Travels in Sierra Leone.

Two Fridays ago I flew a few hours along the Northwest Coast of Africa to Freetown, Sierra Leone.  Freetown is a paradoxical city.  On the West side of the peninsula lie the tourist areas of Aberdeen and Lumley, saturated with chique hotels and expensive restaurants.  From there begins a beautiful stretch of coastline that can boast some of West Africa’s best, and still relatively clean and quiet, beaches.  Freetown is located on a peninsula and the only reliable option from getting from the airport to the city late at night, which was when my delayed flight arrived, is by hovercraft ferry.  The terminal for the hovercraft is in Aberdeen, thus it was this area that was my first impression of Sierra Leone.  After disembarking from the ferry, passengers are greeted (read: accosted) by dozens of touts and hawkers offering to find you a hotel (where they would get a commission) or take you by taxi to your hotel (where they charge you triple the price).  I met a man from Chicago on the ferry and we agreed to share a taxi and find a cheap hotel.  Quite the guy, for him the number 100 is significant for two reasons: he claims to have set foot in 100 countries, and claims to have slept with about 100 prostitutes.  After considerable confusion and hassle, and a screaming match with our taxi driver who tried to cheat us, we found a hotel and I was able to sleep for a few hours. 

            As mentioned, Freetown is a paradoxical city.  Only a few minutes drive away from the tourist-focused West, the city centre and particularly the Eastern part of Freetown stand as an encapsulation of Sierra Leone’s condition, in all its stereotypical African destitution.  In the morning I hopped on the back of a bike and asked the driver to take me up the snaking mountain road to one of Sub-Saharan Africa’s oldest universities.  From the top, Freetown appeared like a city bursting at its seams.  Hundreds of thousands of people fled to Freetown from the provinces during the country’s 11-year civil war; many of them never left once peace returned.  Countless shanty-towns are characterized by tin roofing held down by rocks, unfinished buildings with jagged metal protruding from its walls, and electrical wiring tangled in fire-hazardous clumps. The smell of petrol, the lovely smell of beans-oil stew, the ghastly smell of open sewers that waft particularly when it rains, and the smell of burning trash fill the street air.  Yet Freetown is quite a picturesque city, set against an ocean backdrop on hilly streets, shaded by massive cotton trees that erupt in the most arbitrary of locations. 

             After touring Freetown for a day I decided to travel to the largest national park in the country, located in the Northwest corner of Sierra Leone, near the Guinean border.  To reach Outamba-Kilimi National Park required that I first take a four-hour poda-poda (far more banged-up version of a Ghanaian tro-tro) to a city called Makeni.  From Makeni it was another four-hour poda-poda to a small town called Kamakwie.  The road from Makeni to Kamakwie was one of the worst I’ve ever been on in Africa.  The ‘road’, more like a horizontal slalom course, characterized by gaping potholes the size of refrigerators, was traversed in a poda-poda that should have been retired decades ago.  Unlike in Ghana, where there is at least some road-regulation, in Sierra Leone every car is packed to almost double its capacity.  Thus, in a mini-bus with about 18 seats there were close to thirty people, stacked, crammed, people on the roof- and for the first time since rural Tanzania I spent about four hours sitting beside a live, and very talkative, rooster. 

This road took us through dozens of tiny villages where I saw first-hand why Sierra Leone is regarded as the second most impoverished country in the world.  Little boys and little girls with bloated bellies suffering from malnourishment were absolutely everywhere.  Yet in the beautiful way that children live in the moment they all seemed quite content.  Climbing up and down mango trees, teasing goats with sticks, and running past the village women who’s exposed breasts sagged to their navels, the kids seemed happy as any you’d find anywhere.  But these isolated villages, surviving almost entirely on subsistence farming, are symptomatic of Sierra Leone’s bigger problems.  Sierra Leone cannot feed itself.  There is plenty of arable land, but a lack of machinery, lack of start-up money or training, and terrible roads that make trade very difficult, have essentially removed any incentives to farm.  A few people mentioned to me that the new government in Sierra Leone is now forcing people to farm, but until the time comes when faming is a viable economic vocation, Sierra Leone will continue to be dependent on imports- and thus be at the mercy of volatile global food prices.   

            From Kamakwie, I again had to hire a motorbike driver to take me by an even worse ‘road’ toward Outamba-Kilimi National Park.  I slept in a beautiful reed hut right on the riverbank for $3/night; and at dawn woke up and paddled an hour down the river to where 8 hippos were moving lazily in the water. Tiny little ears, beetie eyes, but an enormous jaw and body, make hippos just the most absurd looking animal.  It was so peaceful though, on the river, the kind of moment where I suddenly forgot everything but the present, sitting in a canoe in the Northwest corner of Sierra Leone, a matter of feet away from hippopotamuses.  Because of the effort and time to reach the park I had been the first tourist in months.  My guide was thus very willing to endure a barrage of questions that I had for him; and as things invariably do in Sierra Leone, the conversation turned towards the war.

The War

  The absolute stupidity and injustice of the war is what seems most frustrating to the people.  But I suppose that is typically the case in most wars: initiated and perpetrated by a few but affecting countless.  Lonely Planet West Africa writes that during the 11-year war approximately 90% of the county’s diamond wealth was stolen by rebel forces or outside governments.  Where would Sierra Leone be if they could have harnessed that wealth?  Where would they be if they could have utilized even just 50% of it for the good of its people?  The legacy of the war in Sierra Leone, which ended around 2002, is found throughout the country.  It’s found in the infrastructure.  It’s found in what’s there: crumbling buildings and unfinished construction projects.  It’s found in what’s not there: reliable electricity and water.  From 6am to 6pm the only places with electricity were those with a generator.  It’s found in the literally thousands of four-by-four cars that roam around towns bearing the emblem of some NGO.  The UN has a huge compound on the edge of the Freetown and its jeeps, helicopters, planes, and staff are found everywhere.  But mostly the war legacy is found in the people.  I walked around Freetown’s centre and must have seen hundreds of amputees in town.  Reminiscent of Phnom Penh, Cambodia, war victims are pushed around in wheelchairs outside of the city’s banks, nicer restaurants, and bus stations, begging for change.  

Everybody I met in Sierra Leone had a story about how the war had affected them.  Many became refugees in Guinea or Liberia, some fled to Freetown, and many people hid.  My guide in Outamba-Kilimi National Park told me a story about how he and his family were forced to hide in the park for three months as the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) burned their village to the ground.  They ate only what they could find in the forest, and when they returned to their homes after the RUF left, there was nothing to return to.  Some refused to go anywhere- as if refusing to let the war affect them.  I met a man in Freetown who had previously worked with WaterAid who proudly proclaimed, ‘I was here when the first shots were fired in 1991 and I did not move until peace was declared in 2002’.  For a people already brutally impoverished, the war in Sierra Leone set the country back more than a decade.

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After leaving the national park I spent the next few days exploring the other larger cities in the country and the little towns along the way.  It’s certainly the most difficult traveling that I’ve ever done.  Ass bruising seats combined with terrible roads and overfilled poda-podas made it feel more like a test of endurance than anything.  After a few days I reached a city called Kenema.  I had plans to visit a second national park to track elephants, but upon reaching the park headquarters I was told that due to the roads it would take me about 3 days to reach the wildlife- 3 days to travel about 80 km!!!  I could walk faster.  Thus, I resolved myself to exploring what Kenema had to offer: diamonds.  Diamond merchants are absolutely everywhere.  As the only foreigner around I seemed to arouse quite a bit of suspicion from people as to what my intentions were snooping around diamond stalls.  Perhaps thankfully, I don’t know a thing about diamonds, so once I opened my mouth the merchants quickly realized that I was just a silly backpacker and not some smuggler. 

As I set out on the long night bus back to Freetown a storm hit.  West African storms don’t flirt, they don’t pretend.  They arrive!  Bang, Kapow!!!  Powerful, deliberate, impatient, and then they’re gone; they don’t linger either.  Amidst the rain and sloppy streets, the bus reached Freetown early the next morning and I spent my remaining day touring around town and perusing some of the nearby beaches.  

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            Sierra Leone is a very difficult country to travel in.  It’s difficult not only because of the roads and mode of transportation, but because of the images that you see outside of your window.  I’m completely unable to understand what is must be like to live this kind of poverty.  A man I met on the bus from Kenema back to Freetown put it perfectly, ‘you could never understand what it’s like not to know how to get your next meal’.  I don’t.  What I saw on the bus between Makeni and Kamakwie seemed totally surreal.  It was as if I had suddenly been transplanted back to a couch in Canada watching a CBC news report of hunger in Africa.  But in Sierra Leone, a country essentially without a middle class, these images are all too real- brutally so.  So many idle men, so few idle children- as they’re busy selling every good imaginable- these images are everywhere.  Yet despite all of this hardship, the constant travails, what’s remarkable is that Sierra Leoneans appear optimistic about the future.  I suppose anything is better than the 11 years of conflict that they endured.  There is an incredible resilience to people, a perseverance built perhaps out of necessity, which I could never begin to understand, but that is so extraordinary.  Yet there is also a sense of urgency to people, not that the peace is fragile, but that this newfound peace presents an opportunity.  If ever there was a country that deserved an opportunity, if ever there was a country that deserved to have this hope realized, it is Sierra Leone.