Traveling on the Edge: Journeys in the Footsteps of Graham Greene - Hardcover

Julia Llewellyn Smith lives in London. She is a former columnist for The Times, Sunday Telegraph and the Daily Express.

Chapter Two - Sierra Leone

The magic of the place never failed him: here he kept his foothold on the edge of a very strange continent.

The Heart of the Matter

When you check in to the brutalist concrete monolith that is the Cape Sierra Hotel in Freetown, Sierra Leone, the first thing they do is ask you for a $2000 deposit. Cash only. The beautiful receptionist smiles winningly as you count out the notes. `I'm sorry, but we have to do it,' she says. `It's in case you die before you check out.'

When I went to Sierra Leone it was the most dangerous country on earth. Civil war had been raging there for eight years. More than 50,000 people had died in the fighting. More than half the population of four million had been displaced. Tens of thousands of people had had their arms, legs, lips or ears chopped off by the rebels' machetes. Rape was common. Cannibalism had been documented. The fighting was growing fiercer by the day, with the prize of Freetown, the capital, just outside the rebels' grip.

More than anywhere in Greeneland, Sierra Leone had changed since Graham Greene's four visits there. His first was in 1935, en route to neighbouring Liberia to collect material for his travel book Journey Without Maps. His romantic hope was to catch a glimpse of primitive Man, of humanity at its purest, as it must have been before it was contaminated by civilization. He was not disappointed. `Africa', he wrote, was the `shape of the human heart'.

In 1942, Greene returned to Freetown as a spy for the Special Intelligence Services. As cover, he worked at the local police station. The city was of vital strategic importance to the Allies. The Vichy French held French Guinea next door and German agents were trying to smuggle industrial diamonds out of central Africa.

Greene was not a successful secret agent. When MI6 delivered him a large safe, he locked his code books in it but then could not reopen it. Eventually it had to be destroyed to rescue the vital codes. On another occasion, he was enthused by the idea of starting a `roaming' brothel, whose girls would debrief Vichy French officers. London gave the idea serious consideration, but in the end dismissed it as too expensive.

Life in Freetown had its ups and downs, but during his year there Greene grew to love the place. Like Scobie, the protagonist of <I>The Heart of the Matter</I>, he was given a house on the mudflats below the colonists' enclave of Hill Station. It was overrun with cockroaches and rats. Once his cook went mad and chased the houseboy with a hatchet. On another occasion, Greene slipped and fell six feet into an open drain. He emerged covered in excrement.

Yet war hardly touched Freetown. There were blackouts, but no bombs dropped there. Wounded people from torpedoed ships were ferried ashore but the actual attacks took place hundreds of miles away. `There's an awful lot of time around in a country like this,' Scobie says, and Greene had plenty of it in which to ponder his disastrous personal life. He no longer loved his wife, Vivien, yet he was also tiring of his mistress, Dorothy Glover. Both made him feel trapped and guilty. He toyed with the idea of suicide.

Ultimately, however, Freetown was one of the few places where Greene's dark side disappeared. The sights, the smells and the shambles of the city relaxed and amused him. He returned in 1949, wretched about his affair with his beautiful, married mistress, Catherine Walston, but as soon as his aeroplane landed in Freetown, he felt a weight lift away. `I have loved no part of the world like this & I have loved no woman as I love you,' he wrote to Catherine. `You're my human Africa. I love your smell as I love these smells. I love your dark bush as I love the bush here, you change with the light as this place does, so one all the time is loving something different & yet the same. I want to spill myself out into you as I want to die here.'

The Heart of the Matter is the story of Henry Scobie - `an obscure policeman in an unfashionable colony' - who has an affair and then, torn between his clinging wife Louise and his young mistress Helen Rolt, kills himself. George Orwell, who hated the novel, complained: `Why should the novel have its setting in West Africa? Except that one of the characters is a Syrian trader, the whole thing might as well be happening in a London suburb.'

The novel may not say much about African politics, but it does show Greene's growing disillusionment with God which in turn contributed hugely to his political development. Scobie loves God, but the Church's generalities prove an inadequate solution to his private dilemmas. At the end of the novel, Greene fudges this tension by having his Catholic priest, Father Rank, rebuke Scobie's widow by telling her: `The Church knows all the rules. But it doesn't know what goes on in a single human heart.' Privately, however, Greene was
beginning to have less and less trust in an organization that allowed humans, both individually and collectively, to suffer.
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The African setting began to make sense to me when I considered that, like all Greene's heroes, Scobie is a lonely man whose loneliness is compounded by his surroundings, on the margin of world events. His struggles of conscience are all the more acute because they take place in a country where morality is a relative thing. Scobie finds the Sierra Leoneans impossible to police. They are inveterate liars who cannot comprehend why it is wrong to pervert justice with bribes and blackmail. `It is usually safe to assume, if the accusation is theft and there is no question of insurance, that something has at least been stolen,' Greene writes. `But here one could make no such assumption, one could draw no lines. He had known police officers whose nerves broke down in the effort to separate a single grain of incontestable truth.'

Yet today these `injustices' and `meanness' have developed into incomprehensible depravity. Greene's record of Sierra Leone is remembered by the locals as an irrelevant piece of cosy nostalgia. `The Heart of the Matter is a portrait of Freetown as it used to be, when it was a sleepy, happy-go-lucky place,' John Ganda, an academic, told me in his office in Freetown. `In those days you could stay out to the wee hours of the morning. When your brother came knocking on your door at eight o'clock at night you used to listen. But now these murderous fellows have come and made life so difficult.'

If Scobie had lived in Freetown today, fear would have banished his existential anxieties. Every time I thought about going there it was as if a shard of ice had lodged in my chest. I rang the Foreign Office for advice. `Our advice is don't go,' a spokesman said. I rang Alex Duval-Smith, the Africa correspondent of the <I>Independent</I>. `God, I don't envy you at all,' she said. I rang James Murray who worked for Oxfam in Freetown. He sounded more relaxed. `It's just like a normal city most of the time,' his voice echoed over 3000 miles.

When I rang him back on the eve of our departure, to ask about the current security situation, there was a pause too long to be blamed on the faulty telephone lines. Then an intake of breath. `Frankly,' he said. `It's very bad indeed.'
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Portland Place is one of the grandest thoroughfares in London, a tree-lined avenue a few yards from Regent's Park. It is lined with tall Georgian mansions now inhabited by multinationals and embassies. The Sierra Leonean High Commission had dirty sash windows and a peeling front door. The consular section is in the basement, the door obscured by black rubbish sacks and piles of mouldy cardboard boxes. The waiting room is lit by a dusty ¢o-watt bulb. Behind the counter are piles of tatty paperwork. A poster on the wall read: Sierra Leone - a Holiday...