Sierra Leone notes continued

Monday

Torrential, torrential rain. I have lost my umbrella and went out wearing a sun dress.



Taking shelter at a tailor shop, Abou Bacchari Bah and his troop of tailors welcomed me in, found me a wooden chair with a broken seat-back, and told me to hold on until the “river go dry-dry”.



I watched them make my mum a shirt out of a red fabric I bought at the market, ironing the folds with a metal iron filled with hot coals, sending a boy out into the rain to buy ‘stiffening’ to starch the collar with, talking about Pita, the town in Guinea where all their fathers come from and which I know too, from travels last year.



Sitting with so many Fulas, it was like being back in Senegal with Now and the gang. They were delighted with me taking photos of them. Since they have a street address, I can actually send the photos, and this time, I will.

Sierra Leone notes continued

Sunday

When I got back to town, the first thing I had to do was to check my emails, read the news, and update my blog. I went up to the hotel where I spent last week, which has wireless internet, and ordered some coffee. The manager was happy to see me and asked me all about my trip.

The obese owner of the hotel, a man who is rumoured to be funding the election campaign of one of the favourite candidates, was sitting at a table next to me. After half an hour I noticed my internet connection had gone so I went over to the reception to ask if there was a problem with the router.

“We have changed the password,” said the large lady in the silken boubou at the desk who I had not seen before. I guessed she was the owner’s wife. She glared at me, managed not to suck her teeth, and went back to looking at her computer screen. I didn’t move, because I thought she was going to give me the new password. A few moments later, she looked up at me and said, “Yes?” and in total disbelief I realised that they had changed the password to stop me from using it.

“It is only for guests,” said the lady, charmed with herself.

“But I was a guest here for a week,” I protested, “and I am having a drink.” I started to burn with embarrassment as one by one the entire staff of the hotel gathered around.

“Yes, well, you are not a guest now,” she said and looked back at her computer. The manager of the hotel, my friend, stared at his hands as if they would save him from this awful situation, and I walked away feeling utterly humiliated.

Luckily, I had already found a great guesthouse by then, run by a magical lady who has built a guesthouse in her retirement. By her own admission, it is a Sierra Leonean Faulty Towers, though perhaps she did not realise that this drew images of total disarray and fundamental breakdown. The first night, I had a room which backed onto the generator so that I spent the night with my head pounding to the sound of an enormous motor. The next morning I asked to be moved and was given a very nice room next door in which all seemed well.

Until I took a shower, and realised that I was getting terrible electric shocks from everything that I touched, including the bar of soap. The shower tray must have been alive with current.

Living in Senegal, my electric shock threshold is much higher than it was when I lived in a place with safe electrics, but I did have images of being fried alive in the bath and was finally afraid to even go into the bathroom.

It turned out that the plug on the air-con unit had melted and the wires inside were touching. The whole room was a death waiting to happen. While I had dinner, the jolly staff brought me four candles while the electrician, called out on a rainy night, turned off the power and fixed the problem.

Tonight I was feeling, well, hungover and tired. My friend and I had been on a long mission to the beach for lunch in which we had to swim across a crocodile-infested (I suspect) lagoon with a ripping current to get to the actual, gorgeous, beach. We were tired. I got home to find there was no water.

Emerging into the bar and pretty restaurant, I was met by the four happy staff who work there who have taken to me like their sister. They call me Aunty when I still do not know their names. Seeing I was in need, they brought me a cold Star Beer, nudged me into a comfy arm chair and opened the wooden chest which had a tiny little TV inside.

They turned on the Africa Magic channel and together- me in the arm chair and the waiters standing around chuckling and saying aa-ha! when anyone did anything they agreed with-we watched a three hour Nigerian feature film, the moral of which appeared to be that women who look for rich husbands end up alone, and that one should never invite the mother-in-law to stay. The script was full of beautiful African English, much teeth-sucking, and so much irony and greek chorus drama, that by the end we were all so involved that the poor customers in the restaurant practically had to go and cook their own food. It was just like being at home.

Sierra Leone notes continued

Thursday

This afternoon, Moustapha came to pick me up. I was glad to get out of such isolation, the wind and the rain falling on my lonely little house eventually got the better of me. We drove along the foot of forested hills and across small rivers with grand names like Macdonald Brige, and Moustapha explained how the British had named everything, even this road, which to me was not much of what I would call a ‘road’. The Penninsular Road, he said.

With the coast to our right, the mountains to our left and the tumbling rivers falling away below us, it was a ripe moment for feeling that all was right with the world. Moustapha put a CD into the car radio and started to sing along passionately to Enrique Iglesias’ ‘Hero’, his gravelly voice scratching through the octaves as I hummed alongside.



Just before we arrived in Freetown, we stopped at a village to buy charcoal for Moustapha’s family. Freestanding on the road’s verge were sacks of the stuff, topped off with palm leaves to protect them from the rain. A muscular man came out to greet us, his wife staying on the porch of the house, cobbled together with wood and metal strips, gathering long green cassava leaves into bundles.

As Moustapha and the father went about the business of arguing over the price, grandmother brought out a little girl to greet me. When the girl saw what it was granny wanted her to do, say hello to a scary white thing, she started bawling, streams of tears pouring down her face as she dug her heels into the red rocky earth and screamed even louder. I beckoned, in as friendly a manner as I could, for her to come over but she cried even more, and before long the whole family- aside the mother who was still bundling up leaves- had come to watch the hilarious spectacle of the poor little girl being dragged towards something really frightening.

Eventually I gave up and we got back in the car. Granny asked if I didn’t have something for the little girl and Moustapha said in his usual abrupt way that I could give 2,000 leones if I had it. I handed over a brown damp note and the little girl steeled herself to take it from me. Everyone clapped, and we drove away.

“She no see white man before,” said Moustapha, happy with his three bags of coal. “She think you monster.” We drove on.

Sierra Leone notes continued

Wednesday

Nesta wears a red t-shirt saying “Be nice or you’re fired”. He is the captain of the canoe, I am told, when I ask how I can cross the river that splits our beach in two. He takes me down the sandy shore of the river, to the point where it meets the sea, and we climb into a narrow dug-out canoe. He has a lovely smile.



Nesta says he is there until dark, and I pay him 1,000 leones to take me the twenty metres across the river. When I want to come back, he says, I should wave my umbrella from the other side and he will come over and get me.

Walking along the beach under ominous skies, a little boy comes running from a dilapidated building where his mother is winding up rope into a tight green knot.

“You want to see live crocodile?” he asks me, beside himself with excitement. How could I refuse?

This little boy, taking me by the hand, leads me over to the back of his house where his father has trapped four crocodiles. Two more kids join the first, the little girl holding my hand.

The father comes along and insists on opening the tiny cage where the four toothy reptiles are penned up, adding at the last minute that they haven't been fed for four days as he has no money for fish.



“You snap-snap them,” he insists, and the mother, teeth missing, laughs and says something along the lines of, the white man is afraid. Too right, I think. Someone’s going to get snap-snapped in all of this.

Sierra Leone notes

Arriving at the beach, I find I am the only guest. I don’t know why this fact surprises me; I tend to almost always be the only guest when I travel to these places, and more often than not, wish it weren’t so. Still, when other people do turn up, I mostly find their presence annoying.

My bungalow, unimaginative concrete and tin roof, is on the beach. The sea is grey and approaching angry, I wouldn’t swim in it as it is, and the ten young men who appeared when I made my way down a rocky dirt track seemed unwelcoming at first.

But as we chatted on the beach- someone was cleaning a room for me- I realised they are just reserved. I am not used to not being a total hit right from the start, but it’s nice this way.

I have a bathroom in my bungalow, but no water. When I decide to go and see if I can have a bucket of water, I hear a lot of giggling and peep out of my window at the back of the house to see a string of teenage boys at various stages up a ladder, one standing at the top pouring water into a large black water tower ('Donated by Mobil, December 2002'). Realising that they are filling the water tower by hand, the bucket being passed from the ground right up the ladder to the top, and that they are doing it just for me, I go out to tell them I am happy with a bucket and a cup.

The boys all turn when they hear me coming, and scramble down the ladder and gather in a hut nearby, as if they had been there all along. When I tell Francis, the slightly older manager-type person, that I don’t mind having my water in a bucket, he looks disappointed and tells me that he wants to get the water tower filled so that when my friend comes tomorrow, we will have running water.

Oh yes, my mythical friend. The one that was meant to be arriving tomorrow, whose existence would serve as a warning to those men who may have wanted to kill me in the night, that they would be found out if they did something bad to me. And here they are, filling up a giant water tower by hand so that I can flush my toilet. Shame.

*****


Moustapha Savage is my taxi man. He tells me he doesn’t want to drive me to this beach because the road is bad. We drive to another beach, where I don’t want to be, and I make him ask a young guy in the village what the road is like further down the coast. Fine, he says, just go slowly-slowly.

The road is in fact better. Some rocky passes, but even gravel in some places, as opposed to the mud we have been sliding along in from Freetown. The whole journey of fifteen kilometres takes three hours.

When we arrive at the deserted beach guesthouse, and I am confronted by too many men, but I decide to stay anyway because where else would I go?, I tell Moustapha he can leave me and go back to Freetown.

“No, I wait till you settle,” he says, his bony face smiling as best it can, wide eyes white under a navy cap.

Moustapha wishes the British would come back and take over Sierra Leone. Maybe then the roads would be better.

The first day off work, we headed into the hills to a village called Charlotte where there is a magnificent waterfall cascading down the rocks near the village. We met a 24 year old man called Akim, a farmer, who led us through the village and into the forest, collecting young boys along the way. At the waterfall, the boys dived off the rocks while I looked cautiously on. But I did have a go too. And it was wonderful.



Akim's village was attacked by rebels in the early 1990s. He fled to the bush with his family and the village was overtaken by ECOMOG forces who fought back the rebels. He lived seven years in the forest surviving, he said, on apples and water.

Now he has a garden and grows salad, tomatoes and runner beans. HIs mum takes them to the town to sell. The village has 65 people in it, and seems a peacfeul haven. Hard, and sad, to imagine a war being fought there.

chicken chop-chop

Rose and Dan go to a restaurant. It is late at night.

They peruse the menus.

Rose: "What is the 'chicken random' please?"

Waitress: "Is chicken chop-chop."

Rose: "And what does it come with?"

Waitress: "Huh?"

Rose: "What with?"

Waitress: "A knife."

Dan: "But how is the chicken"

Waitress: "Is dead."

Rose falls below the table in hysterical giggling.

Sierra Leoneans went to the polls today. That was how my story started anyway. I was up and out by 7, when voting should have started, but in the school where the Vice President was going to vote, ballot papers still hadn't arrived at 10am. Tempers were frayed.



The VP did arrive, and people in the queues told him, get to the back of the queue, we want vote. So he went away again.



Eventually, people started to get their votes in, often queuing in the rain standing in muddy fields for hours at a time with probably very little warm food to keep them warm. Whoever says Sierra Leoneans are "slow in their march to democracy" is wrong. Sierra Leoneans, just like the Africans in the four other countries I have reported on elections in, are much more politically engaged than I am, for example. It just isn't always the man on the street who gets heard when he talks.



At lunch time, we decided to go out of the city to a place called Waterloo, where all we did pretty much was visit the Sata de Yum restaurant and eat a plate of acheke: pounded cassava with chicken, potatoes, egg, salad, cold baked beans, tomato ketchup and mayonnaise all in one bowl. Delicious! I just googled acheke and was told:

"Acheke is really significant in Sierra Leone and to its culture. It is important because it strengthens an individual and keeps one going for a long time, without getting hungry."



I ate 8 hours ago. I am still not hungry.

Next to the restaurant was the USA Big Time hair salon, a wooden chair in a concrete room with a tin roof where a young girl was being subjected to a hair cut by a man with a pair of large paper scissors. Wearing a pinny, he first hacked off her hair literally to within an inch of its life, then he used a razor blade, cleverly slotted against a comb so that the teeth of the comb picked up the hair and then the blade sliced it off, to shave off the rest. He offered to do mine. I declined.

On the way home we stopped for petrol. Unremarkable, I know, except...



It was such a great petrol station. The young pump attendant pumped a handle so that the petrol rushed into a glass chamber which could hold a gallon, and then the pump went into the tank and it all gushed out. Magic.

Views of Freetown

24 hours non-stop of gushing, biting, slicing rain. But this is a city of umbrella-lurkers, men who run out with large picnic umrellas and escort you through the torrents to where you want to go.

Today I had success at one of the ministries. I was preparing myself, had long ago steeled myself, for the shaking of the head and the "he'll call you" followed by phone silence that I was expecting to receive. I have never got a minister to talk in Senegal, why should it be any different here?

Indeed, yesterday, I was met with red tape. "If he wants to see you, he'll give you a ring," said one secratary, and then scowled as I tried to tell her why it was good for him to talk to me. She scowled me out of the office, making sure I would never come back.

But this morning I was lucky. I found the public relations man, surrounded by the obligatory newspapers and a poster of Jesus.

He suggested we go up to the fourth floor and see the minster himself. I was ready for the scowling and the intense feeling of failure as I yet again don't manage to get any information, but when I arrived in the large, softly furnised yellowing room, I was shown straight in to see the minister.

He sat, big belly almost like another person in the room, at his desk and seemed delighted to see me. He was eating a muffin, told me that his wife had told him in bed this morning that he was getting fat, and then said he was sorry not to be able to offer me tea, but he had taken his tea cups home incase he was no longer minister come Monday morning.

I asked if we could meet to do an interview.

"Yes! Right now!" he shouted, and then laughed. "Ah ha! I have caught you on the wrong foot."

About an hour into the interview, which was immensely entertaining, five of his ministry came into the room.

"Gentlemen," he boomed. "There are five of you here including the director. Is something the matter?"

They looked nervous. Clearly there was, but they weren't going to announce it infront of me.

"Um, Sir, it's about that contract," said one of the group.

"Well get me my lawyer then, we need her here!" he contined to bellow, the heavy wooden furniture seeming to rumble in the wake of his voice. "And come back later! I am doing an interview."

When we finished the interview, he studied my business card and saw the photo on the back.

"You will give this to me for free?" he asked, delighted when I said yes.

"And you are a photographer? then you must take my photo please."

I happened to have my camera in my bag and, in total disbelief that a minister was asking me to photograph him, I took a photo, first of him looking serious and ministerial, and then, when I asked him why he didn't smile, of him roaring, positively quaking, with mirth.

In all the time i have traipsed in and out of ministerial offices and sat in the boxy, disorganised rooms of so-called public relations people who can't tell their telephone from their tea cup, this is the first time I could even imagine doing something like taking a photo. When I get home I will print them as a reminder of how miracles do happen.

My first impression of Sierra Leoneans is how much they laugh. This is one of the perverse stereotypes of Africa, that people are poor but happy, but it's not a trueism; people in Senegal are frequently sucking their teeth and appearing to be not happy in the slightest. But most of the people I have met in this green and hilly city do seem to be laughing. My taxi driver, Ibrahim, laughs whenever I say something, even if it's not funny, and he laughs even when I am talking on the phone to someone else and definitely not saying anything funny. It's nice to be around, it seems a well-rounded place.

Yesterday I ran around the city and was met with the usual disdain at the various ministries, but I did meet incredibly helpful people, one of whom took the entire afternoon off to help me secure an interview with the governor of the central bank. At lunch time, slightly disgusted that I had a personal taxi service to myself and therefore wasn't out there meeting anyone except my taxi driver, I made him take me to a lunch spot, perched on the edge of the cliff going down to the sea.



Outside, a man was selling jeans. Inside, two men in stetsons discussed over beer and hot pepper soup what appeared to be a legal case, the one advising the other how he could "get off". We ate our soup and cassava, and Ibrahim chewed the meat. I went to the toilet, down an incredibly narrow and wet hallway, and through a wooden door which was so narrow that even sideways I scraped both my back and front on the soggy mouldy wall. the toilet seat was refreshingly English, mounted on a block, with a drain falling to the sea below.

Afterwards, to my delight, Ibrahim took me down the steps and along a gutter (was this where my hot pepper soup had landed just moments before?) to the dried fish market where women and children hustled, pigs slept amongst the effluence on the beach, and a small boy shitted right where he was.



It was nice that it didn't occur to Ibrahim that it might be unsafe for me with my expensive camera and wallet full of Leones. Of course, it wasn't, and the only people who paid attention to me were two kids who winked and asked me to take their picture.



On the way back through the streets of colourful wooden houses, I saw some buses and taxis with carefully painted tail slogans. "Sea Never Dry" and "Leh Dem Talk", and then, "Jesus is Lord" printed around a halo emblazoned on the perfectly round tummy of a man coming towards me. "Eats eats," hissed a young boy through the car window, selling snacks.

There is something slightly naughty about sewing a thousand pounds into the back pocket of your trousers in an airport toilet. But I am not money smuggling, I am going on a work trip to a place without cash machines, exchange bureaus, or electricity.

Arriving at Gatwick, I was informed at the Astraeus airline desk that our plane, due to carry on from Freetown to Monrovia, will infact go to Monrovia first, even though it is further away, and then return to Freetown. This is because the runway landing lights at Monrovia are not working and have not been fixed, and the plane must land in daylight in Monrovia. For me this means that the already-long flight will be two or more hours longer, and that I will not land just at dusk, but in full darkness.

The Sierra Leonean man behind me in the queue, three enormous Brixton market suitcases on a trolley, told the bony English airline worker at the head of the queue that it was inconvenient, this addition to our journey. I was just about to leap in and complain myself when I saw the airline man give a loud “tut”, then turn his back on the Sierra Leonean, and start talking to his colleague.

“You can’t get angry at us for feeling put out,” I said to the man, upset that he had been so dismissive of the African. I know for sure that he wouldn’t have turned his back on an English man.

“Well, it’s not my fault if Monrovia airport can’t fix their lights. They should have done it a month ago and I’m sorry to say it but it’s typical Africa not to have done it yet,” he said.

I bristled.

Then I remembered when I lived in Ziguinchor and our airport was closed for months on end because there was no airport fence and a plane had hit a pig crossing the runway. On the day that the airport was due to re-open, a new perimeter fence protecting planes and pork-life, Air Senegal cancelled our flight because they refused to land there, as the fence, after months of work, still wasn’t finished.

I had nothing more to say. But felt cross with the guy anyway.

London. On Sunday I met Baaba Maal. There is a long story behind this. When I first went to Senegal, seven years ago, I tried meeting with Baaba, and ended up following him around the country until I got so frustrated with nearly meeting him but not quite that I went to his house in Podor only to find out he had gone to Matam. I slept in the house, and after seven more years of futilely following him around, I gave up.

On Sunday a friend introduced us and he said, "Why have I never seen you in Dakar?". What could I say?

On Friday I went to a gig in Camden, in a small vegetarian restaurant called the Green Note. A Senegalese singer was playing with his band, and there were sixty people or so gathered. Half way through the gig, the singer made an anouncement:

"Tonight we have a very special guest here: Toumani Diabate."

For me, this is like meeting Baaba Maal. or Bob Dylan. Toumani is the world's finest kora player. His last album, recorded with the Symmetric Orchestra, was groundbreaking and beautiful. You can hear a track from it at the very bottom of this page He is someone I have written about and admired for years. And there he was, in a tiny bar in Camden, playing the kora.

Afterwards I went out onto Parkway and found him smoking a cigar, leaning on his walking stick, against the railings. I told him how honoured I was to meet him. I sounded like everyone else who probably tells him the same thing every day. But I didn't want any more time to go by and still not to have met this inspirational musician.

So, London has turned up some nice surprises. And now I am off again, this time to Freetown. Insh'allah.

I dread Dakar airport at the best of times, but with a bicycle on my luggage trolley hoping to get it on a flight to London, the task seemed monumental. Now and I had wrapped the bike up in rice sacks and gaffa tape but I feared that the police at the airport door would shake their heads with glee and declare, ‘C’est pas sure’.

Sow the taxi man arrived on the dot of 4am, as ever punctual and ready for the job ahead, the seats already folded down. Sow has seat belts in his car and worries if I don’t put one on.

At the airport, all was quiet. Beside the taxi rank, usually brimming with touts and old men keen to extort a few thousand francs, a row of young men lay lined up on a set of concrete steps, fast asleep. One sat with his head between his knees, his beige t-shirt pulled up over his head. Another, wearing a woolly rasta cap, had laid his neck on the lip of the step, as if it were a feather pillow.

A young guy with a squeaky-wheeled trolley appeared and quietly took my cases and bicycle away. He was happy with his coin, and didn’t ask me to change money. The gendarme on the door smiled as I wheeled my trolley through, and the man at the Air Maroc desk apologised for the fact that I would have excess luggage, then said, ‘C’est pas grave’ and let it go. The military man at the oversized luggage door said my bike would arrive with me in London, insh’allah.

Outside, I went to the boutique, a crowded shop at the end of the dark car park. I bought an apple, then went to sit on a home-made bench of wooden planks smoothed over time by bottoms. A young guy with a Nescafe cart standing nearby said hello, and I asked him for a café au lait, with just a little sugar. We spoke Wolof.

“Are you going to sit here?” he asked, because he needed to go to the boutique to buy plastic cups.

“Go ahead, I’m staying,” I said, and he went off leaving me in the dark road with his cart, his jacket, and his money purse.

Before long, an airport employee appeared in a smart white shirt and asked if he could have some coffee.

“He’s coming back soon,” I said. “Wait.”

The coffee seller came back after a while and served the worker a cup of coffee. He was wearing a shiny black and white shirt with dollar notes printed all over it, and ‘Goodbody’ scrawled across each one. An old, skinny man in a long purple boubou, weathered by his time spent traipsing the streets and airport car park, paraded up and down not far from us, his hands clasped behind his back and head down as if he were looking for something he had lost. On the radio attached to the Nescafe stand, the morning Koran call came through and we sat in silence, enjoying the calm and quiet cool air, drinking our coffee.

I wish I was accepted here as part of the furniture more often, I thought.