Back to Salone

Two years ago in my friend Paul’s basement, I looked at his big Michelin map of West Africa and imagined my future in that mysterious place as he told me incredible stories from his past. Paul served two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Sierra Leone and I was about to leave for Senegal to do the same twenty years later. His account of living in a rustic village on the ocean and adventuring through extraordinary situations that only the vivid landscapes and eclectic people of West Africa could produce appealed to me on a visceral level.

I listened with an expectant grin on my face as Paul told me about an acid fueled motorcycle trip he and his friend Kim took around the Freetown peninsula that brought them from a monkey massacre to sketchy police checkpoints. Rounding a corner on their Honda 125s, the countryside broke to reveal dozens of green colobus monkeys swinging slowly in the wind, their tales and limp arms bound around a rough wooden pole. Bare-chested men with machetes smoked cigarettes and stared at them with bloodshot gazes as they drove by. I tried to imagine this bush meat slaughter through LSD eyes but snapped out of it as Paul went on to describe how at a police stop soon after, they had to bribe an officer with a few shots of whiskey to carry on. By the time they left, they had joined him in finishing the bottle, toasting the health of their families, the police force, and the enduring friendship between Sierra Leone and the United States.

Before I left the states Paul gave me the Michelin map. It had hung on his wall during the Peace Corps, and now it would hang on mine. With a strong pat on the back he said he knew exactly what I was about to get into. During my stint in Senegal we have kept in touch over email. A few weeks ago I got a message: would I be interested in joining him and his old pal Kim for a trip to Sierra Leone? It would be their first time back to “Salone” since the Peace Corps. Within a week I bought a plane ticket and was memorizing the few Krio phrases in my Lonely Planet guide to West Africa as I studied Sierra Leone on the aged map in my hut, now well into its second tour on the continent.

From the moment we stepped onto the plane that would take us from Dakar to Sierra Leone—an ancient Bellview Airways 737 aptly named “Faith”—Paul and Kim were giddy. They were already speaking their rusty Krio with other passengers, their senses at greater attention. This seemed at surprising odds with the generous amount of valium they were ingesting, though perhaps that made it all the more impressive. Paul had twisted my arm at more than one pharmacy in Dakar to help him procure the better quality, French Laroche 10mg tablets, a cut above the Valium 5s he and Kim used to swear by in Sierra Leone.

As we made our descent into the Lungi airport I remarked how wild the country looked from the air- thick forest dotted with mudbrick homes, mangroves rooted along a vast network of rivers snaking to the sea, and a noticeable absence of pavement.

The airport was more like an airstrip, but once inside the terminal, the reunion was already underway. The village where Paul lived is only two kilometers from the airport, and after he dropped a few names, employees at the security check had heard of “Mistah Paul” and responded to his “I done com’ back for see you!” with laughter and 30-second handshakes. Kim chatted as casually as he could with the director of airport security, a tough looking man dressed in a silk zebraprint shirt who was certain that several Peace Corps volunteers were agents for the CIA. Kim did his best to assure him that we were nothing more than harmless tourists, but he kept looking at us suspiciously even as he let us pass.

Just before leaving, Paul asked if anyone remembered a man named Samba, who used to be the airport expeditor for the US embassy when Paul was in Salone, and his best friend. “He still working here Mistah Paul!” exclaimed one of the men, and offered him his cellphone after bringing up Samba’s number from his contacts. Paul broke into his uproarious big man laugh and made arrangements to meet up with Samba in another hour at our hotel.

They sat next to each other like matching book-ends pushed together after years on opposite sides of a dusty shelf. The same age and same build—short and stocky with healthy beer guts—Paul and Samba smiled at how much had happened and yet how little had changed in the 20 years since they last saw each other. They kept smacking each other’s prominent bellies saying, “You have the bigger bo-bo belly!” The expression I learned, refers to the distended stomachs of the many malnourished Sierra Leonian children, or bo-bos.

We sat in the lounge of the airport hotel and drank Star beer while Paul and Samba reminisced about getting drunk together and chasing women, catching up on two decades separated not just by time and distance, but by war. Next to us a British Airways flight crew in bathing suits and flip flops quietly sipped daquiris, obviously fascinated by the reunion of these two old friends, and by Paul’s gregarious, if at times stammering Krio. We invited them to join us for lunch in town but they gave a reluctant no thanks, saying they were prohibited by the airline from leaving the hotel, and bring all of their own food with them. Prisoners for their own safety apparently.

Samba took us to a local chop house for spicy groundnut soup with mystery meat. He carried a large plastic jug of “poyo” or fresh palm wine that he had brought for the occasion. “From God to man,” Kim toasted as we raised our effervescent glasses of milky white brew for a quick clink. I drank eagerly and as the subtle but warm buzz of the poyo took its place at the table after three glasses, so did a sense of gentle euphoria, and I understood why the palm-wine drinkard in Amos Tutuola’s book was named the “father of the gods who could do anything in this world.” The moment faded when Paul produced a bottle of Purell to wash our hands before the meal as well as a packet of “Wet-Ones,” a brand of moist towelettes for a gentler wipe after the “runny belly” he assured me we would all enjoy that afternoon.

Sure enough, each of us frequented the hotel bathroom after lunch while Samba waited for us in the bar. Stomachs full and bowels empty, we climbed into Samba’s embassy rig and drove to Paul’s village, Mahera. The road was rutted and bumpy from last year’s long rainy season. Paul narrated who had lived where, pointing out the curve in the road where he crashed his motorcycle, rermarking how the mosque was now a ghost of its former self. We ascended a short grade and pulled up to a house perched on the edge of a ridge overlooking the ocean, Pauls’s old house.

We got out and walked around the place, a well built one story building with two identical sides separated by a large patio. We listened to Paul as he pointed to his old garden and told us how he had killed more than green mamba snakes with his shovel. Behind the house we found a hesitant woman with three children at her side cooking cassava leaf and rice. She said that Paul’s old Ma and Pa had passed away years ago, though not because of the war. Paul asked after Sadiki, who at the time was his six year old host brother. Still in the village, now with wife and child the woman said. “You don’ tire for no see him Mistah Paul.”

We walked through Mahera and found Sadiki. As he and Paul looked at each other and embraced, Kim and I covered up our glassy eyes with our cameras. I tried to imagine walking into my own village in Senegal twenty years from now. Sadiki and his wife were living in a scene straight out of an Oxfam advertisement or commercial for Chrisitan Children’s Fund. Their mud house was crumbling and had no more furniture than a mattress on the ground for the three of them to sleep on, a few plastic buckets and piles of scrap wood and metal, and a copy of the Koran sitting on a wooden chair in the corner. The place smelled of cooking smoke and earth, a humid and heavy feeling to the air.

As Sadiki showed us his home and took us on a walk through the onion fields and along the beach past Shacka Steven’s old presidential rest house, Paul whispered to me that he just didn’t think he would find Sadiki like this. As the older brother to this man who at the time was just a boy, Paul felt somehow responsible and would spend the rest of our vacation thinking of the best way to help Sadiki. “Should I just give him a handful of cash?” he wondered. I said, “Do you want to give him money or do you want to be involved in his life again?”

On the day Paul left Mahera to return to the US twenty years ago, he looked for Sadiki to say goodbye and found him crying high up in one of the palm trees. On this day, as we left at dusk for our hotel, Paul promised him that he would help him however he could. Sadiki just smiled and shook Paul’s hand, saying, “Tank you Mistah Paul.”

We took the ferry across the bay to Freetown with second class berths. Packed closely among other passengers and baskets of produce and fish, we watched the high hills of the south side of the peninsula materialize through the haze. Crawling through traffic on the streets of Freetown we watched banks, barbershops, hardware stores and even a law school bustle with activity. Police wearing blue shirts with white sleeves worked to direct the congestion while troops of girls in their school uniforms of white blouses, pleaded skirts, and smart English hats paraded down the streets. The smell of pepper, fish, and warm sewage captured my nose while the tempo of post-war Sierra Leonian music set the pace for a long, humid day.

Between shelled out or burned buildings children played marbles, women cooked cassava or potato leaf, and men sat with one another chatting. I noticed several Lebanese shopfronts selling used CDs and worthless knick-knacks and wondered how they were making any money. I mentioned this to Paul and he said that many of them are fronts for trafficking diamonds and other gems harvested in the upline provinces near Kenema. Hearing our conversation, the taxi driver asked if we were interested in buying any diamonds, saying he could get us a good price. Though the flow of diamonds was greatly curtailed by the war, he said investment in the trade is back on the rise and the availability of the stone became as obvious in the rest of the capital as it was in our cab.

The movie “Blood Diamond” has introduced much of the world to Sierra Leone, or at least to the horrors that it suffered during its senseless and brutal war, 1991-1999. With no political objective whatsoever, the RUF rebels systematically murdered and tortured thousands as they took over the one source of wealth and power- the “blood” diamonds- in what ranks as the world’s second poorest country.

The money the RUF reaped from the diamond trade, estimated at between $25 million and $125 million per year, was used to buy weapons and continue their war. The rebels often resorted to the ruthless tactic of amputating the limbs of innocent civilians in order to terrorize the population and ensure continued control over the diamond mines. It’s estimated that over 75,000 people were killed during the war and another 20,000 mutilated.

The war’s legacy is no more evident than in its victims’ poignant struggle to continue living. In downtown Freetown near the famous 500 year old cottonwood tree, war victims held out stumps with smiles, congregating together to beg for change. Many people were still bandaged, a sign of the sickening recentness of the RUF’s campaign of atrocities. On the outskirts of Freetown near Waterloo, amputees have been moved to rehabilitation housing projects safely hidden on the other side of the peninsula’s highest point, Signal Hill. Row after row of squat cement houses however, seemed little improvement over the shantytowns that house the impoverished and war refugees who never left Freetown after fleeing the country’s interior.

But in spite of the war, in the face of such poverty and loss, we were received with smiles and warm greetings at every turn. “Cooshay sah! How dee body?” When you ask the same, “I tell God tank-ee” is inevitably the reply. Kim had a response to the common question “How dee time sah?” that I thought was especially fitting- “Well I tank God sah but the struggle continues.”

As we made our way to the far side of the city near Aberdeen, we passed Lumley Beach, Paul and Kim’s favorite hangout as volunteers. What had been an open stretch of sand and ocean with a few rice shacks and beer stands is now a busy strip dotted with bars and restaurants, even a Chinese fast food place with an attached grocery store that advertised tofu. Paul and Kim could hardly believe how it had changed. Group after group of male expats-- mainly Brits and Lebanese-- sat with beers and bottles of liquor around plastic tables with Carlsberg and Guiness beach umbrellas. We caught glimpes of many of them fondling the prostitues on their laps as we drove past the long row of their landcruisers and NGO 4x4s parked out front.

From Lumley, we drove up the hill to Lighthouse Rd. where we were staying. Sierra Leone may be one of the poorest countries in the world, but it is not cheap. An average room at a hotel ran anywhere between $70-$140. My being poor and Paul and Kim not being rich, we hooked up with another old Peace Corps volunteer named Gary Walker who served in Salone in the sixties, and who lives in Freetown. He offered to put us up at his home for free and we told God tank-ee.

Gary has lived off and on in Africa for over 40 years, working as a consultant for the UN, multiple governments, and various NGOs. His knowledge of the history of Sierra Leone and the rest of Africa was remarkable, and his broad collection of books complemented a wealth of intriguing experience dealing with African development, politics, and people. Like other expats I’ve met who have remained in West Africa for years, Gary was cynical about nearly everything we discussed, though equally passionate. An activist since his college years, he regarded history as a series of troubling and connected events in which corrupt and powerful people worked to suppress equality, democracy, and social progress for the advancement of their own control and affluence.

In the US Gary had been active in the civil rights movement, refusal of the draft during the Vietnam War, and establishment of the Voting Rights Act. He had spent most of his career traveling and working on projects across Africa, but was based out of Washington, DC. When George W. Bush was elected president, he sold his house and moved to Sierra Leone permanently. “I’ve never regretted that decision,” he said plainly.

Nor do the multitude of Sierra Leonians who Gary supports in some way or another. Over the course of our stay at his home, it became clear that “Pa Gary” employed a sizeable group of his neighbors as cooks, guards, water carriers, maids, handymen, and errand boys. He payed for their secondary education, he financed technical apprenticeships, he sent their children to the doctor, and literally paid for many of the zinc roofs above their heads. Between his bitching and moaning about how they were all fleecing him out of a small fortune, Gary showed a real love and concern for all of these people. All over his house on Lighthouse Rd. were pictures and carvings of lighthouses. All around Pa Gary were Sierra Leonians he helped through difficult waters.

After staying in Freetown for a few days we joined Gary for a trip to the Banana Islands, where in collaboration with the local community he has created an ecotourism campement, the Banana Islands Guest Houses. The islands themselves are nothing short of a hidden, tropical paradise; particularly after negotiating the crowds and stresses of Freetown. Three rugged atolls rise from the sea to form a steep green ridge of cottonwood and palm trees. Pockets of clean sand are nestled among rocks smoothed by countless tides. Terns and gulls divebomb schools of yellowfin tuna and grouper that congregate along the reefs and shipwrecks on the islands’ periphery. Here, local fishermen work adroitly from small wooden dugout canoes that bear slogans like “I hope to God,” and “Thank you Mother.” Besides Gary, we were the only white men to be found.

We sat down at white plastic tables looking out on the ocean in front of the guest houses and had a lunch of lobsters, jolof rice, and slightly chilled tall-boy beers. Paul and Kim couldn’t believe it. They had left the states not knowing what to expect in Salone, and never considered that they would be eating like kings along an idyllic beach on these beautiful islands.

That, of course, is exactly what Gary is counting on as he works to develop the Banana Islands campement and promote it to the flow of tourists coming back to Sierra Leone with the war finally over. When we visited, the guest houses had only been in business for two weeks, but the operation was impressive, especially considering its remote location and novice employees, many of whom had never left the island. While the staff still have much to learn, the fresh seafood was delicious.

Paul, Kim, and I took long walks along the island. In the main village of Dublin we passed by ornate iron lamposts and a boat landing constructed by the Portuguese when they landed on the islands and created a settlement over a century ago. Children still pulled water from the colonists’ deep well. This small Krio community felt initimate and archaic, made up mostly of fishermen and their families who had been on the islands for generations. We were only 2km by sea from Kent on the mainland and another hour’s drive to Freetown, but couldn’t have felt any farther away.

On one afternoon we followed a series of well worn footpaths through the forest to a large stretch of gorgeous beach. We sat in the shade under a tree at the far end of the sand and reflected on how beautiful the place was. Kim told Paul to go down by the water so he could get a picture of him. Paul approached the surf, hesitated for a moment, and then bent over to pick something up.

“Dudes, holy shit. Look at this.” In his hand were two plastic Barbie-Doll arms that had washed up on the beach. The incongruity of these plastic limbs in our little piece of paradise was not without a disturbing sense of irony. The sight of them was a strange and chilling reminder that plenty of people in this beautiful country had met a similar fate during the war.

Walking back to the campement, we met a fisherman named Mr. Dalton standing in front of his home, a classic Krio wooden building with a pitched tin roof. He introduced us to his son Dalton Jr. and his daughter Daltonia. Evidently old English names like Dalton and Johnson survived on the island for good reason. Mr. Dalton told us that during the war the island received thousands of refugees who fled the Freetown Peninsula during the RUF’s assault on the capital. The islanders could do nothing but take in all those who came and hope that the war would come to an end soon.

Back at the guest houses we found a tailor hunched over his sewing machine working on uniforms for the employees. “Only 20 to go,” he said. He told us he was happy to have all the work and that Pa Gary was a blessing to the people of the Banana Islands. He had given them opportunity to improve their lives and develop their community. He said his family would have been proud of him for making money now, but they were all gone—his mother, brother, and aunt killed by the rebels.

And though the war in Sierra Leone is certainly over, the presence of its perpetrators remains. While the leaders of the RUF rebels are in prison and await trial before international war tribunals, their legion of soldiers have been disarmed and reintegrated into the population. I asked most people I met if this process of reconcilitation bothered them and they said, “What else are you to do with people who are your brothers?”

We said goodbye to Gary and the Banana Islands and headed back through Freetown to catch the ferry. Our taxi driver wished us well and dropped us in front of a roadside bar where we could wait for the boat, a small piece of calm among the madness of the port. Three short cinderblock walls with a sheet for a roof shielded us from the chaos outside as we sipped cold Stars. We toasted to an excellent trip.

As we raised our bottles, a large man dressed in all black walked in on the scene. He wore mirrored sunglasses that reflected my own image as I looked up at him. Immediately, and for no obvious reason, my stomach dropped. The man’s fierce muscularity and the way he looked at us from behind those sunglasses made me nervous.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“To Lungi,” I said.

“I will drive you in my taxi when we get to the other side,” he stated flatly and put his bag on the bench next to ours. Paul told him we had other arrangements already.

“Then buy me a beer,” he said and moved in front of Paul. Everything about his tone, his rigid body language, and his aggressiveness were enough to make Paul stand up, while Kim and I looked quickly at each other and moved onto the edge of the bench.

“You go on now leave us here,” Paul said as he squared his shoulders to the man, easily a foot taller than him. The man said nothing, just stared with a cold presence that I somehow knew to be capable of violence, perhaps even familiar with it. As I braced for action, a single thought crossed my mind: “Was this man a rebel?”
Paul repeated himself and the man produced a thin, toothless smile as he exhaled through his nose. He grabbed his bag and left. The three of us looked at one another and recognized the fear that had walked in and out of the confines of our small space. Rebel or not, there was no question that this was a bad man.

The tension passed and after we had another beer and Paul downed another valium, he said he was going to get some air and walked into the action on the street while Kim and I kept chatting. When a few minutes had gone by, I thought again of the threathening man and wondered about Paul. Kim seemed to know what I was thinking and got up to take a look onto the street. He scanned the crowd and then said, “Oh God, look at this.”

I looked out and saw Paul talking with two police officers and another man that I recognized as our taxi driver who had dropped us off at the port earlier.

“What is he doing?” I said and looked on with disbelief as Paul laughed and put his arms around the cops—one for each officer—and slapped their backs as he had mine at his house two years before. Kim started laughing and said that seeing this had reminded him of how back in their days as volunteers, Paul had bribed a police officer for his uniform, and then got in trouble for showing up at an official Peace Corps meeting wearing the thing, demanding to see people’s IDs. Just then Paul walked in with a huge grin on his face.

“Those cops were going to give our driver a parking ticket, and…”

“And Prince Valium had to save the day!” Kim interrupted. We all broke into laughter. As I thought to myself that some things obviously never change, the ferry blew its whistle and we were on our way.