Need: Stories from Africa

Introduction

The peace that prevailed in Sierra Leone from colonial time ended in an attempted coup in 1986—a fiasco cooked up by the First Vice-President, a handful of local Lebanese businessmen, and a few dozen disgruntled soldiers. It was botched from the start. President Momoh’s government—ineffective at everything except collecting bribes and stealing public money—showed itself to be, nonetheless, more effective than the stumblebums who tried to take it over. Momoh discovered the plan (how could he not discover it—it was the topic of conversation all over Freetown for days) and trapped the armed and assembled coup plotters on the morning they were set to get the thing started. In a brief shootout loyal soldiers killed one of the plotters and the rest surrendered.

The failed coup was laughably inept; but it was, nonetheless, a sobering moment in the history of Sierra Leone. It was a sort of Rubicon, marking the first time political resentments and disagreements were expressed there with such violence. Within three years the civil society had disintegrated into civil strife that was marked by murder, mutilation, terror, and the disappearance of the rule of law. Some called the decade-long bloodbath a civil war, but that term implies the nobility of justifying cause. The term civil war is inappropriate because it dignifies what was simply warlordism run amok. It was a time of organized banditry, of mass murder and intimidation through mutilation.

By the early 1990s the government, chased out of most towns and villages in Sierra Leone, controlled only Freetown. The countryside became fiefdoms of ignorant warlords with the social consciousness of common criminals. They quarrelled among themselves and fought over loot and ruled a terrorized peasantry by AK-47 and cutlass (a homemade machete that was favored for the task of lopping off the hands and feet of tens of thousands of villagers, to teach cooperation through terror). Before the killing stopped over fifty thousand civilians were dead, another hundred thousand maimed by limb amputation, and other hundreds of thousands refugees in Guinea and war-ravaged Liberia. This carnage was visited upon a country with the size and population of the state of Washington. Scores of villages that had existed for hundreds of years were depopulated and simply disappeared into the bush.

But the decade of economic disaster that led to the so-called civil war wasn’t bad for everyone in Salone. Expatriates, for instance, lived more or less normal lives throughout that period of economic dissolution. The worst inconvenience for most were frequent power outages and chronic shortages of petrol. No expat, however, experienced the discomfort, the hunger, and the fear that dominated the lives of Sierra Leoneans. In fact, in a perverse way expatriates benefited from the slow-motion social and economic implosion they were living through. As inflation led to economic disintegration, which ruined Sierra Leone’s middleclass and spread hunger among the poor, expatriates became relatively richer and richer, because they were paid in the hard currencies of their employer countries—the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany—currencies that, in the hyperinflation of 1980s Sierra Leone, had constantly increasing buying power; which, in turn, greatly widened the income disparity between expat and the local poor. As that gap increased, so did the personal power of those with hard currency over the lives of those who earned leones. Any expatriate in Salone, even low-paid Peace Corps volunteers, could hire locals to perform the menial work of day-to-day existence. A pile of dirty laundry handwashed, dried, and ironed might cost forty leones—less than half a dollar. Your house could be guarded by and cleaned by a man and his wife twenty-four hours every day for oh, maybe a thousand leones a month—which was ten or twelve bucks.

Most expatriates had come to Sierra Leone for the noble work of developing the country, but most of them edged into an inevitable condition of corruption, which advanced the approaching economic collapse. In their expat social gatherings they talked endlessly about the endemic corruption of African societies and of kleptomaniacal African leaders, and even as they complained they contributed their own petty corruptions to the mess. To obtain high currency-exchange rates, they routinely converted their dollars and pounds to local currency on the black market at ten times the rate offered by the state banks. This had the effect of giving them knapsacks full of leones with which to purchase food and other local commodities, as well as (very cheap) labor. It also had the lethal effect of diverting desperately-needed hard currency from government banks, and further undermining the already-crippled economy by moving financial control of the country into the hands of blackmarketeers and to the street. To get their jobs done, and to remove personal impediments, expats routinely bribed local officials, which, over the years, eroded confidence in government and undermined legitimate authority. Expats also abused their growing personal power, a situation that always accompanies possession of great wealth in a poor country. In these ways and countless others the expatriate community sabotaged their own achievements and thereby had some responsibility, however unintended, in the destruction of the country.

The first dangerous lurch into disorder—the First Vice-President’s failed coup—taught Momoh’s corrupt government nothing except to hold more tightly to power. They prosecuted the coup plotters, hanged the leaders, and continued their own corrupt practices. And the country’s drift toward anarchy accelerated into the chaos of the 1990s.

The stories in this book are set in the last, precipitous, year of decline that preceded that failed coup, focusing in particular on the relationships of white expatriates and their Sierra Leonean hosts. At that organic, personal interface a disturbing and violent discontinuity grew, in parallel with the economic collapse and the increasing violence in the country at large. The social discontinuity resulted, principally, from the increasing disparity between the economic means of Sierra Leoneans and expats. As the value of the local currency collapsed, white expatriates, with salaries no greater than middle-class functionaries in their own countries, became rich and powerful figures. All the while the real value of the money that Sierra Leoneans received for their labor declined relentlessly. By the late 1980s only the expatriate community, the government elite, and the Lebanese business community had any buying power. As the economic pain of most Sierra Leoneans increased, communication between them and the expatriate community became more and more strained. White expats increasingly viewed gestures of friendship from Sierra Leoneans with suspicion: What does he want from me? Will he steal from me? Is he going to beg me?

While Sierra Leonean professionals earned a few thousand leones per month (a few tens of dollars), expatriate colleagues were paid by hard-currency deposits into bank accounts in London, New York, Frankfurt, Paris, Milan. (For example, by the time my own contract was finished, in 1987, I was earning a hundred times what my professional Sierra Leonean colleagues earned, and using perhaps a fourth of my income, lived exceedingly well on the local economy—the rest of my salary remaining in my Frankfurt bank account.) The ruined Sierra Leonean economy, with the accompanying distortion of the social structure, eroded the will of young Sierra Leonean professionals to continue the struggle to build their careers and their country. Their near-term goal became the acquisition of a bag of rice for their families and their long-term goal became escape from Salone.

The collapse wiped out the accomplishments of thirty years of development. As the economic implosion accelerated into the anarchy of the 90s, rice became scarce, sickness and disease went untreated, the relationship of white expat to Sierra Leonean began to echo, more and more, the old relationship of colonial master to colonial supplicant, and Salone became an increasingly dangerous place for all who lived there.

The time of murder and the mayhem is gone now, and some say that the healing has begun. But the best and brightest of Salone’s sons and daughters have been killed or grievously maimed or have managed to escape from Sierra Leone, probably for good. And, for all the talk of healing, the country remains an exhausted ruin.

WM

Mister Henry’s Trousers

Hearing the Honda in the valley, he pushed himself to his feet, paused to let his belly receive the pain, then moved stiffly across the dirt yard to the wrought-iron gate. From there he watched the young white man drive the Honda through the stand of tamarind trees on the brow of the hill and bounce along the dusty trail toward him.

The white man stopped the motorcycle in front of the garage, and, still astride his machine, removed his goggles and stripped off his gloves.

How de day, sah? Sheku asked.

I de manage, Mister Henry said over the bubbling put-put and pop of the engine. He tossed a ring of keys to Sheku.

Sheku caught the keys, unlocked the gate and pulled it open.

Mister Henry gunned the Honda up the incline into the garage, where he stopped it between a drum of petrol and stacks of shovels and head pans. Sheku waited at the gate while the young man dismounted and removed his helmet. When he came out of the garage, Sheku entered and loosened the rubber that held the shovels on the back of the Honda.

Mister Henry went across the bare earth and up the stairs to the long covered porch and unlocked the double doors. Sheku, come upsai, he called over his shoulder as he entered the house.

Sheku finished stacking the implements against the wall, secured the gate and climbed the stairs. He approached the threshold of the open doorway and stopped and waited. He heard Mister Henry opening windows in his bedroom.

Sheku!

Sheku stepped out of his halfbacks and went barefoot across the cool tile floor toward the hall. The shadowy room contained bamboo chairs, a dining table, a writing table. On both of the tables were coal-oil lamps.

Mister Henry came out of the hall carrying his laundry bag. He handed the bag to Sheku. Bobbing his head, Sheku took the bag and returned to the porch.

Under the gauzy, tented shelter of his mosquito net Sheku sat cross-legged on his sleeping mat. From his vantage point on the porch at the top of the stairs he could observe much of the hillside, which was bathed in silvery moonlight. The moon’s position in the western sky told him that the night was almost finished. He leaned back against the wall and put his hand inside his baggy trousers, taking in his hand the substantial weight of his scrotum. The pain subsided a bit. For a while the underwear that Mister Henry gave him had supported his scrotum and thereby provided some relief from the pain. But no longer. Now his scrotum was too big for the underwear, and the pain was with him more often, and more intensely.

Sheku tried not to think about the pain. He preferred—as on this night—to pass the time by reflecting not on his affliction, but on how good life had been for his family in the year they had been in the care of Mister Henry. The young man had provided many good things: the underwear, the trousers that were roomy enough in front to contain his scrotum, the school fees for his children, the halfbacks for his entire family, the mosquito nets, the coal oil and the lamp, the rice. Above all, the rice: even now, in the hungry season, Sheku’s family ate rice. Only three days ago the young white man had returned from Pujehun with a fifty-kilogram sack of upland rice tied on his Honda. Of course Sheku knew this good luck would end someday. Mister Henry would leave, and the project masters in Freetown would send another white man to replace him, as Mister Henry had replaced the white man who was before him. The new white man would no doubt choose another, more able, villager to be his watchman. But that was in the future and he did not worry about the future, which would come no matter what he thought about it.

He reflected once again on his recent ride on the back of Mister Henry’s Honda, when the young