I take his point. After six weeks in Guinea-Bissau (plus a lot of background research), I felt I had a fairly good grasp of how the society worked, why things are as they are, and what the prospects are going forward. But after six weeks in Sierra Leone, my mind is full of confusion, as chaotic as Freetown’s deranged street markets. I can only hope that a few weeks of quiet reflection somewhere sane like Burkina Faso will help me sort through the jumble of impressions, fears, questions and competing explanations that are clattering around my head.

One of the questions I’m grappling with is whether Sierra Leone is knitting itself together after Siaka Stevens’ ruinous dictatorship and the even more damaging civil war, or if in fact the country is in danger of slipping back into conflict.

Tony Blair, who visited Freetown last year, believes Sierra Leone is “thriving.” The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, on the other hand, which was set up to investigate the causes of the war, argues that the same levels of poverty, corruption and youth alienation pertain today as prevailed twenty years ago, before the war started. As Paul Collier showed in The Bottom Billion, moreover, most countries that go through one civil war endure another within a decade or two.

Blair’s view is buttressed by the fact that the country has been at peace for nine years, that it held uneventful elections in 2007 which were widely judged to be fair, and that dangerous neighbours like the Liberian thug Charles Taylor are off the scene. Exiles are returning, drawn by peace and the still-tantalising prospect of mineral riches. And many Sierra Leoneans have told me their compatriots have learned their lesson from the war and are extremely reluctant to go down that road again.

Not everyone is so sanguine, however. While the wealthy are generally quite optimistic about the future, the poor remain disgruntled, railing against the corruption of the rich and the ineffectiveness of government. “The poor don’t love their country,” says Joseph, a young Freetonian working with Amnesty International. Edward, an old man in a Freetown slum, says the poor have no reason to be patriotic. Most young people I’ve met have asked me to help them acquire visas for Britain.

Society, rent apart by the war, still seems deeply fractured. Just as the poor bemoan the greed of the rich, so the latter berate the lower classes for laziness, dishonesty and incompetence. In cities and villages, angry arguments in the street are nerve-gratingly regular. In an eastern village, a young teacher complains that “people don’t understand how to resolve disputes by dialogue: they always want to use violence.” Many of the secret societies that held rural communities together through slavery and colonialism, moreover, were destroyed by the civil war, in which rebel soldiers deliberately targeted the chiefs and elders who were the repositories of traditional knowledge.

The insurance and savings schemes of the dollar boys and market traders are all too rare examples of social capital being rebuilt (albeit by groups working illegally), as are village cleansing ceremonies for women abducted and raped in the war. Nestor’s Women’s Movement, on the other hand, used to have thousands of members but now has only ten. He can’t find a woman to take it over: “Joining this movement would require having ideals,” he explains plaintively, “but today people only think about their personal gain. They can’t see beyond themselves to issues.” Tales of efforts by jealous neighbours, friends or relatives to use witchcraft to prevent others attaining wealth, success, or happiness, meanwhile, are frighteningly common.

Nestor believes corruption and selfishness worked their way down to all levels of society from the highest echelons of Siaka Stevens’ government. They even infected the one significant social movement of the last thirty years – the Revolutionary United Front militia, which began as a justifiable response to inequality and venality but ended by causing terrible and wanton carnage.

There are a number of potential flashpoints that could precipitate a return to conflict. War in neighbouring Guinea could have serious repercussions for Sierra Leone, which is ill equipped to house a flood of refugees, or to root out combatants who base themselves in its border areas or target its diamond fields. The 2012 elections are an even greater threat: the SLPP ceded power peacefully in 2007, but may not have gone so quietly had its leader not been retiring. The APC may not yield so willingly in 2012, and there are rumours that it is preparing for possible defeat by training its own militias. And the pressures of Sierra Leone’s demography are unrelenting: huge numbers of young people, few jobs, little in the way of public services, and limited youth representation in power make for a potentially explosive cocktail, particularly in the chaotic, crowded capital.

In this judderingly unstable part of the world, other threats to stability may yet emerge – as one angry young dollar boy warned me with foreboding recently, “When there’s a pool of oil on the ground, you don’t know where the spark that sets fire to it will come from.”

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It didn’t take long to find out. A nation that should be eager to attract tourists seems to be making systematic efforts to keep them out. If you were trying to make it as difficult as possible for foreigners to visit your country, I could recommend the following measures, which all work brilliantly for Sierra Leone:

- Charge an exorbitant sum for visas (£50 for a month, compared to, say, £10 for three months in Turkey, a much more tourist-friendly destination)

- Make obtaining the visa more complicated than for any of your neighbours by forcing applicants to produce a letter of invitation from a Sierra Leone national

- Encourage customs officials in the airport to be as surly as possible, and fail to punish them for extracting bribes from new arrivals for performing the simplest of procedures

- Build your airport thirty miles away from the capital city, on the opposite side of a giant river mouth, forcing visitors to cross either by helicopter, which regularly crashes, or ferry, which often breaks down or sinks. Make sure, too, that the ferry departure times do not coincide with incoming flights, so that your visitors will have to wait for hours in the burning sun (you will of course already have ensured there is no shade at the dock)

- Allow dozens of hustlers to converge on new arrivals as they exit the airport, giving preference to pickpockets and con merchants

- Refuse to harness the torrential rain in the rainy season to provide water and electricity to visitors at any time of year. This will ensure they cannot take respite from the heat with the help of fans, cold drinks, air-conditioning or showers. It will also mean restaurants and food stores will be unable to refrigerate food, thereby increasing the risk that your visitor will fall sick

- In the event that he does fall sick, make sure you spend none of the billiions of pounds of aid you receive on building effective hospitals or recruiting competent doctors to treat him

- Make your public transport system as slow and uncomfortable as possible, by failing to maintain vehicles so that they break down often, waiting until they are full before departing hours behind schedule, and packing two people into seats designed for one

- Enhance the effect of the above by allowing roads paid for by foreign donors to deteriorate and then failing to fill in the hundreds of resultant potholes

- Should a tourist somehow manage to shrug off these obstacles and apply for a visa extension (you have no psychiatric hospitals to house him, of course), redouble your efforts to force him out. To do this, hire the least friendly, most corrupt people to work in your immigration department. Extort money from your visitor for a visa extension that is officially free, then smile smugly at his distress

- As a final punishment for having the cheek to visit your country despite all your efforts to stop him, charge the departing, browbeaten tourist a £50 airport tax

NB: For foreign investors, multiply your efforts tenfold.

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Sierra Leone has some of the highest quality diamonds in the world. Like a lottery winner who wastes his fortune and sinks into misery, however, the country has been unable to cope with its windfall. “Blood diamonds” have been blamed for causing its horrific civil war, which saw rebel militias, Liberian thugs, mercenaries, Sierra Leone’s army, and UN and Nigerian “peacekeepers” killing and maiming in a desperate struggle to gain control of the gem trade.

Since the war finished in 2002, Sierra Leone has languished among the world’s poorest countries, with nothing to show for its rich treasure trove of minerals. Economists see it as a classic example of the resource curse, which plagues many poor nations endowed with valuable natural commodities: mineral wealth allows governments to neglect the rest of the economy, enrich themselves, and ignore those outside their circles, forcing the excluded to resort to violence to obtain a share of the loot.

But the failure of resource-rich nations is not inevitable. Botswana has thrived on the back of its diamond mines. South Africa, brimming with gold and diamonds, is Africa’s largest economy. Australia, another diamond producer, doesn’t do too badly.

Earlier this week we spent the day at a diamond mine near Kenema. Johnny, a Sierra Leonean who has spent most of his life in England, has come back with his wife Suzy to dig for diamonds. Using borrowed money, they have leased an acre of land deep in the jungle and hired fifty men from surrounding villages to dig a forty-foot-deep pit and sift through the mud and gravel it throws up.

It is easy to see the allure. When we arrive, Johnny shows me yesterday’s haul of eight small stones. The first looks like an undistinguished lump of glass, but the second, flawless, looks like a diamond and, although rough (it will be cut in India or Antwerp), its different facets glitter as I turn it around in the sun. It is worth about £1,000. On the neighbouring plot last year, a Lebanese found a thirty-carat diamond worth £4 million. From one moment to the next, Johnny could get rich.

Or die trying. Another nearby plot was mined for two years by some Americans. They didn’t find a single gem. Prices fell by 80% in the recession, prompting many miners and dealers to switch to gold, which provides a steadier, less risky income. Ali’s business partner almost bankrupted him by giving him a fake cheque for £100,000-worth of diamonds. “We say the profit from diamonds reaches from your toes to your knees, but the losses reach up to your throat,” he says, making a strangling gesture. He is currently pursuing the man through Interpol.

Nearly everything at Johnny’s mine is done by hand. The only sound other than the chink of pickaxes on rock is the drone of the baling machine, which pumps water from the bottom of the pit and spits it out in the washing area, where four muscly young men, bent at the waist, shake mud from large flat sieves and peer intently at the residue, searching among the pebbles and gravel for that elusive glint.

It is sweltering, backbreaking work, but the miners are well remunerated by local standards and are promised significant bonuses if they find something big. Everything is above board: Johnny and Suzy acquired a licence to mine from the government, and every diamond they find is certified, packaged and sealed with a wax stamp under the UN-approved Kimberley Certification Scheme before being shipped to Europe.

The Kimberley Process was initiated in the wake of Sierra Leone’s civil war. It aims to show that a diamond has not come from a conflict zone. Sierra Leone is currently at peace and legal diamond exports have increased since the scheme began. It was not the gems themselves that caused the war, however, but the venality surrounding them, and Kimberley does nothing to tackle corruption.

To acquire a mining licence, you must pay a £70 bribe. If you find a large stone, locals advise you to take it away from your mine immediately, before government helicopters arrive to seize it. Although the diamonds are conflict-free today, therefore, the Kimberley Process will not stop them sparking a new war tomorrow.

On our day at the mine, we don’t bring Johnny and Suzy, who are as superstitious as any gambler, much luck. The washers find four small one-carat stones and a couple of tiny grey specks that can be used industrially. The most valuable is worth about £500. It would take the washers nearly a year to earn that amount, so it is not surprising at the end of the afternoon to hear one of them grumbling that what he has just found in the sieve could be worth trillions of leones (he earns 10,000 a day, about £1.70). The miners may be well paid by Sierra Leonean standards, but they are very cheap labour for their employers. Worried that the washer is planning theft, Johnny relieves him of his duties and sends him to dig in the pit.

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If you don’t mind the 250-leone to the dollar spread, you can change money at foreign exchange bureaus or banks. But whereas the latter buy dollars for 3850 leones and sell them for 4100, the spread with Freetown’s Dollar Boys is a much more generous 4000-4050.

You can’t move more than a few yards in downtown Freetown without hearing the words, “Hello sir, change?” as a Dollar Boy accosts you, brandishing a large wad of leones or dollars. Dollar Boys are illegal, but their clients include government officials and ministers, big businesses and even banks in need of a liquidity top-up. The governor of the Central Bank sends someone onto the streets every day to find out how much his currency is worth. When I mention to Ahmed, a Dollar Boy of my acquaintance, that I’ve been to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, he tells me he knows the building well as he provides a delivery service to ministry officials. “Even if they wanted to, the police couldn’t stop us,” he says. “We have too many customers.”

Ahmed makes around 20,000 leones (£3.30) a day – a decent sum by local standards. On his best day ever, someone (probably a diamond dealer but he doesn’t ask questions) changed $15,000 into leones – lacking that much cash himself, he had to bring in other Dollar Boys to make up the shortfall. He delivered the money in a huge box that he carried on his head through the streets of Freetown.
Although illegal, the Dollar Boys are well organised. Each one has his own patch, or “Base” – Ahmed loiters outside a bank – and each area has its own “committee,” with one central committee overseeing all the others.

The committees, which were set up on police advice after a Dollar Boy was murdered by Nigerians a few years ago, protect their members against violence and fraud (according to Ahmed, most of those who try to exchange counterfeit money are women). They also run an insurance pool, into which all members make regular payments so that if one is cheated for a large sum or suffers a family disaster, he has a cushion against bankruptcy.

The committees have two other important roles. The first is to protect the industry’s image, by investigating customer complaints, punishing bad behaviour and weeding out bad apples. The second is to vet new entrants to the market. As in the formal sector in Sierra Leone, you can only become a Dollar Boy if you have the right connections. Incumbents collude to keep out potential competitors (too many Dollar Boys, of course, would reduce each individual’s profits). Unwanted newbies – and Ahmed reports that competition to enter the fray is fierce – are told to keep away. If they refuse, the committees take them to the police and report them for acting illegally (yes, really). The police respect the committees – many of them use Dollar Boys’ services themselves – so they are usually sympathetic.

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There is keen competition among the major mobile networks – Zain, Africell and Comium adverts adorn billboards, bars and houses, whose owners charge a monthly rent for you to daub your logo over their walls. They sponsor pop concerts, sports events and even Freetown’s venerable cotton tree, under which the first freed slaves congregated to plan their new lives.

As in Europe, the operators do not shirk from sharp practice. Calls to someone else on your network are cheap, but if you call a Zain phone from an Africell sim your costs soar. To combat this, Sierra Leoneans buy a sim card for each network and give out three numbers to contacts – a sim costs a dollar, and phones are sold unlocked. Some have handsets that can carry two cards at once, and you press a button to choose which to use for a particular call. Others have three phones with a different sim in each. The less affluent have to open up their phone to change the card each time they call another network (this of course means that you often have to dial three different numbers before you can get through to someone).

The mobile exerts a dictatorial hold on social intercourse. Nothing is more important than an incoming call. Businesspeople interrupt meetings to take calls from friends, family and colleagues; the judge in a court case we observed last week kept halting proceedings whenever his phone rang; a beer with a Sierra Leonean friend is a series of stops and starts as he or she fields calls or replies to texts.

Phones reflect social status too. The powerful screen contacts by giving their regular number only to a select few, with a number they rarely answer used to fob off unwanted hangers-on. Those lacking funds will “flash” wealthier peers, dialling and hanging up before the latter answers in the expectation that he will return (and pay for) the call.

The next big battle in the mobile sphere will be over mobile payments. These are a new thing in Sierra Leone, but Africa is the world leader in this fledgling industry, with Kenya’s M-PESA already boasting 8.5 million subscribers.

Mobile payments are Africa’s version of online transactions. Few people on the continent have bank accounts, let alone regular and secure internet access, but many have phones, and cash. Until recently, if you wanted to get money to someone you couldn’t hand it to in person (and as well as buying and selling goods, Africans with jobs send money to relatives all the time), you either had to send it with a friend (not always secure) or use a professional middleman like Western Union or a bank (expensive and often absent outside the main cities). Mobile payments are both secure and cheap, and they do not rely on the availability of banks.

To make one, you take cash into a payment outlet – the latter can be anywhere that holds cash, from banks to shops to bars to hotels. You then text your PIN number and transaction details to the payment company, which sends a message to the recipient. The recipient can then collect the cash from his own nearest outlet. The outlet owner and the payment company take a commission.

Mohammed, an illegal money changer on Siaka Stevens Street in Freetown, used to get money to his grandmother in the provinces by either taking it himself, which meant transport costs and taking valuable time off work, or sending it with friends, who sometimes “lost” the money in transit. He now uses mobile payments instead, and says it’s a much safer way of ensuring his grandmother “eats” the money.

At present, only transactions within the country are possible, but with Sierra Leoneans receiving $150 million a year in remittances from abroad (and that is just those that are recorded), it is not surprising that a couple of entrepreneurs I’ve met are staking out the territory for cross-border payments.

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Seventy years ago, the ship carrying my grandfather to the Far East during the war anchored briefly off Freetown. He remembered the oppressive heat and humidity, and the hawkers who rowed out to the ship in dugout canoes to sell their wares to British soldiers (plus ça change). The soldiers would lower buckets down to the canoes and haul up fresh fruit and snacks. For entertainment, some would drop coins into the sea, which intrepid young boys would dive down to retrieve from the seabed.

The port is a pretty modern affair these days. A couple of hours there gives you some insight into the workings of the country. A huge Norwegian vessel was unloading limestone to make cement (the post-war rebuilding of Freetown continues); another ship was being emptied of flour; dockers employed by the day were asleep in the shade of Maersk containers. Rice, bizarrely in such a hot and wet country, is the main import commodity, followed by wheat and iron rods for construction. Iron ore (processed elsewhere – Sierra Leone lacks the industrial capacity to process anything), timber, bauxite and rutile are the main exports (diamonds and gold are exported by other means). The World Food Programme has its own depot there, half-full of sacks of corn and flour.

We were shown round by a security guard, Alex, who has worked at the port for twenty years, including during the war when RUF rebels took it over and looted all the containers. His main duties include checking departing ships for drugs and stowaways. He says about half of the ships bound for Europe contain four or five stowaways. They row in in the dead of night, climb into the rudder hole, and sit tight – for weeks.

Sitting forlornly at the far end of the dock is a medium-sized Chinese fishing vessel. On it are a couple of Chinese men and a Sierra Leonean soldier. The boat was caught and impounded last autumn for fishing in Sierra Leone’s waters without a license (a common problem in West Africa). Seven Chinese fishermen have languished in a Freetown prison ever since – those who remain on board take them food every day but are not allowed to leave the country. To obtain his and the boat’s liberty, each prisoner must pay a $25,000 fine, but the shipping agent has failed to cough up. The vessel, guarded round the clock, is quietly rusting.

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Among the most arresting are the crowds gazing at DVDs playing in shops; the emptiness of markets after festivals; the accused dressing up for court in clean T-shirt and flip flops; young African girls on the beach with old white men; the hordes of disabled people – not just amputees from the war but also victims of polio, leprosy and unhealed fractures; beggars of all ages on every street corner; the ubiquity of slums, which as well as having whole districts to themselves also fill in the gaps in more affluent areas;  billboards telling people to beware of counterfeit medicines; people collecting used plastic water bottles; the popularity of lottery outlets; car engines being switched off going downhill; children outside a bar at night using the electric light from inside to see their homework; stalls selling individual cigarrettes, pills and teabags; incessant and insistent requests for money or help with getting to the UK, even by people who work; the huge number of working children; and, of course, the proliferation of NGOs.

And finally an audible indicator of poverty, in the shape of a complaint made to me last weekend by an old man in a slum: “We should be shitting four or five times a week,” he said, “but people here only shit twice a week.”

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