This piece from yesterday’s Africa Review contains much that is spurious. That coalition forces are ‘taking their lead from the US,’ that Libya will become ‘a basket country’ after Gaddafi goes, that African leaders see Gaddafi as a ‘benevolent godfather,’ and that in the Ivory Coast there is ‘little difference’ between Gbagbo and Ouattara are all at the very least arguable.

But these claims pale into insignificance compared with the article’s overarching point, which is that the West wants to remove Gaddafi because he is a ‘dangerous African likely to cause a united front against neo-colonialism in Africa.’ According to the Africa Review, the kindly dictator ‘identified himself with sub-Saharan Africa, championing a united Africa and showing the continent how if they formulated a collective vision, they would be able to stand on their own feet.’

The basis for this claim is unclear, for when one thinks of Gaddafi and sub-Saharan Africa, unity and self-reliance are very far from the first things that spring to mind. Was Gaddafi championing a united Africa when he armed Charles Taylor in Liberia and Foday Sankoh in Sierra Leone, enabling them to kill tens of thousands of sub-Saharan Africans and maim, rape and torture many more (even Taylor’s defence lawyer at the Hague has asked why Gaddafi is not in the dock)? Was he formulating a collective vision when he sent Libyan troops to help the mad cannibal Idi Amin crush a popular uprising, or when he gave Amin arms to massacre sub-Saharan Africans in northern Uganda? Was he helping Africans stand on their own feet when he sent weapons to a rebel leader in the Democratic Republic of Congo who is now on trial for war crimes? The list goes on and on; with friends like these, as sub-Saharan Africans reading the Africa Review must surely be asking themselves as they splutter over this morning’s cornflakes, who needs enemies?

In the recent conflicts in Darfur, Uganda, Congo, and Bosnia, rape has been used systematically as a tool of war. The horrors perpetrated on civilian women and girls have been a key part of fighting forces’ strategy, a deliberate method for advancing the war effort.

Different theories have been put forward for the surge in such violence in the past few decades. Amnesty attributes it variously to ethnic cleansing (by raping a woman you infect her ethnicity with your group’s seed), the desire to sow terror in the enemy’s community, and the need to stop culture and values, of which women are often seen as the guardians, being passed down to the next generation. Others highlight the need for armies to humiliate their opponents (both the raped women and their husbands and sons) by emphasising their inability to protect themselves.

Sierra Leone’s 1990s civil war saw some of the worst atrocities against women of any war in history. Boys raped their mothers and sisters, pregnant women had their stomachs cut open, poles were shoved up vaginas. Gang rape became a sport. Yet here, ethnic considerations played little part, and in what turned into a Hobbesian frenzy of all against all there was no clear enemy to humiliate. Terrorising the civilian population and showcasing their power were no doubt important motivations for the rapists, but it seems there were other factors at work too.

I wonder whether a lethal cocktail of population pressure, poverty and pride was not a more important driver of the carnage. The population explosion forced young men off the land and into the cities to find work. Most ended up unemployed and dirt poor. They were therefore unable to afford the products of modernity – cars, houses, mobile phones, smart clothes – that the young women of the country, clinging to dreams of Westernisation, increasingly demanded. Spurned, the destitute young men could not find wives or start families. In Freetown earlier this year, one young Muslim hawker told me, ‘unless you have a car and a house, people don’t think you’re serious.’ Further along the West African coast in Senegal, a hotel boy complained that he could not find a wife because he was too poor. These days, he said, a girl’s highest priority is money: ‘I can’t afford a car or a house so women aren’t interested in me.’

Rebel fighters in Sierra Leone’s civil war singled out their elders for some of the most horrific violence. The latter, seeing that their sons and nephews could not fulfil the roles expected of them, had looked down on the younger generation. When war broke out, they paid a heavy price for this lack of respect. Could it be that the treatment of women was also linked to respect, a crazed act of vengeance by the proud, frustrated young men they had scorned? The traditional explanations for armies’ use of rape in war put most of the blame on instructions from the top, but perhaps in some cases the pressure comes from the bottom, from the fatefully wounded pride of the soldiers themselves.

Having refused to testify against Charles Taylor, the thuggish former Liberian president currently being tried at the Hague for war crimes, it now seems likely that the supermodel Naomi Campbell will be subpoenaed instead.

The story goes that after a dinner party hosted by Nelson Mandela at his home in South Africa, Ms Campbell was visited in her hotel room in the middle of the night by envoys sent by Taylor, who presented her with an enormous uncut diamond. Campbell allegedly told Mia Farrow about the gift the following morning, but has since denied receiving it to anyone who asks.

Some might think this romantic, but the diamond, if it existed, was a blood diamond from Sierra Leone, Liberia’s nextdoor neighbour, and was paid for with the weapons and soldiers deployed in that country’s vicious civil war.

This, of course, could stain Campbell’s impeccable reputation. She has said she does not want to testify because ‘Taylor has done some terrible things,’ (er, I think that’s why they want you to testify dear) and because she is ‘concerned for her safety.’

By 1997, Sierra Leone’s war was already several years old and approaching its most apocalyptic stage. Already, thousands had been killed or had hands, lips, legs or noses cut off by men and boys funded and supplied with weapons and drugs by Taylor, who needed Sierra Leone’s diamonds for his own insurgency in Liberia (which itself caused a quarter of a million deaths). So Taylor had already ‘done some terrible things’ by the time he allegedly gave Campbell the diamond. Perhaps Campbell hadn’t researched his past (she is a busy woman), but what is Mandela’s excuse for inviting him to dinner?

Apparently, Campbell promised Farrow she would give the diamond to Nelson Mandela’s Children’s Fund, but the Fund denies having ever received it. This could get interesting.

“You wouldn’t understand this country if you stayed here for five years. I don’t understand it,” says Nestor Cummings-John, the head of the Sierra Leone Women’s Movement (“faute de mieux,” he replies when I ask why the group is run by a man).

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. (more…)

When I arrived in Sierra Leone six weeks ago and encountered its friendly people, spectacular beaches, lively nightlife and mysterious traditions, I wondered why the country has so few tourists (in our six weeks we have met a total of three, with three or four other possible but unconfirmed sightings).

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.

“It’s not diamonds that are the problem,” says Ali, a Lebanese diamond dealer in eastern Sierra Leone. “Diamonds are just stones. It’s people that are the problem.”

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.

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The leone, Sierra Leone’s currency, is not highly prized abroad. Nor is it especially strong compared to more established currencies: in 1978 when it broke from its sterling peg, the leone was worth 50p; buying 50p today would set you back 3,000 leones.
Sierra Leoneans with cash, therefore, along with importers of goods and those travelling overseas, are eager to get their hands on dollars, pounds or euros. Foreign diamond dealers, the legions of UN and NGO workers, local people who receive remittances from abroad, and the country’s dribble of masochistic travellers need leones in cash because there are no ATMs and nobody accepts credit cards.

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.

This morning, presumably because of a burst pipe, a trickle of water was bubbling up through a hole in the surface of a busy Freetown street. Next to the hole, a man in rags was on his hands and knees, lapping at the water like a dog.

Mobile phones are spreading through Sierra Leone like a cholera epidemic. Everyone either has one or aspires to one. Phone theft is common (my own lasted a week). People will sacrifice meals or school fees to buy credits (everyone is on pay-as-you-go, and stalls selling top-up scratch cards are ubiquitous, as are recharging shops, since few have electricity at home).

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. (more…)

Had a surprisingly interesting tour of Freetown’s port yesterday. It’s the world’s third largest natural harbour.

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.

I’ve been in Freetown for a couple of weeks now and am starting to get my head around the place. Sierra Leone has only recently climbed off the foot of the UN Human Development Index, but signs of poverty, which people in the West – where its most abject form is mostly confined to society’s margins – can go long periods without glimpsing, are everywhere.

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.”

While researching my upcoming book on the world’s poorest countries last week, I came across David Keen’s ‘Conflict and Collusion in Sierra Leone,’ an analysis of the causes of the world’s poorest country’s vicious 1990s civil war. What struck me most was the similarity between what I read of the conditions in Sierra Leone before war erupted and what I heard on a recent trip to Nigeria of the conditions prevailing there.

The parallels are remarkable. Burgeoning youth population? Check. Intense competition for services and economic opportunities? Check. Collapsed education system that fails the young? Check. Dependence on a single valuable natural resource? Check (diamonds in Sierra Leone, oil in Nigeria). Neglect of other economic activities like agriculture? Check. Catastrophic lack of jobs? Check.

The result of all these fundamental problems in Nigeria, as in Sierra Leone, is a youth population that cannot establish itself. Denied employment, young people cannot leave their parents’ homes, marry, or start families. Their reliance on the older generation deprives them of the latter’s respect. Their resentment of their elders, who benefited from a better education, faced weaker competition for jobs, and have control over the country’s economy, is acute. The corruption and decadence of those in power and their lack of interest in young people’s demands further fan the flames (both David Keen writing on Sierra Leone and several Nigerians I spoke to said that wealth, no matter how dishonestly acquired, had become society’s’ overriding goal – as a young woman in Lagos lamented, “nobody asks how you got rich”).

In Sierra Leone, young people eventually took out their frustrations with extreme violence. Among their main targets were village chiefs and other figures of authority. When the Revolutionary United Front invaded Freetown in January 1999, its young rebel soldiers sought out and dealt out horrific punishments to journalists and writers who had criticised them and shown them disrespect. Many young Nigerians also bemoan the lack of respect they receive from the older generation, who dominate the country’s institutions.

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