on the ground. They made a tinkling sound when I stood up on the tarmac. I looked to my left, towards Lunsar and to my right, back towards Rogbere, and tried to think which way to go. I had no idea if the ambushers were still near the road but I had to get moving, had to get to water.
‘I turned right. After half a mile or so I came to the cars. The Mercedes was shot to shit and there was blood everywhere but no bodies. And then Miguel’s jeep was there, hit even heavier with bullet holes that made it look like a Swiss cheese and, again, no bodies. I kept going.
‘I had no idea what I was walking into and it started to go through my mind that I should prepare a farewell message, something that I would leave behind in case I got killed. I am a photographer so the obvious thing was to take pictures. I had one camera still with me so I set the lens on wide, held it high up in front of me, turned it round and took pictures of myself. Maybe I would die, I thought, so maybe they would find my camera and find these last pictures.’
A few miles down the road Yannis finally reached a position held by government soldiers. The first ones touched him to see if he was a ghost, unsure how he had survived. A few yards away, under a stand of trees, was a large group of soldiers and on the ground nearby the corpses of Kurt, Miguel and four of the soldiers who had been riding with the convoy. Mark had arrived on foot a short while earlier and the two journalist survivors embraced. Yannis helped load the bodies of his friends onto the back of army trucks before their long final journeys, Kurt to Washington for cremation and Miguel to Barcelona for burial.
A few days before taking the bus out of Freetown, I had arranged a jeep for my own personal pilgrimage to the ambush site described by Yannis. The road between Rogbere and Lunsar had been resurfaced and widened so it took a bit of finding, but after a few hours and with the help of some nuns from a local convent, I found the heavily overgrown spot where a small, steel memorial cross had been erected by Miguel’s mother. The heat was formidable out on the road and would have been worse under the cover of thick bush. I tried to imagine the fear, sweat and chaos of those moments back in May 2000.
‘I took a long time off after it happened and of course there was a lot of questioning about the job,’ Yannis had said as we finished talking. ‘But you’ve been there yourself, you know what it is like doing this work. If you are the sort of person who is good at this job you are the sort of person who would most likely go down that road. You just have to remember the part that luck plays and that in many ways the best of us are just the luckiest of us. I got back to work on the ninth of September 2001 and two days later the twin towers came down in New York. Since then, I haven’t really stopped.’
Graham Greene was not ashamed to articulate his love for danger, indeed he wrote often of coming alive through brushes with death. As I thought of what Yannis had said, I felt a connection to Graham Greene’s attitude. For years I had reported from war zones and had tolerated danger precisely because of its sense of thrill, of personal release as you witness life at its most unvarnished, humans stripped of all artifice as they cope with the ultimate drama of conflict. Late in life, Graham Greene wrote how coming so close to death had stirred in him a passionate interest in living. Thinking about it now, I fear the death of Kurt and Miguel had a more permanent effect on me than I admitted at the time. In the game of chance that governs a war reporter’s life, my bluff had been called and I would never again take the risks I had once blithely embraced.
A few yards from the memorial cross on the roadside, I found a rusty shell casing from the 30-mm cannon Yannis had described, the one that soldiers fired into the trees and that terrified him as much as the original rebel ambush. I picked it up and, much later, presented it to him back in Jerusalem. He thanked me quietly and emailed me a picture. It was one of the self-portraits taken when he did not know if he would live or die, an unforgettably stark image. Journalists tend to be people of swagger and self-confidence and I found it incredibly brave of him to share a moment when he was lost, scared and desperate.
CHAPTER 5
Peace Garden
Above: Pioneering railwaymen in Sierra Leone pass Waterloo Station by pump trolley, circa 1900
Below: The author with original Sierra Leonean pump trolley, Freetown railway museum, January 2009
I dozed as the bus churned along deteriorating roads and was woken by talk of the devil. An evangelist, a young man with immaculate clothes, was standing next to the driver’s seat, swaying with the motion of the vehicle, holding a Bible and declaiming forcefully on the virtues of Jesus. Islam might have been enjoying a surge in mosque construction in Freetown but out here in the provinces, Christianity was booming. From the window I could see growing numbers of road-side signs indicating Pentecostal, Adventist and Baptist churches, as well as others linked to more unorthodox denominations.
The young man at the front of the bus wore a badge that read ‘Youths For Christ’. Next to him was an assistant earnestly holding up a flip-chart of images, pictures drawn on large pieces of paper, all attached at the top to a bamboo cane, which he would turn over with a flourish as the narrative developed. As I came round, the image on display showed the outline of a man and
inside his chest a large heart had been drawn with two smaller, stylised figures gripping it on either side, one a winged angel, the other a horned devil.
‘Jesus teaches us that during all of our life, from when we are born to when we die, our heart will be fought over by good and evil, by the side of angels and the side of devils,’ the young man said in commentary, raising his voice for the final flourish. ‘Jesus will help you but to be certain that good wins you must always, always turn your back on the devil.’
With that he nodded at the driver and the bus pulled over. ‘Thank you all in the name of Youths For Christ,’ his voice boomed, before he and his partner jumped off. As we drove away I glanced back at them standing in the roadside dust, the speaker looking about him eagerly for souls ripe for saving, his assistant more concerned with reorganising his parasol of pictures.
The bus picked up speed, curtains streaming out of windows opened against the heat, passengers groggy with torpor. Potholes started to appear, occasionally to begin with but then replicating like bacteria until the tarred highway had morphed into a dirt track broken only by rare scabs of tarmac. At the same time the roadside undergrowth grew steadily more rusty, every leaf, frond and branch talced with the finest of dusts churned up from the exposed red earth of the road. We turned a corner and a scarcely airworthy vulture attending to road-kill flapped untidily out of our way. It was the only movement that I saw outside for miles.
The word devil dwelled in my mind. Throughout my research into Sierra Leone and Liberia the term kept coming up, with explorers, including the Greenes, describing the central role played by devils in tribal society. From my reading I learned these mysterious figures – humans who assumed special power through the wearing of magical masks and costumes – acted as guardians of tribal lore, straddling the mortal and spiritual worlds. One of their principal responsibilities was the organising of initiation societies, a type of graduation school for youngsters held in remote parts of the bush. So powerful were these bush societies – the male version was commonly known as Poro, while for women it was called Bundu in Sierra Leone and Sande in Liberia – that graduation was regarded more as a process of birth than coming of age.
Students were taught practical skills such as hunting but they also learned about darker arts, drawing power from the worship of ancestor spirits. For some tribes these initiation societies were as common as high schools in the developed world, with villages all over Sierra Leone and Liberia convening them whenever it had a large enough group of young people. The names differed between tribes but the tradition of initiation by masked elders dominated both countries.
Located far from parents and home comforts, these camps were places of austerity ruled by a hierarchy of specially trained bush society members under the ultimate control of devils, who would appear masked and in costume at crucial times such as circumcisions or graduation. In many communities the identity of the person behind the mask was an open secret, indeed Graham Greene joked that one should never be rude to a village blacksmith in Liberia as he was almost always the village devil.
Anthropologists have long recorded the existence of these bush societies and found clear parallels with initiation rituals followed by other tribal communities around the world as far apart as Asia and South America, but what made me really curious was whether they had survived into the twenty-first century. Finding out would not be easy as initiates swear an omertà, a code of silence, and are warned on pain of death never to divulge the secrets of the bush societies.
What I found so interesting about the West African devil was that it was more nuanced than the devil as framed by Christianity. Instead of being the epitome-of-all-evil, it was regarded by its tribal followers as being capable both of benevolence and of cruelty. When I was a schoolboy I remember struggling to understand a history teacher describing early Christian communities as God-fearing. God, in my child’s mind, was a good thing, not something to be feared. I remember my teacher urging me to consider how respect for God relies ultimately on fear of omnipotence. In a similar way, communities from Sierra Leone and Liberia can be described as devil-fearing.
Wanting to know more, the devil talk on the bus felt like a way in to this sensitive subject so I looked around at my fellow passengers, hoping to ask some questions. Most were asleep but the lady directly across the aisle from me had been listening closely to the preacher. Haja Miniatu Konneh – she preferred ‘Mini’ – wore a two-piece outfit of gown and headscarf tailored from cotton with the same brown and yellow floral design. We got chatting and she explained how she was going to Bo to attend the funeral of a daughter-in-law who had died from diabetes. Aged sixty-five, she was a devout Muslim running the Sierra Leonean branch of an American-Muslim charity, LIFE for Relief and Development, and was clearly well-travelled and educated. I steered the conversation round to the evangelist’s sermon.
‘I am a Muslim and that man was a Christian but I agree with him totally,’ she said. ‘The devil is waiting to take you at every turn in your life. Look at what happened to our country when Foday Sankoh came here with his rebels from the RUF. Now he was someone whose soul had been taken by the devil.’
‘But is the devil you are talking about here the same as the devil from the Bundu society?’ I asked, using the local term for women’s initiation society.
Her expression changed. She gave me an empty smile and shook her head. ‘Of course not. The bush devils are not evil. They bring good things to our society.’
I persisted. Could she explain a little more?
‘I am sorry but I cannot talk about those things,’ was her polite but firm reply.
We drove on in silence for a few moments. I was curious about the duality of an observant Muslim also believing in the power of tribal spiritualism, so I came back to the subject from a different direction. One of the most important issues for aid workers in post-war Sierra Leone is female circumcision or, as the current aid community vernacular calls it, female genital mutilation (FGM). FGM is a very modern term for a very ancient procedure undergone by every girl who passes through Bundu initiation. An account published in 1670 by an early Dutch visitor to Sierra Leone, Olfert Dapper, describes the procedure in some detail:
They bring girls of 10 or 12 or over to a special secluded place in the bush … then they cut off their hair with a razor, and bring them on the following day to a river in the bush, where, at the appointed time, the priestess arranges the circumcision, one holds the other tight and the priestess cuts the ring of pleasure out of the private parts, which bleed very much and hurt very much. After the circumcision the priestess heals the wounds with green herbs; this lasts about 10 or 12 days.
In Sierra Leone FGM is as widespread today as it was in 1670 but the reality is not quite as benign as that described by Dapper. It is carried out in non-sterile conditions, using blades that have not been cleaned properly, meaning female circumcision claims the lives of many women and ruins the lives of many more, leaving them in permanent pain and discomfort. Some foreign aid workers, especially those with projects in the rural provinces, have been trying for years to persuade Sierra Leonean women to end the practice but so deeply entrenched is Bundu lore that attempts to change a central component such as this have been largely unsuccessful.
I wondered what, as a senior aid worker, Mini thought of FGM?
‘It is a good thing. It stops girls being promiscuous and in this modern day that is a good thing,’ she said, before folding her arms and turning away from me. Our conversation was at an end, a lesson for me in the difficulty of trying to break through taboos associated with local tradition.
*
It only took five hours to reach Bo by bus and, when we arrived, David and I took the same attitude to the town as the Greenes did – we moved on as fast as we could. During the colonial period, Bo had been developed as the capital of the protectorate, the tranche of inland territory staked belatedly by Britain long after the Freetown peninsula was colonised, but even at its height t
hat development did not amount to much. There had been a sizeable government reservation in Bo, with a dozen or so bungalows and offices built to house colonial administrators, next to a small town centre which consisted mainly of trading stores, mosques, churches and schools.
Bo was their journey’s first landmark and while Barbara Greene ignores the town completely in her book, one can detect a sense of gathering excitement in Graham Greene’s brief description. He had been so irked by the complacent imperialism of Freetown that, out in the protectorate, he was delighted to find colonialists with what he regarded as a more genuine connection to Africa.
The Englishmen here were of a finer, subtler type than on the coast; they were patriots in the sense that they cared for something in their country other than its externals; they couldn’t build their English corner with a few tin roofs and peeling posters and drinks at the bar … suddenly, inexplicably, I felt happy in the rest-house, the square squat bungalow built on cement piles to keep out the white ants, as the hurricane lamps were lit and the remains of the tough, dry, tasteless coast chicken were laid out … I was happy; it was as if I had left something I distrusted behind.
Fought over repeatedly during the war and barely touched by meaningful post-war development, today Bo is a modest sprawl of mostly single-storey buildings built around a frame of dusty, pitted avenues of beaten dirt, spreading out from the national highway that runs across the middle of Sierra Leone. With a population of roughly 200,000 it has a few college campuses, teacher training schools and shops, but most of the buildings are low-cost houses and shanties that make scant impression on a skyline dominated by treetops. The only sign of the modern world comes with the occasional mobile phone mast peeking through the foliage. In its time-worn simplicity Bo felt no different from Freetown, although I was interested to learn the burghers of Bo had horizons that reached far beyond West Africa. After the civil war ended, a friendship link was established between Bo and, of all places, Royal Leamington Spa, a town close to my birthplace in Warwickshire. As we passed Bo it was a struggle to connect mentally its tatty streets with the spa’s famous bathhouses, pump-rooms and neo-classical crescents.
