I'm just back from a very busy three weeks in Sierra Leone, finally with time to reflect on my trip and write something about it here.
There was no time to play the tourist on this trip, even the weekends taken up with work, but thankfully the work included visits to two of our smaller offices in the provinces and to some of the sites where we have been working. So I was able to spend probably two whole days in total looking out of the car window (all whilst listening to the driver's favourite Bob Marley album on endless repeat). I believe I was last in the country in early 2011 - gosh, more than eight years ago - and I felt that the place had changed a little in that time. Definitely fewer birds. We drove along small laterite roads into the mountains, where I expected (well, hoped, anyway) to see hornbills and maybe a turaco, but there was nothing, not even weaver birds.
the slash-and-burn agriculture that seems quite common in the country.
Or could it be all the trees cut down for charcoal? Bags and bags of it on sale in all the villages we drove through.
But what was most concerning to me was the felling of the larger trees - again, evident in so many of the villages we passed and all, apparently, destined for China:
As in nearly all of the sub-Saharan African countries I've been to over the past year or so, the presence of China was striking. Building roads, taking over the mining companies, taking out the forests. Oh, and building casinos. I even found myself sitting next to a Chinese guy on the ferry back to the airport, and he told me (in between racist comments about Africans) that he was in the country to set up a teak-buying business.
What I don't know is the extent to which China has a hold over the infrastructure of Sierra Leone (well, apart from perhaps over the roads they are building). In other African countries they are making loans to the governments secured on major infrastructure assets, such as the port of Mombasa, and the international airport in Lusaka. I heard that in Guinea they built a railway all the way from the coast to the bauxite mines near the Liberian border - a two-day journey by car and thus a route that could certainly benefit from a railway. But the railway is for cargo only, no space at all for the locals to travel on the trains.
I wonder how it can be that these countries do not see history repeating itself, after all, didn't the British build railways into the interiors of the colonies so as to more easily extract their resources? They got their independence once and are now walking with open eyes back into the same kind of relationship, but this time with China. I'm always surprised by how warmly I'm received in Britain's former colonies, how little resentment there is (in fact none that I've encountered personally), but I am even more surprised to see those countries signing up for a repeat performance with a different master. I suppose the leaders are easily bought off, and the ordinary citizens really have no say in the matter.
Another form of colonisation upset me rather more, which was the sight in one town of a few Islamic preachers of the more hardline variety. They stood out enormously amongst the African garb around them, with their too-short trousers and their big beards. Pakistanis, my driver thought. So in a country where rural women often go around with nothing on their top halves and where Muslims and Christians inter-marry and convert from either religion to the other without concern (I questioned a Christian colleague there about his name - Mohamed - and he explained that his parents were Muslim but like most parents in Sierra Leone they let him choose whether to attend church or mosque - or, indeed, neither - and at 18 he decided to be Christian...), these guys are visiting the mosques and preaching sermons about how Muslims should be behaving, as a result of which the odd headscarf can now be seen, but more worryingly also a small number of black burquas. With the introduction of Islamism (if that is right term) into the formerly tolerant Mali and Burkina Faso, and suggestions that it is spreading into the north of Benin and Togo (with two French tourists recently kidnapped in northern Benin), I worry about the future for Sierra Leone. The driver told me there was no chance of such extremism catching on there, but they said the same in Burkina Faso only three years ago and now much of that country is infested, with schools shut and civilian fatalities up 7,000% so far this year.
My dear Sierra Leonians, wake up ...
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