1
West Africa is nobody’s idea of a dream holiday destination. This troubled region, which was once mooted as a dumping ground for transported British convicts, contains most of the world’s poorest countries and many of its least stable. Tourist attractions are sparse, amenities for travellers meagre (the convicts were eventually sent to Australia instead, West Africa deemed too disease-ridden and too uncomfortably hot even for the dregs of British society). Back home in southern England, where few people I knew had heard of Guinea-Bissau or Burkina Faso and where Sierra Leone was known only as the scene of a bitter civil war, my plans to spend half a year travelling around the three countries met with a mixture of incredulity and alarm.
In England I had carved out a comfortable life, with a mortgage, a marriage and an interesting career. I had been fortunate to stumble upon the latter when I responded to a newspaper advertisement for what was described simply as a “Good Job” but which turned out to involve working with eminent American professors to research and write about ways of tackling the problems of poor countries. Having no particular calling or ambition but thinking, with the naive arrogance of youth, that it would be wasteful not to put any abilities I had to a useful purpose, I buckled down, and within a few years had become sufficiently established to set up on my own. Chance had given me a leg-up, but I now felt I had some control over my destiny. I had attained contentment, and was happy with my lot.
Contentment, however, can breed boredom, and I worried that if I continued along this smooth path the slow creep of middle-age would accelerate. In my mid-thirties I retained an adolescent urge to have a life that was unconventional, unpredictable, romantic. I had a hazy notion that I could fend off stagnation by seeing and doing new things, as if, like a character in a computer game which acquires extra lives each time it completes a task, consuming new experiences would somehow buttress me against time’s onslaught.
In the past I had sated this need through travel (I had inherited a certain restlessness from my father, a peripatetic dealer in antique scientific instruments who on returning from his innumerable buying trips abroad would delight in showing me the globes, astrolabes and sextants that had guided voyagers of centuries past). But long trips to India, Turkey and South Africa had become steadily less fulfilling, with a diminishing return in extra lives. As I grew older and harder to impress, and as globalisation made these countries more like what I knew at home, I felt that travelling in them had become too easy. Whether it was the last, desperate throes of youth or the first symptoms of a mid-life crisis I am unsure (they are perhaps the same thing), but I now found myself confronted with a new yearning: to jettison comfort and control and advance to the next stage of the game, the next level of intensity.
I cast about for a means of soothing this itch, and soon had another lucky break. A chance trip to the West African nation of Ghana to write about a malaria programme was to introduce me to a part of the world which, as well as giving me the convulsive experience I was seeking, would force me to question much of what I thought I had learned in my work. Africa’s western reaches are widely considered its most inhospitable and least attractive. A friend of mine, an old Africa hand, warned me that ‘nobody goes there unless they have to,’ and the little I was able to glean from my preparatory reading (there were few recent books in English and most of those in French dated from the colonial era) suggested his gloominess was justified. The region offered few luxuries to the visitor - paved roads were scarce, electricity and water supplies anaemic, and there were minimal facilities in the way of hotels and restaurants. Grinding discomfort, on the other hand, was easy to come by. Coastal West Africa is hot, humid and a fruitful hunting ground for lethal diseases. The interior is bone-dry, witheringly poor, and prone to devastating famines. Both coast and hinterland, moreover, are chronically unpredictable. History is still in the making, nothing is settled or certain. Governments rise and fall, wars erupt and subside, people live and die. At all times there is a sense that from one minute to the next a sudden tremor, a small twist of the kaleidoscope, could transform the social and political landscape beyond recognition, reshaping entire countries, entire lives.
Ghana in many ways lived up to this image - hot, poor and ramshackle, it boasts few monuments, palaces or museums, and travel around it can be exhausting. But during my month-long stay I saw that there was more to the country than dilapidation. As the sun and the heat and the damp ate away ravenously at everything humans had made, Ghanaians appeared to be fighting off decay in a stubborn display of vitality. There was music everywhere, upbeat, joyful music that lifted you above the surrounding squalor. There was bustle, movement, commerce, noise. To the visitor there was warmth and kindness. In a remote northern village a blind old woman performed a little shuffling dance to welcome me to her crumbling, mud-built compound. At a pavement bar in the capital, where I sat watching acrobats performing outlandish feats in the oil-lit street, a group of skinny boys on an adjacent table treated me to a plate of kebabs. And in yet another hour-long traffic jam on the way home from work, as lilting hip-life tunes floated on the sticky, petrol-fumed air, smiling hawkers ribbed me good-naturedly as I refused their offers of chewing gum, mattresses and seemingly everything else in between. These unfamiliar and beguiling encounters, the poise and spirit of the people, convinced me that West Africa was worth getting to know, and the idea of an extended visit began to take root in my mind.
Ghana challenged my preconceptions. In my work I had written about Africa’s many problems – disease, poverty, bad governments, and so on – and on television I had seen the terrible images of starvation and war and genocide. But Ghana presented a different picture, suggesting that the continent was more complex, and therefore more interesting, than I and many other outsiders assumed. For years I thought I had been working to better the lot of people in poor countries, but I realised I lacked a strong enough sense of how life there was really lived. It occurred to me that a journey around Africa’s western fringes could have a more constructive purpose than satisfying my self-indulgent craving for adventure. What did West Africans talk about? What do they do every day? How are they adjusting to the onrush of modernity that is transforming the rest of the developing world? I felt I needed a deeper understanding of this neglected corner of the planet, and thought that perhaps, by writing about it, I might help bring its inhabitants’ lives a little closer to ours.
As I began to plan a trip, I discovered that Ghana’s near-neigh-bours Sierra Leone, Burkina Faso and Guinea-Bissau were the poorest countries in the world. Of the seven billion people on earth, the citizens of these small, seldom-visited backwaters were the very worst off, the least fortunate. This was Africa at its most exacting. In these ill-starred lands, things that we in the West take for granted – being born without killing yourself or your mother, reaching your first birthday, surviving colds, diarrhoea and other minor illnesses, reading and writing, toilets, switching on a light or turning a tap, eating a regular meal – all these things are privileges few are accorded. Slavery, colonial plunder, dictatorship and war had left the three countries reeling. More recent afflictions, from Islamic terrorism and international organised crime to climate change and the population boom, threatened to thwart their hopes of rising out of poverty.
Volatility, however, brings highs as well as lows, and even here, amid the most gruelling living conditions to be found anywhere, there was good news among the bad. Guinea-Bissau and Sierra Leone had recovered from crippling civil wars and defied the doomsayers by enjoying a decade of peace. Burkinabes had begun to mobilise against a despotic, violent regime, demanding greater democracy and freedom. As in Ghana, it seemed, the reality was more complex than the news headlines suggested, and I felt sure that exploring the three countries would give me a clearer picture of West African life, and a better idea of how the world’s poorest people make it through the day.
Having decided where to go, there remained one final task: to convince my wife, Ebru, that this was a journey worth making. Although she had accompanied me on previous visits to India and South Africa, and although herself brought up in far from affluent surroundings in south-eastern Turkey, Ebru was nervous about my choice of countries for this trip. She had heard my friend’s unenthusiastic assessment of West Africa, and a brief look at the UK Foreign Office’s website confirmed her fears (the mandarins described in vivid detail the instability and insecurity in and around the countries on our itinerary, informing us that in Guinea-Bissau alone, as well as the usual problems of crime, unsafe roads and unpreventable killer diseases, we would do well to guard against the less familiar threats of banditry, armed uprisings, land mines and Colombian drug traffickers).
My raptures over Ghana and a short holiday together in Gambia were of only limited effectiveness in assuaging Ebru’s concerns, but the combination of a curiosity kindled by the diet of African novels I passed on to her and a perception that I was too incautious to undertake the journey alone eventually persuaded her to join me. Her acquiescence came with three conditions: that we buy a plane ticket with an adjustable return date, that since she has a mortal dread of the snakes with which West Africa teems we stay in no mud huts in forests, and that we avoid rather than gravitate towards potentially life-threatening situations. Delighted to have her company for what would be a long and difficult trip, I gratefully agreed to her demands (although as it turned out, only the first two of them would be met). We booked our flights before she could change her mind.
Bafatá provides a gentle introduction. Guinea-Bissau’s second city, home to just twenty-two thousand inhabitants, is little more than a large village. Built on a black rock above a bend in the languorous Gêba River, it is slowly emptying out. The old colonial quarter hugs the riverbank, snoozing in a permanent siesta. Crumbling two-storey Portuguese villas shade its deserted cobbled streets, their white paint peeling off and balustraded balconies sagging in the heat. Most are abandoned, their roofs caved in, door and window apertures gaping like the mouths of sleeping grandmothers, but a few have been occupied, by child-heavy Guinean families who have replaced terracotta roof tiles with corrugated-iron sheets and whose women hang clothes washed in the river over the balconies to dry.
At the water’s edge, life proceeds slowly. Boys in torn T-shirts fish with bamboo rods, a man rinses a bicycle, young women soap their naked bodies. In an adjacent, weed-strewn field, as kites circle overhead in the pearly afternoon light, a child and his mother hack at the dry soil with tiny hoes. The far bank of the river, perhaps seventy yards away, is thick with forest. In the shade of its trees an orange-breasted Egyptian plover pecks in the mud. The plover has mystical qualities – according to Herodotus its ancestors were allowed to pluck scraps of meat from between the teeth of crocodiles; that it could maintain such a close relationship with such a dangerous animal was regarded as proof of the bird’s special powers.
A few yards from the riverside, between an abandoned covered market with arched Moorish entranceways and a children’s playground where rusting chains which once bore swings now hang loose, a small, unobtrusive statue offers a clue to the state of neglect that cloaks the town. For a brief period in the 1970s Guinea-Bissau shuffled out of obscurity and onto the world stage, as the country’s bitter fight for independence from Portugal became a cause célèbre for students and leftist movements in Europe and America. The struggle was led by Bafatá’s most famous son, Amílcar Cabral. It is his bust that stands near the market, seemingly the only new construction in the old town in the last forty years. (Thousands of miles away in a different world, another monument, Amílcar Cabral Court, a scruffy 1970s apartment block which today houses refugees from East Africa, still stands near Paddington Station in London).
The Portuguese were the first Europeans to establish a colony in West Africa. In the late fifteenth century they settled the hitherto uninhabited Cape Verde archipelago, three hundred miles off the coast, and began using it as a base for trade. For the next four hundred years their only use for what is now Guinea-Bissau was as a source of slaves, first for cultivating the islands and later for export across the Atlantic. It was only after the Berlin Conference of 1884, at which European powers carved up the continent into private colonial fiefdoms, that the Portuguese pressed for greater control. Their wars of “pacification” lasted until the 1930s, when the “savages” were finally brought to heel. The campaigns were long and brutal. One Portuguese officer had to be withdrawn to Lisbon when his barbarity proved too much for even his superiors to stomach; his methods, which would be deployed again a century later in Sierra Leone’s civil war, included burning villages, massacring civilians, gouging out eyes and shooting pregnant women in the womb.
Having been the first to arrive, the Portuguese were the most reluctant to leave. The 1930 Colonial Act had emphasised the importance to the Portuguese nation of ‘civilising the indigenous population’ of its overseas territories, but in practice the colonisers did nothing to elevate their subjects. Ryszard Kapuscinski, the great Polish writer on Africa, remarked that in Luanda, Angola, ‘in the course of four hundred years, the Portuguese did not dig a single well for potable water, or illuminate the streets with lanterns.’ The Patriarch of Lisbon announced in 1960 that the colonies needed schools, but only within limits, ‘to teach the natives to write, to read and to count, but not to make them doctors.’ In Guinea-Bissau, even this was considered a step too far: at independence in 1974, only one in fifty Guineans could read and write.
But despite Portugal’s apparent indifference to her colony, as the winds of change blew across the continent after the Second World War and Britain and France let go of their West African territories, Guineans who expected the same treatment were to be disappointed. Antonio Salazar, the Portuguese dictator, was unwilling to accept his country’s diminished status in Europe, and believed that holding onto the colonies would demonstrate her continued international clout. While the French and British moved Africans into positions of power, therefore, in preparation for a peaceful handover, nationalists in Portugal’s territories were ignored, and all their demands for dialogue dismissed.
Guineans who yearned for freedom would have to seek other means to achieve it, but although weak relative to France and Britain, Portugal was a mighty force compared with Guinea-Bissau. The overwhelming majority of Guineans could afford to eat only what they grew themselves; most lived on the brink of starvation. Disease was rife, with average life expectancy just thirty-eight years. The population seemed too enfeebled even to think of rebellion, and the idea that a ragtag group of impoverished peasants might overcome his well-equipped military was of little concern to the strongman Salazar.
2
Born in 1924, Amílcar Cabral left Bafatá for the Cape Verde islands as a young child. His family’s poverty was nearly fatal, for when he was in his teens Cape Verde was hit by a series of droughts and famines. Cabral would later estimate that between 1940 and 1948 famine killed a quarter of the islands’ population. ‘I saw people die of starvation,’ he said. ‘This is the fundamental reason for my revolt.’
He was in no doubt that the colonisers were to blame. At the age of twenty-one he won a scholarship to study agronomy in Lisbon, and it was here that his political consciousness awakened. Many Cape Verdeans felt closer to Portugal than to Africa, but contact with other educated young Africans shifted Cabral’s perspective. Inspired by black American civil rights leaders and by “Négritude“, a concept developed by French West African intellectuals who rejected colonialism and argued that black culture was the equal of white, he began to meet regularly with like-minded Lisbon-based Guineans, Mozambicans and Angolans. Their aim was “re-Africanisation”. At the meetings they discussed African literature, geography and culture, and made covert plans for a reconquest. Cabral, a charismatic, popular participant whose goatee beard, woollen cap and half-rim glasses gave him the classic look of a twentieth century intellectual revolutionary, was becoming convinced that his future lay not in Europe but in freeing his continent from the imperialist yoke.
His conviction was strengthened on his return to Guinea-Bissau in 1952. He took a job with the colonial service as an agricultural engineer, and was asked by the Governor of Guinea to conduct a survey of the territory. He travelled the entire country, studying land use, crop production and trading conditions. For the first time he got to know his homeland. He saw the ubiquity and depth of rural poverty, and noted how Portuguese demands for peanut and cashew exports to balance the colonial budget were hastening soil erosion. Guinean farmers responded to these demands by burning fields to speed the soil’s recovery and cutting down forests to create more space. Such methods – effective in the short-term but devastating when used over long periods – exhausted the soil, bleeding it of precious nutrients; the colonisers’ insistence on intensive cultivation of cash crops was jeopardising Guinea-Bissau’s future for Portugal’s temporary gain.
In 1956 Cabral founded the Partido Africano da Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde. Like its South African contemporary, the African National Congress, the PAIGC began by agitating peacefully but clandestinely for change. Its members infiltrated trade unions and organised industrial action. An early strike demanding higher pay for dock workers was successful, but after police quashed a further protest by shooting dead fifty dockers at the Pidjiguiti waterfront in the capital, Bissau, Cabral realised peaceful dissent was futile. Like Angola and Mozambique, Portugal’s other African colonies, Guinea-Bissau would have to fight for its freedom.
Leading up the rock away from old Bafatá is a once-tarred road. It is flanked on one side by dark forest and on the other by wasteland and a few crumbling buildings on whose porches sit pairs of Guinean men smoking and chatting. Sleepy donkeys pull carts up and down the hill. Occasional trucks bringing water or removing sewage traverse in a wide zigzag to avoid the numerous potholes, many of which are so deep that the red earth shows through. A thin breeze whispers up from the river.
At the top of the hill sits the African quarter. When the Portuguese moved out of the colonial town on the riverbank, no Guineans moved in. Instead of occupying the large, comfortable European villas with their bougainvillea-filled gardens and airy balconies, the Africans remained where they were, huddled in their simple, ramshackle township on the great black rock. The quarter’s main street winds between crepuscular shops built of wood and corrugated iron. Women sit in the dust by the road, touting little piles of fruit and bags of peanuts laid out on cloths on the ground before them. There are few cars, so shoppers and idlers walk down the middle of the street, many of them in groups of two or three, smiling and talking, or haggling with hawkers. Compared with the old part of town it is bustling, but after eighty yards the activity peters out and gives way again to quiet.
Wandering through one day in the fading late afternoon sun, we buy oranges from a young girl. She has peeled off the skin, leaving a rough white orb. She lops the top off with a knife and, in the West African way, we squeeze the sweet juice into our mouths, spitting the surfacing pips onto the ground. The girl has the spindly, undeveloped limbs of a child; she appears no older than eight or nine. She wears a blue and white school dress, her hair tied in short plaits pushed back from her brow. Delighted to be selling to “brancos”, she tells us she comes here after school every day to sell oranges. Each orange costs twenty-five francs (about six cents). She has about twenty in her bucket. If she has a field day and, having fended off stiff competition from other vendors, sells an entire bucketful, she will earn just over a dollar – and that does not take into account the cost to her of buying or growing the oranges or the less direct, longer-term costs of tiredness and time spent away from her homework. Her mother sells bananas nearby for about seven cents each. On a good but not stellar day, they might make a profit of a dollar or so between them, just enough to buy a kilo of rice.
Further along the street we come upon a roadside coffee shack. We push aside the old grey sheet that shelters the interior from the heat and dust and take seats on a wooden bench. We order Nescafés. On the opposite side of the single table sits an old man. He is thin and frail, the skin of his face drawn and slightly dry, but his small eyes are bright and alert, giving him a cunning, somewhat feline air. He wears a white shirt, its undone top buttons exposing his bony chest, over baggy blue trousers and flip-flops, and sits bent-backed with his legs crossed and hands clasped lightly around his knee. He greets us with a smile, and asks to look at our guidebook. He peers at it, holding it upside down – few of his generation can read – and explains in Portuguese that he speaks no English.
He introduces himself as Eduardo Gomes. He is a carpenter by trade, and although old does not yet consider himself retired. ‘If I could afford the materials I’d work,’ he says, ‘but I have no money to buy wood.’ His first wife died a few years back and he has recently married a younger woman. He had six children, but two died; his latest son, with his new wife, is a toddler. It is a struggle to feed his young family and he relies on his older children for financial support, but despite his troubles he is cheerful and sprightly, and chuckles often as we talk.
He tells me about the war of independence. When it began, he was a young man living in the capital. He had no hesitation in joining the nationalist cause. Like many older Guineans, Eduardo has bitter memories of Portuguese rule. ‘They did nothing to raise us up,’ he complains. ‘They treated Africans very badly. When I was seven my father had several big rice fields near Bissau, and eight dugout canoes to take rice to the Bijagós islands off the coast and bring palm wine back to the city. A Portuguese man called Manuel Pinto came one day and took all my father’s fields. He took his canoes too, and his rice, goats, pigs and chickens. My father had no choice but to give them all up. Pinto was strong and because he was Portuguese he could do what he wanted.’ He sips at his coffee. The young coffee seller sits beside him, washing glasses in a tub of soapy but grey water. ‘My father lost his strength after that,’ Eduardo continues. ‘It changed him. We became poor overnight, and he had to take me out of school. From that time I hated the Portuguese.’ Although the years must have diluted the anger, a trace of hatred still flashes in his sharp little eyes.
He joined the PAIGC soon after its formation. When the fifty dockers were massacred he was working near the Pidjiguiti waterfront. He saw the police running towards the port and heard the shooting. ‘It was then that everyone realised we had to get rid of the Portuguese. Everyone saw what they did at Pidjiguiti. There is a Guinean saying: When your house is burning, it’s no use beating the tom-toms. We had a meeting of Africans and said we would fight them – maybe they would kill us but we would fight.’
3
The nationalists faced an enemy with vastly superior firepower and manpower. Portugal had shown at Pidjiguiti that it could keep a lid on protest in the capital, that it was strong enough and well enough organised to snuff out unrest in the cities. Amílcar Cabral and his colleagues realised this, and switched their attention instead to the countryside. Cabral suspected that the colonial machine would not be so formidable outside the main population centres, and that if forced to stray too far from its urban fastness it might be vulnerable. Taking his lead from guerrilla campaigns in Latin America, therefore, he turned his back on the cities, and plotted a peasant revolt.
But how to mobilise the masses? How to bridge that huge gulf between the educated, cosmopolitan city-dwellers who would lead the rebellion and the conservative, illiterate villagers whose participation was essential for its success? The peasants had known nothing but colonialism; their instinct, inculcated over the centuries, was to defer to rather than resist authority. Revolution would require putting down their tools and interrupting the life-giving cycle of planting, nurturing and harvesting. It would mean surrendering the little security they had for the possibility – and it was no more than that – of a better future. Most villagers had little interest in who would govern them from a far-off capital; they were more preoccupied with basic survival, with finding enough food to make it through the week.
Cabral’s time touring the country had sensitised him to these difficulties. He was an engaged and understanding listener (‘he was interested in the personal life of any individual,’ one of his successors would say of him after his death), and in his meetings with chiefs and farmers he had felt and learned to soften country-dwellers‘ mistrust of sophisticated urbanites. He spoke the peasants’ language and trained his supporters to do likewise; although a socialist himself, he refrained from using Marxist jargon in his speeches. His recruitment methods were based on friendly persuasion, not force. From his base in Conakry in neighbouring Guinea, to which he had fled to escape the Portuguese secret police, he sent out envoys into Guinea-Bissau’s villages to hold discussions with chiefs and their subjects. His followers worked their way patiently around the country, cajoling and negotiating, listening and reassuring.
They backed up their words with actions. ‘Always remember,’ the pragmatic Cabral told his party, ‘that the people are not fighting for ideas…they fight and accept the sacrifices demanded by the struggle in order to gain material advantages, to live better and in peace, to benefit from progress, and for the better future of their children. National liberation, the struggle against colonialism, the construction of peace, progress and independence are hollow words unless they can be translated into a real improvement of living conditions.’ The party set up schools and hospitals in the villages; it established health brigades – mobile training teams which taught villagers the rudiments of hygiene, disease prevention and basic treatment; and it provided training to farmers, introducing new techniques and encouraging them to diversify away from peanuts so that they would be better protected in times of scarcity.
The nationalists recruited thousands of villagers to their guerrilla campaign, bringing together people from dozens of ethnic groups and speaking numerous different tongues. All were unified by the desire to evict the colonial oppressors. Like their contemporaries in South Africa’s ANC, they began the armed struggle with acts of sabotage. Later, as their numbers grew and they gained in confidence, they attacked enemy barracks, police stations and military convoys. The Portuguese, overstretched as Cabral had predicted, lost one district after another. The south and parts of the north were quickly liberated, but the cities remained under the colonists’ control.
The Portuguese response drove more peasants to the nationalists’ side. Unable to match the guerrillas on the ground, they turned to an aerial campaign, bombing rice fields and dikes and, following the fashion of the time, napalming liberated villages. They set up networks of informers, executed prisoners, and tortured and killed villagers suspected of harbouring nationalists. They deliberately targeted the rebels’ schools and hospitals, which were forced to move several times a year. Driven out of their villages, many peasants were at first too afraid to flee into the forests, where dangerous spirits were thought to lurk, but after Cabral convinced them that the spirits too wanted rid of the colonisers, they took cover under the trees and launched attacks from their shade.
In contrast to the Portuguese, the rebels conducted a clean war. Captured soldiers reported being well treated, and Cabral’s arguments and his troops’ comportment impressed even senior Portuguese army officials. ‘The longer a subversive war lasts,‘ mused one high-ranking officer, enunciating the growing sense of unease among his troops, ‘the more one assimilates the ideas of the enemy, the oppressed.’ As their losses accumulated, so did military dissatisfaction with the fascist government in Lisbon, now headed by the bookish Marcelo Caetano. With young Portuguese fleeing their country in droves to avoid being conscripted to what had come to be seen as a useless and unwinnable war, the first rumblings that a coup d’état might be imminent were heard at home.
By 1972 the insurgents had gained control of most of the country. Cabral compared Guinea-Bissau’s situation to that of an independent state, ‘part of the national territory of which – notably urban centres – is occupied by a foreign power.’ He described national liberation as a ‘return to history;‘ only when his country was free of foreign domination, he believed, would it resume its natural trajectory.
He would not live to see that day. On the evening of 20 January 1973, with the war almost won, he was shot dead by a colleague outside the PAIGC headquarters in Conakry. It remains unclear whether his killer, who was later executed, was recruited by disgruntled elements within the party or, more likely, by the Portuguese secret police, who had been trying to eliminate Cabral for years. But the assassination did not stop the war effort: the nationalists’ declaration of independence eight months later was recognised by the majority of United Nations member states. The following year, after the Caetano regime was overthrown in a coup, Portugal, bowing to the inevitable, recognised Guinea-Bissau as a free and independent country.
Eduardo spent much of the war in Conakry, screening new recruits to ensure they were not agents for the Portuguese secret service. On his return to Bissau he was arrested and thrown into jail, released only when the gates were flung open at independence. ‘We won because we were right,’ he says now, supping the last dregs of his coffee. ‘It is not always the hare that wins the race. Sometimes the one who starts slowly wins.’ In his words are traces of Cabral’s legacy – a unified nation proud of defeating a better equipped enemy and of conducting a clean, just war. Its totems are still in evidence today: memorials to fallen soldiers still stand in Bissau, independence and Pidjiguiti are commemorated as national holidays, and T-shirts emblazoned with Cabral’s grainy image are a common sight on young Guinean torsos.
As we stand up to leave the coffee shack, Eduardo invites us to dinner at his house. Aware of his financial straits, and not wishing to deprive him and his family of precious food, we decline. He smiles and shakes our hands, wishing us a good stay in his country. We leave him chatting to the coffee seller and head back down the darkening hill to the old town.
4
When dusk falls in Bafatá, something extraordinary happens: Guinea-Bissau’s second city, like all its other cities, towns and villages, is plunged into darkness. The shops in the African quarter are blotted out. The Portuguese villas recede into the gloom. Streetlamps hang unlit, the little wood fires kindled on the ground below them a quaint but ineffective substitute. Only the lighters of the fires are visible – everyone else is swallowed up, their dark faces and limbs melding into the night.
Since the state power company ran out of money and closed down in 2003, Guinea-Bissau has had no electricity. For nearly a decade, no fan has turned, no streetlight shone. Ice, refrigeration, the very concept of coolness are mere memories. Businesses cannot light their stores, power their machines or try out new technologies. Families, cast back in time, rely on candles and oil lamps to illuminate their homes. Even the wealthiest are affected: to charge their mobile phones government ministers must take them to internet cafés, which unlike their ministries have functioning generators. Seen from space at night, the country is a black hole.
We pick our way carefully down the potholed hill and slowly our eyes adjust. Ebru points out the dazzling equatorial starscape up above, the pinpricks of light almost merging in intense, brilliant clusters. At Cabral’s statue we turn left along a cobbled lane parallel to the river and come to Bafatá’s only restaurant. It is easy to find in the darkness because it has the old town’s lone generator and is suffused with a faint electric glow, like a single light in the bottom of a large swimming pool. On the cracked and uneven pavement outside it, four young children sit around a table, taking advantage of the lamp above the door to do their homework. Further along the street their mother sits in front of a house, cooking over a low fire. The children’s chatter and the chirruping of crickets rest lightly on the pregnant silence of the African night.
The owners of the restaurant are the last Portuguese in Bafatá. Dona Celia, a small, motherly figure now in her late fifties, her grey hair tied tightly back from her tanned, sun-worn face, came here in the final years of the colony to marry José, who had stayed on after completing his military service. Most of their compatriots left for the motherland in the early 1970s, as defeat in war and independence loomed. A handful clung on, but without their privileged status and with the economy in post-oil crisis freefall life was hard. One by one they gave up the struggle and boarded the plane home. A brief but destructive civil war in 1998, which saw foreigners evacuated by boat to Senegal and Guinea-Bissau’s already tiny economy contracting by a quarter, flushed out the stragglers.
‘It is too late for us to go home now,‘ says Dona Celia as we sit outside on heavy wooden Iberian chairs, the looming darkness kept at bay by the fly-flecked light above us. ‘Portugal is a better place because it has electricity and facilities, but I’ve been here too long. I’m used to it now. It would be hard to go back.’ Three of her four children have moved to Europe, and the youngest, Bruno, a strapping, dark-eyed teenager whose energy and verve sleepy Bafatá could never contain, will follow as soon as he finishes school. ‘You can’t make money here,’ he explains, standing beside his doting mother‘s chair. ‘There are no jobs. I have problems with epilepsy so I need money for treatment. There is no free healthcare in Guinea-Bissau and the nearest hospital is seventy miles away. If I want to get on in life, I have to go to Portugal.‘
The smell of woodsmoke drifts up from the fire along the street. Dona Celia brings us huge plates of omelette and spaghetti, the only item on today’s menu. (We have ordered in advance. The restaurant has few customers and to keep down fuel costs the generator is powered up only at night. This renders refrigeration impossible and means food must be bought in and served on the same day; since buying too much would be wasteful, diners must give warning of what they will need.) After we finish eating, the father of the homeworking children, Anton, a studious-looking young teacher in round, metal-rimmed glasses, wanders up the street and takes a seat next to us. He greets Dona Celia and tells us how fond he and his family are of her and José. He even named one of his daughters after her, he says, the general Guinean distrust of the Portuguese as a nation running up against the warmth of the individual human relationship.
As a teacher, Anton is theoretically in a privileged position, for unlike nearly all his countrymen he has a salaried job. In Guinea-Bissau, however, employment does not guarantee financial security. ‘It is hard to make ends meet,’ he tells us, brushing away a large mosquito that has been droning around his head. ‘The government doesn’t pay us on time. Sometimes they go months without paying, and then they only give us one or two months’ wages. I worry that I won’t be able to put all my children through school. Even clothing and feeding them is difficult when I don’t receive my salary.’
I ask him what has happened to Bafatá. He knows instantly what I mean. It is not just the Portuguese quarter that is decaying, he says: the African town is also thinning out. The city used to have electricity, and its roads were paved and intact. A cotton factory employed four thousand local people, and many more cultivated rice on the surrounding flatlands. But the post-independence socialist government, carried away by dreams of rapid Soviet-style industrialisation, neglected the hinterland in favour of the capital. There was no investment in irrigation or in upgrading agricultural techniques. Rural roads were left to crumble, making it impossible to take produce to market (despite a doubling of the population, the country has the same road mileage today as in 1974). Grand promises to stimulate the economy failed. In 1982 the government declared a “Year of Production and Productivity”; 1983 was the “The Year of Action, not Words”. Neither lived up to its name – in 1987 the same government, unabashed, announced another “Year of Production”.
The cotton factory in Bafatá has closed down, Anton tells us. Rice, once sufficiently plentiful to export, is now imported from Thailand and Vietnam. Thousands have left for Bissau, abandoning the second city to the vultures and the encroaching bush. Early the next morning we make the same journey. As we are humping our bags up the pockmarked hill towards the transport park, a man in a pick-up truck pulls up beside us and gives us a lift.
5
In Bissau we stay at a hostel run by evangelical Christian missionaries. Very few tourists or foreign businesspeople come to Guinea-Bissau, so there is no competition to attract their custom. Hotels are therefore expensive. The mission hostel is cheap, but as the only non-missionary guests we have the additional cost of guilt. There are probing questions at first, suspicious glances, particularly from the Americans, but my book seems to meet with approval (a young woman from Ohio promises to pray for it to ‘open people’s eyes to what life is like here’), and we are for a time left in peace while they go about their good deeds.
For many young Guineans from the interior, Bissau is the promised land, a great metropolis where their dreams will be realised, where they will escape the eternal agricultural treadmill and step into a modern, Westernised world of possibilities and change. At independence three-quarters of today’s city was uninhabited bush, but in the past thirty years its population has quadrupled. A great flood of humanity has converged on the capital, gushing in from all corners of the country. Like a deserting spouse who has grown out of a long marriage, rural Guinea-Bissau has gathered up its belongings, said goodbye to its past and decamped for the city. All the emptying villages and provincial towns of the hinterland, all the abandoned rice fields, the forlorn forest hamlets with their decomposing mud houses – all come down to this.
What has triggered this exodus? What has ruptured the ancient cycle of planting and harvesting, the slow rhythms of village life, the unquestioned acceptance of the cards life deals? Guinea-Bissau once had a proud agricultural tradition. In pre-colonial times, while most of Africa was struggling to feed itself, Guineans, expert in wet-rice farming and using manure from cattle and goats as fertiliser, produced surpluses of rice, yams and millet. They traded these staples with early Portuguese explorers, and exported malaguetta peppers and kola nuts across the Sahara to North Africa. An eighteenth century English visitor to the country was dazzled by its great orchards of ‘orange, lime, lemon, fig, guava, banana, cocoa nut, and plantain trees, and also pine apples, water melons, cucumbers and cassava plants.’
Slavery and then colonialism disrupted this Eden. With the advent of the Atlantic slave trade, harvesting souls became more lucrative than harvesting crops; after its demise the European colonisers transferred the subjugation of Africans from the international to the domestic arena, forcing their vassals to grow crops for export. Farming had once been a venerable occupation, regarded by most Guineans as the only truly honourable form of work. Now it was reduced to drudgery, a mindless, joyless slog for a hated foreign master.
Independence could not halt the slide. Amílcar Cabral’s return to history never materialised. The farmers who were supposed to lead this revival and shepherd their nation to prosperity were stopped in their tracks by a new blight, for the colonists’ departure coincided with a population explosion. Health improvements in the West had filtered through to Africa – vaccination against measles, smallpox, whooping cough and tuberculosis prevented millions of early deaths; improved hygiene and new treatments for diarrhoea and other maladies saved the lives of millions more. Instead of dying within a few months of birth, African babies began to make it to childhood, and then to adolescence. Women who had previously had eight or ten pregnancies in the hope that one or two infants would survive suddenly found themselves with five or six healthy children to bring up. There was a continent-wide baby boom -Guinea-Bissau’s population, which before independence had remained static for decades, more than doubled in forty years.
Although for their parents a bigger household means more hands to help in the fields and at home, for the children it is a disaster. Food must be shared between more mouths, so each child grows up less strong and healthy. Parental time and money must be parcelled out, meaning less attention is paid to the health and education of individual children. And when the baby boomers reach adulthood and ask the village elders for a plot of land to farm, there is nothing left to give them. While communities had remained stable and small there was enough land to go around; sons took over their fathers’ fields, plots were passed down from one generation to another. But as the population mushrooms and the ranks of young adults swell, land must be sliced more thinly, between five or six claimants rather than one or two. Where farmers had once had sufficient acreage to produce and sell surplus crops, now there is barely enough space to grow enough to eat, and with plots ever more cramped it becomes uneconomical to use machines or animals to cultivate them. The boomers must bend over the ground themselves, and hack at the dry soil with hoes. They know that these methods cannot compete with the more efficient, mechanised techniques of farmers in less crowded countries, but there is no alternative – they have run out of room.
The problems for farmers do not end there. To keep up with the rest of the world, and to be able to offer their crops at prices that will attract domestic and overseas consumers, Guinean farmers do not just need the same amount of land; they need more land. The Portuguese demanded that their subjects grow cash crops – peanuts and, later, cashews – which would be sold in Europe to balance the colonial budget. But cash crops are at the mercy of global forces, particularly if, like Guineans, you lack the know-how and technology to offer anything more sophisticated than the raw product. Manufactured goods are constantly refined and developed – even a humble peanut can be cooked, flavoured, combined and packaged in numerous different ways. But the quality of raw produce improves little if at all over time; a cashew nut plucked from a tree in the 1970s is no different from one picked today. While the price of manufactured goods increases, therefore, that of raw commodities declines. Since independence the value of the unprocessed crops in which African farmers specialise has collapsed: between 1987 and 2007, the price of a ton of cashews halved.
To earn the same income as he did in the 1980s, then, a modern-day Guinean cashew farmer must plant double the number of trees. To do this he must either use more land - but there is no more land - or work his existing acreage more intensively. He tries the second approach, but quickly runs up against the exhaustion of the soil foreseen by Cabral. It becomes impossible for the farmer (who now, remember, also has more children to feed) to maintain his standard of living.
As farming becomes ever more difficult and unattractive, the country dweller casts around for alternatives. In the past, when everybody lived in villages and all life revolved around agriculture, he had nowhere to go; now, however, drawn by the promise of jobs in industry, government or the aid sector, a few intrepid pioneers have taken the plunge and left the bush for the capital. From time to time they come back to their villages to visit. They bring with them the trappings of success: a moped, a mobile phone, perhaps a music player. They wear different -modern - clothes: jeans, baseball caps, training shoes, short skirts. And they tell villagers of the bounties of the city, of the abundant jobs, the shops overflowing with exotic foreign goods, the market stalls teeming with fish and meat.
Our country-dweller is entranced. At last there is a solution to his problems. His choice is simple: he can stay in the village and struggle or move to the city and thrive. Tired of breaking his back in the pitiless fields for tiny, and dwindling, rewards, he follows the pioneers to the capital.
6
The old European quarter of Bissau saw few of the new arrivals. A low-rise town of wide avenues and pastel-coloured colonial villas and mansions, it nestles sleepily below a canopy of palms and shady mango trees, its western edge divided from the still, sun-pounded ocean by a thin green line of tangled mangroves. It must once have been elegant, with European traders thronging the port area and colonial officials and their frayed wives sipping at sundowners and peering from their balconies at the street life below, but after the Portuguese fled it lay vacant: with the exception of a few embassies and government ministries, and despite a massive influx of African villagers to the city, old Bissau never filled up. Instead of occupying the grand and spacious brick-built villas, the peasants, the inheritors of the colonial legacy, built their own city, a city of mud, thatch and tin, adjacent to but separate from the abode of their former masters. Where the colonisers had clung to the shoreline, which provided proximity to home, access to trade goods and occasional relief from the exhausting heat, the new arrivals spread inland, back towards where they had come from. The focal point of life in the capital shifted, and the Portuguese quarter was reduced to an irrelevant relic, a mere curiosity for the dribble of visitors who pass through on their way somewhere else.
Today the old town is silent and almost deserted. In Bissau as in Bafatá, the Portuguese buildings are collapsing, many of them no longer safe to live in even if anyone felt so inclined. Nature, never long kept at bay in the tropics, has crept back in and filled the gap. Thick bushes occupy living rooms, cracks in plastered facades expose red-brick scars, the slender trunks of climbing trees wind like pythons through windows. The central market too has been vacated and begun the process of decay; a few stall-holders have moved onto the pavement outside, where they charge high prices to stray tourists and newly arrived aid workers. A couple of cafés on Che Guevara Square see a steady traffic of politicians, World Bank staffers and South American drug traffickers, but otherwise life is elsewhere.
Those newly arrived from the country brought it with them on their backs. Today’s capital is a patchwork of villages. Neighbourhoods are dominated by a single tribe, a single family, or by migrants from a single village. The dividing lines between them are impermeable: within the lines, everybody knows one another, and knows one another’s business; beyond them, although still in the same city, you are an alien, a stranger - the people you encounter live by different rules and with different customs. Your loyalty, unchanged since time immemorial, is not to these outsiders but to those inside the lines, to your fellow villagers. That they, like you, have left the countryside behind is not important; you belong to your family and to your ancestral community, not yet to your city.
As in the countryside, life is lived outdoors, in the unpaved streets that are indistinguishable from the lanes that wind through forest hamlets. The mission is in one of the poorest bairros, a quarter dominated by the Pepel, a tribe of fishermen and farmers from the malarial swamps north of Bissau. It lies at the end of a dusty track that zigzags between rusting metal fences, shacks selling liquor or basic provisions, patches of untidy scrub, and a few simple one-room houses with tin roofs. Pigs rummage in the drifts of refuse that have washed up against the buildings. Children throw stones listlessly at stray dogs. The squalor is interrupted only by the few mango and neem trees that have not yet been felled for firewood or construction, and by the tiny, bright-red firefinches that flit among their leaves.
There are people everywhere, re-enacting village scenes in the city. Teenage girls sit in front of their houses, plaiting each other’s hair. Children draw water from a well and wash in the open. Young men play chequers or table football, or lie sleeping on porches. Housewives in headscarves and patterned skirts bend at the waist like pairs of compasses to sweep the dust with palm-frond brooms or scrub clothes against wooden washboards; they hang the clean clothes to dry on lines suspended from trees. At the far end of the street, near the mission, a small boy lies face down on an old tyre, observing the road intently like a cat stalking a bird. A huddled old lady, white hair cropped short above her wrinkled brow, sits near him on the ground, selling peanuts and lumps of charcoal. A few yards further on, a middle-aged man, newly washed, sits on a chair pontificating, naked but for a blue towel wrapped around his waist; three women, perhaps his wives, crouch beside him over a little stove, cooking pungent-smelling fish. There is chatter, laughter and an occasional raised voice scolding an errant child. Pied crows squawk, piglets snort. But the sounds are not of a city. The roar of traffic is absent, the road too uneven and the dust too deep for most cars. There is no electricity, so no television or stereo blares. And there are no sirens, since the police have no vehicles. The only sign of industry is a tenebrous baker’s oven, sheltered from the dust by rusting corrugated-iron walls; the baker runs out of loaves in the early morning, and spends the rest of the day sprawled on his mud floor snoozing in the gloom.
The village ways die hard. Like their rural cousins, the people of the bairro are wary of strangers. Our arrival in their midst is greeted with hostile stares and muffled discussion, as if we were brash Londoners striding into a remote country pub. Modern Guineans are unused to white visitors, but their ancestors’ experiences have not been forgotten. As we walk down the dirt road, attempting vainly to be inconspicuous, a few children shout ‘branco’ (white man) or ‘oporto’ (Portuguese) at us from the safety of doorways. But their parents do not return our smiles and greetings, instead staring at us blankly or uttering disapproving or mirthful comments to their friends. We have a bleak sensation of being very far from home.
Slowly, however, and perhaps won over by our dogged refusal to ignore them back, the people of the neighbourhood begin to lower their defences. In many poor countries merely having white skin assures immediate attention and popularity, but in Guinea-Bissau you must earn affection. At first one or two of the more confident men return our greetings. The youngest children sally forth from their doorways to hold our hands or follow us home. We buy peanuts from the old lady, who thereafter salutes us with a cheery smile. After a fortnight, people begin to wish us good day; those who speak Portuguese ask how things are going and whether we are missionaries (in a community that is predominantly animist, they seem pleased that we are not). Some days later a serious, rugged-looking man, who has never previously acknowledged us from his street corner seat on a plastic jerrycan, suddenly beckons us over. He pulls up two more jerrycans and offers us a glass of sweet green tea that he has brewed in a little red kettle on a metal stove. Other young men come up and join us. Relieved at gaining some degree of acceptance, we chat happily with them for a while, about the mission, our trip and the situation in Guinea, and when we rise to leave, our new friend refuses to accept payment for the tea.
7
Since there is no power and the heat quickly rots anything perishable, Bissau’s residents must lay in a new supply of food each day. Every morning, therefore, we walk down the paved but potholed road that leads from our bairro to Bissau’s main market at Bandim. The market is a labyrinth, its narrow dark lanes winding between rickety wooden stalls whose tin roofs jut out threateningly at throat height. A press of brightly-dressed shoppers haggles noisily over tomatoes, onions, smoked fish and meat. The vendors know their customers – you can buy individual eggs, teabags, cigarettes, sugar lumps and chilli peppers; bread sellers will cut a baguette in half if that is all you can afford; potatoes are divided into groups of three, tomatoes into pyramids of four; matches are sold in bundles of ten, along with a piece of the striking surface torn from the box. In the days leading up to Christmas and New Year, which all Guineans celebrate regardless of their religious persuasion, the market is crowded and chaotic, but after the turn of the year, when all the money has been spent, it is empty and silent.
Only the alcohol sellers do a year-round trade. On a half-mile stretch of the paved road there are thirteen bars or liquor stores. They sell cheap Portuguese red wine, bottled lager, palm wine and cana, a strong rum made with cashew apples. Bissau has a drink problem. Its inhabitants’ love of alcohol is well-known throughout West Africa. Back in Senegal, a fellow passenger on one of our bush taxi rides had warned us that Guineans ‘like to drink and party but they don’t like to work.’ Later in our trip, on hearing we had spent time here, Sierra Leoneans would talk in awed tones of Guineans’ capacity for alcohol consumption. The liquor stores near our bairro are busy at all hours of the day and night. Christians and animists quaff openly, Muslims more discreetly.
For there is little to do but drink. When the hordes of wide-eyed villagers arrive in the capital, there is nothing here - no neon lights, no buzzing shopping malls, very few private cars or motorbikes. All they see is poverty, filth and a jumble of crowded neighbourhoods that bear an alarming resemblance to what they have left behind. Nor is there any work. The aid jobs have been colonised by foreigners, government is in the hands of a small clique of elders, and the few public sector positions in a city with scant public services are handed out to the friends and relatives of the powerful, not to humble, uneducated peasants. The new arrivals are too late – there are too many people and not enough jobs; the threadbare urban economy, like the villages they have forsaken, has no room for them.
The only option available to them is commerce. But how can they lower themselves to hawking in the markets? These are people used to real work: hard physical labour in the fields, hunting, fishing, work for which you need strength, determination, patience, where you are judged by the size of the yams you produce, the sacks of rice you harvest. A man’s work. Commerce is for women and for Fulas, those flighty Muslims from the east who are too lazy, too eager for a fast buck, to bend their backs in the fields. Bandim market is dominated by women, Fula men and foreigners. Coffee sellers from Guinea-Conakry, medicine men from Niger and pale-skinned Mauritanian shopkeepers compete for business with Senegalese, Gambians and Malians. Even if they could put aside their hauteur, Guineans would not easily find a niche – the foreigners and Fulani are well ensconced; they have taken the prized pitches, honed the sharpest sales techniques, cornered the best customers. Here again the villagers are crowded out, here again they have arrived too late.
So instead they idle. They drink, play chequers, or brew green tea. Many survive on one meal a day – they call it “um tiro”, one shot. The well-connected crowd into small houses with relatives or friends, six or seven sharing a room; those without contacts must sneak into the market at night to sleep under the tables. I ask a local headmaster, Carlito, if he thinks the migrants would be better off staying in the villages. He replies without hesitation: ‘If I could afford a tractor, I’d go back to the village myself.’
But the new arrivals have their pride. While they were back home toiling in the fields, those who came from the city to visit were the ones who had prospered, who had made it (the others, who did not come back, were presumed to be too busy to take time out from their soaring new careers). With them these pioneers brought not just mobile phones and sports shoes, but an aura of glory, of achievement, of success. Can those who followed them now go back as failures? Can they give up their dreams of betterment and return – forever – to a life of drudgery? Of course, they cannot. It is too late for that, as well. Their aspirations have left the fields behind. The village is the past, not the future. In their minds they have moved on, and turning back is impossible to countenance.
Next to the mission in a small, whitewashed one-room building, a young Christian convert named Tino has a shop. He built it with his own hands, having saved enough money as a hawker to buy bricks, cement and a plot of land. From behind the metal grid that fronts it he sells basic provisions – washing powder, sachets of water, tinned sardines, pencils, exercise books and other sundries. The shelves are only thinly stocked, however, and since he opened up a few months ago business has been quiet. He spends most of the day sitting on the raised platform out front, reading the Bible or playing chequers with his friend, Joka. I sometimes join them in the sultry late afternoons after buying teabags and eggs from the shop for the next day’s breakfast. Tino without fail gives me his plastic chair and pulls up a less comfortable wooden stool for himself. Small children run around squealing in the street below us as we talk.
Neither of them is happy. Joka, tall and languid, sprawls across his plastic chair like an octopus. He is often asleep when I pass, his head lolling pendulously over the back of the chair, a living image of Orwell’s ‘boredom which is inseparable from poverty; the times when you have nothing to do and, being underfed, can interest yourself in nothing.’ He came to Bissau as a child from a village in the north. Although he completed several years of schooling and speaks three languages, he cannot find a job. He complains about the lack of opportunities for young people in the city. ‘The government does nothing for us,’ he spits, his general air of sloth betraying an angry streak that I have encountered before among young men in more combustible parts of West Africa. ‘All they do is stuff their pockets. The only people who can find jobs here are the family and friends of politicians. They live in big houses and drive big cars. Nobody else has a chance.’ Tino, smaller and more compact than his friend and with a less cynical demeanour, nevertheless concurs. ‘People in the countryside think conditions are good here in Bissau,’ he says, ‘but they are wrong. There is nothing here.’
Their resentment is trained on the older generation. The heroes of the war of independence have reneged on their promises. Instead of development they brought impoverishment; since the colonists departed, incomes have plummeted. Although a handful of the country’s leaders have prospered, the wealth has not been shared. The elders allowed – encouraged! – the spread of corruption, and excluded the next generation from prosperity and power.
Until recently the young have kept quiet, mindful that Africa expects deference towards its elders. But look around Bissau and you see signs of change. In the shade of an abandoned Portuguese building in the old town is a stall selling cheap replica football shirts. They are in blue and white stripes or green and white hoops – the colours of Porto FC, or Sporting Lisbon. Some are in the deep red of the Portuguese national team. Teenage boys wear T-shirts emblazoned with photos of Deco or Ronaldo, the modern heroes of Portuguese football. Most young Guineans do not want Ghana or the Ivory Coast to win the upcoming World Cup; they are supporting their old colonial masters. To the dismay of the elders, their children and grandchildren do not despise but look up to Portugal. Tino and Joka are among numerous young people who talk of “taking the boat to Europe,” where you can get ahead through merit and hard work rather than deceit and nepotism. The journey, they know, is dangerous and often fatal, claiming thousands of West African lives each year, but their patience is running out.
The political scientist Samuel Huntington once wrote that it is not invasion by foreign armies that is the main threat to stability in traditional societies, but invasion by foreign ideas. Across West Africa, foreign ideas are fuelling a clash of the generations. In the city, Guineans are exposed to Western products and Western culture. They see foreign aid workers driving around in European cars and tapping away at laptops. They see them chatting on mobile phones, dining in Western restaurants, wearing Western clothes. And they meet fellow Guineans who have done well in Europe and returned to flaunt their success. Realising that a better life is possible, and that millions in the West enjoy electricity, running water, a steady income and an array of other luxuries, their frustration with those running their country is growing.
The latest slight against the older generation is perhaps the most painful. A popular rap song is playing on radios all over the city. It harangues the elders, the veterans of the independence struggle, and tells them that life was better under the Portuguese. Imagine the shock, the betrayal! All that they fought for, all those brave friends who gave their lives for freedom. Was it all a waste of time? Was all that blood spilt for nothing? Have their heroics been forgotten so quickly?
The youths are unrepentant. They want more than Guinea-Bissau can offer them. Until recently, all but a few have been reluctant to undertake the journey to Europe – Guineans are not great risk-takers and family ties at home are strong. But as the population grows and resources decline and they find their government neither willing nor able to give them a chance, the ocean crossing beckons like a Siren. Several of Tino and Joka’s friends have already boarded makeshift motorised canoes for the perilous trip up the Atlantic coast. If Joka does not find a job soon, he says, he will have to follow. Many of those who depart West Africa are arrested en route and sent back, unwanted; many more drown, their vessels unfit for the ocean. But a few make it, and grow prosperous enough to send money back home, and a handful of success stories is all it takes to persuade their desperate peers, whose journey to the city has brought nothing but disillusion, to make the next, much greater leap.
8
The mission compound sits behind high walls studded on top with broken glass. Built of brick and freshly whitewashed, it boasts a basketball court, an outdoor cafeteria in a pleasant, grassy garden, and two large, two-storey classroom blocks. In such a tumbledown neighbourhood the mission’s size and solidity appear incongruous, but this juxtaposition has a purpose. The compound conveys a simple message to those living around it. If you mend your heathen ways, it tells them, you too can be orderly, affluent, whitewashed, and sheltered from the tumult outside the walls.
The hostel lies at the rear of the complex, behind the basketball court. Our first-floor room overlooks the compound on one side and on the other a wide expanse of lush green rice fields, bordered in the far distance by a dark line of palm trees. It is where the city ends and the country begins. The room is spartan but comfortable. It has a bathroom with a cold water shower, and a ceiling light and fan. The latter are only occasionally of use, however, for the electricity, which relies on a private generator, is strictly rationed (the mission was once hooked up to the old city grid, but the connecting copper wires were stolen and the collapse of the national power company rendered replacing them pointless). To save on expensive fuel, the generator is only fired up quite late in the evening, often well after dusk. It is switched off again at ten o’clock sharp.
The absence of electricity has surprising effects on one’s state of mind. As darkness falls, the guest finds himself longing for the moment of illumination. This is not just a practical matter – being unable to read, cook, remain cool or see those you are talking to are all bothersome but, after a period of acclimatisation, bearable. No, it is more than that. Living in the dark is miserable. Conversation is muffled, eating becomes an ordeal rather than a pleasure, you feel and probably are less safe (criminals and dangerous animals and insects all thrive in the dark), and there is nothing to do to while away the hours before bed. You are plunged back to a simpler but less secure time. You find yourself, like the renegade Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten, worshipping the light. As the generator’s ugly drone - sweet music! - finally cranks up and dormant bulbs flicker into life, great joy and relief wash over you. You feel ashamed, of course, at your pettiness -most Guinean homes are never electrified - but everyone you meet is embarrassed by the country’s powerlessness. Local people complain as lustily as spoilt foreigners; for them, it is the ultimate symbol of the government’s failure.
The hostel’s five rooms see a steady traffic of guests. There are two long-term residents: Dan, a lugubrious, middle-aged Californian whose gaunt frame and sunken cheeks bespeak years of subsisting on a meagre African diet, and Missael, a jolly young Guatemalan music teacher. They are joined from time to time by temporary lodgers - earnest students from the Americas, here to teach for a term in the mission school, or doughty evangelists from the interior who have business in the capital or are in need of a break and some comfort. Freddy, a jocular Brazilian with a grey beard and bottle-thick glasses, visits frequently from the south of the country. He and his wife Raquel, a nurse, have set up shop in the Islamic stronghold of Quebo, a hot, dreary town whose resident Muslim holy men, or marabouts, draw pilgrims from all over West Africa in search of healing or wisdom. Freddy is building a small mission there, and he comes to Bissau to buy building materials and classroom equipment, which are not available in the south. The venture is not going smoothly, he tells us. Many of Quebo’s Muslims are angry that a Christian mission is going up in their town, and are keen to sabotage the project. They have repeatedly torn down the perimeter fence and blocked the access road. Anyone tempted to take up the missionaries’ offer of schooling is hounded into backing down. Night after night, moreover, the remarkably unflustered Freddy adds cheerfully, enraged locals surround the house where he and Raquel are sleeping and stone it.
Another Brazilian guest, a chubby, unshaven, serious young scholar named Tony, lives in the eastern forests. He is a linguist, and is translating the Bible into Sarakole, a language of the predominantly-Muslim Soninke people. Translation is always painstaking work, but this is a particularly laborious undertaking. To do it, Tony has had to learn four languages: Sarakole, English, Kriolu (Guinea-Bissau’s lingua franca) and koine Greek, the language of the first New Testament manuscripts. When he translates, he tells me, he starts by reading the Greek Bible. He then checks his interpretation against the English and Portuguese texts (he has three different versions of the Portuguese) to make sure he has not missed any subtleties in the original. Next, in order that his translation will be at home in a Guinean context he consults the Kriolu Bible. This, however, does not help with the most difficult cultural conundrums. Mark 8:34, for instance, where Jesus tells his disciples and various bystanders that anyone wishing to follow him must ‘deny himself, and take up his cross,‘ makes sense to Kriolu speakers, who have had long exposure to Christianity and understand the symbolism (the earliest Portuguese explorers of West Africa planted wooden crosses to mark their progress down the coast). But to speakers of Sarakole, far from the sea and barely touched by the Portuguese presence, the cross is meaningless. ‘I puzzled over this for days trying to find a suitable translation,’ says the patient Tony. ‘The cross wouldn’t do, so I needed to find another symbol. I asked around and discussed it with people in my village in the east, and finally I lit on the casanke, a sheet the Soninke use as a shroud. Every Soninke owns one of these sheets in preparation for death, so they will all understand its meaning.’ He beams with satisfaction.
The Jesus of the Sarakole Bible therefore tells his followers to take up their casanke. Few are likely to hear. Most Soninke are based in Mali and Senegal. Since they speak a different dialect to their brethren in Guinea-Bissau, Tony’s translation will be unintelligible to them. There are just seven thousand Sarakole speakers in Guinea-Bissau. Nearly all are Muslim, but even if they convert en masse to Christianity and show a sudden interest in the Bible, literacy rates are so low in that part of the country that only a handful will be able to read it. Tony, who has calculated that the whole project will take him ten years, expects a readership of around a dozen. This does not deter him, for he knows he is doing God’s work and that the path to salvation is never smooth. One day, he believes, the Soninke, who have hitherto shown little enthusiasm for the missionaries’ message, will be won round. ‘Who knows when the Lord will speak to them?’ he asks. When at last He does, Tony’s Bible will be there waiting.
To some extent, the missionaries’ motives for being in West Africa are similar to my own: to be of some use in life, to assuage our wracked consciences, to burrow ascetically among the wretched of the earth. But whereas my beliefs are rooted in the shallow rubble of hope rather than the deep clay of conviction, the evangelists are in no doubt that they will be bountifully rewarded for their labours. ‘I know I’m doing good here,’ says Dan, the doleful Californian, sounding simultaneously both smug and melancholy. ‘I know I’m going to heaven.’
Doing good has as its focus the spreading of the Gospel. The South American missionaries seem equally interested in Africans’ spiritual and physical well being, but for the North Americans improving the lives of local people is not a target but a tool, a means to an end. Children are taught English so that they can attain high rank in their careers or communities and use their influence to spread the Word; young men are given business coaching so that they can support themselves as pastors; computer training and basketball are offered as incentives to lure fresh recruits; Dan, who has no medical qualifications, runs a clinic where he distributes medicines in the name of Jesus. Although subtler than the methods of the eighteenth-century Muslim jihadis who gave the forest peoples of the interior the choice of converting to Islam or being attacked, the intent is the same. Bringing Jesus into Africans’ lives, the missionaries believe with chilling certainty, will be more beneficial to them – in this world and the next – than the secular goals of health, education and the elimination of poverty in which the international aid community places its faith.
Before he found Jesus, Dan, who is lanky and greying but still fit-looking in his fifties, was ‘a pretty normal Californian kid.’ He excelled at baseball and golf, smoked marijuana, chased girls and cheated at cards. As a Roman Catholic, however, whose Irish ancestors migrated to the United States in the late nineteenth century, he had been inculcated at a very early age with a bleak fear of hell. When he was in his late teens he decided to find out how to avoid eternal damnation. He began to study the Bible, and after months of reading and ruminating came to the conclusion that only by submitting his life to Christ would he be saved. At the age of just nineteen, he was born again; for the three and a half decades since, his entire existence has revolved around his religion.
We sit one hot afternoon on a comfortable bamboo sofa in the garden, drinking tea. Large grey lizards dart across the high walls around us. A praying mantis waits patiently on the armrest of the sofa. In the far corner of the garden three Guinean boys lay bricks; they are building a workshop that will train Christian mechanics, labouring under the watchful eye of a young man from Michigan (the mission’s American founder did not yet trust Africans to run projects themselves: ‘We still need to hold hands with them,’ he had told me with a paternal smile).
Dan tells me about his father, Ed. A tough Irish policeman of the old school, Ed smoked heavily, womanised and gambled, and did not shrink from dealing out beatings to suspected criminals. His Roman Catholicism was nominal; he entered church only for weddings and funerals and prided himself on living a perfectly godless life. Only once was he spotted praying, when the family car broke down one evening in a crime-ridden district of Detroit – ‘we’re gonna die, Dad’s praying!’ shrieked Dan’s terrified sister when she saw her father murmuring to the heavens.
When Dan told him about his conversion, the father felt he had lost a son. ‘You’re a goddamn Jesus freak!’ he yelled, horrified. ‘You’re a goddamn fucking Jesus freak!’ Seven times he repeated the same thing. Dan’s attempts to calm him were futile. ‘Give Him up or get out of my house! Renounce Him!’ his father bellowed. Dan, shellshocked, left and went to stay with a friend.
Son and father made up after a few months. They resumed their weekly golf games, but Dan never succeeded in converting Ed to his new creed. Even when the years of smoking two packs of cigarettes a day finally caught up with him and he was struck down by Legionnaires’ disease, Ed remained steadfast. When he was on his deathbed, Dan made one last attempt. ‘I told him it’s never too late Dad,’ he says with a resigned but sad smile. ‘He knew what I was talking about, and even though he could hardly breathe for all the tubes that were wrapped around his face, he still managed to tell me to get the fuck out of there.’
Dan didn’t laugh. For him, his father’s refusal was spiritual suicide, a one-way ticket to hell. But living up to Dan’s standards is exacting. Simply believing in God and accepting the existence of Jesus are not enough. Even living a virtuous life will not help you reach Dan’s heaven. Unless you give yourself to Jesus and relegate everything else in your life – love, friendship, work, pleasure – to mere appendages, you are doomed. The missionaries’ demand that you shed your old, sin-tainted skin and become, born again, a completely different person; nothing less will save you.
For the first few days after our arrival Ebru and I had been left free to continue along our benighted path, but the missionaries cannot resist for long. Dan tells me that by refusing to devote myself to Christ I have ‘chosen darkness over light.’ During an evening game of cards he informs me that Satan has me in his grip. This is an unsettling revelation, and a highly effective diversionary tactic: I duly lose the next hand.
The assaults quickly become relentless, not just from Dan but from the other North Americans and their zealous Guinean converts. I fight back, but my plaintive arguments that belief in God and living a good life will surely help one to escape damnation are brushed off peremptorily, like a mosquito from your arm. Dan claims that doing good will make no difference to your prospects of salvation. You can spend most of your life in sin, but as long as before you die you give your life to Jesus, you will enter the kingdom of heaven. Live a saintly life without converting, on the other hand, and you will flounder forever in hell. Stunned by this nihilistic philosophy, you find yourself playing devil’s advocate (providing the knowing missionaries with further proof of your allegiances). But they have answers for everything, as if they have memorised a manual of responses to infidel questions. Ask them why an all-good God allows Guinean infants to die of pneumonia or malaria and they tell you that sinful mankind has failed to prevent the deaths, and that anyway the children are now in a better place. Ask if the children can go to heaven without having given their lives to Jesus and they tell you that the Bible contains exceptions for those who die too young to have found Him (the age threshold for this is unclear). Few of the answers are watertight, but the missionaries have no doubts – everything can be explained, everything is part of the divine schema. Even when you lose your temper and balk at their inconsistencies (Ebru is so exasperated by their obduracy that she tells Dan he is in danger of turning her away from belief), they remain unruffled; Jesus told them in the Bible that people would think his followers mad, so your behaviour too is already in the blueprint.
It was not until after his death that Dan discovered his father had been a devil-worshipper. ‘I went round to my sister’s house in California one day and saw all these books in the living room about Satan and the occult. I was shocked. I said, Debbie why have you got all these books? You can’t follow Jesus and have all this evil around you!’ Debbie told him they were Ed’s books. She had found them in a closet after he died, and had kept them for sentimental reasons.
After some persuasion, Dan convinced her to throw them on the fire that was warming the living room against the chill winter afternoon. One by one the books were burned. As the pages crackled and shrivelled, Dan noticed that his sister’s cat was acting strangely. ‘Debbie had a cat and a parrot, and they’d always got on very well. But as the books were going up in flames I saw the cat staring intently at the parrot. Her jaws were quivering in a way I’d never seen before. And then, suddenly, she jumped up at the bird and grabbed its neck between her teeth, trying to throttle it. My sister managed to pull them apart, but then the cat ran to the other side of the room and sank her teeth into my little niece’s finger. She bit really deep and wouldn’t let go.’ Both parrot and niece survived, but the following day the cat went out of the house and started running back and forth across the busy road in front – a road she had always previously avoided – until she was hit by a truck. ‘It was only later,’ Dan says, ‘when I read in the Bible that Jesus said spirits can inhabit living things, that I realised the evil spirits must have jumped from Dad’s books into the cat.’
Similar stories are commonplace in West Africa, which is a much more fertile hunting ground for Christian evangelists than the desiccated wastes of the developed world (Dan mournfully describes Europe as ‘spiritually dead’). Whereas Islam had to adapt to attract converts, by allowing them to meld the stories and preaching of the Koran with their existing beliefs in ancestors and other spirits, Christianity had to make less of an adjustment. For while Islam’s stark austerity has little time for miracles, saintly mediators or ecstatic trances, its more baroque rival shares much with the old religions of Africa.
The animists of West Africa attribute great powers to the spirits which reside in water, trees, the soil and rocks (there is a divine creator, but he is a distant entity who has little to do with everyday human affairs). These spirits are amoral and, like Greek gods, must be regularly propitiated if they are to do you good rather than harm. They are reached with the help of your ancestors, who fulfil a mediating role that bears some resemblance to that of Christian saints. Miracles, too, are common to both Christianity and animism. I met several Guineans who believe people can turn into snakes, for example. One, a well-educated, sensible young follower of Christ, told me that he once saw his own uncle make this very transformation. The uncle metamorphosed into serpentine form and slithered into a nearby hut. His nephew, amazed, followed him inside, only to find his relative standing there chatting calmly to the hut’s inhabitants, not a reptile to be seen.
When you believe that your president can make himself invisible, as many Guineans did of the late Nino Vieira, who reportedly vanished when soldiers broke into his palace to kill him, reappearing only when the intruders had beaten his wife to within moments of death, it is not a great conceptual leap to place your faith in a miracle-working son of a virgin who came back from the dead and claimed to be God’s heir. The Portuguese made little effort to convert Guineans to Catholicism, using religion instead as a front to justify slavery and colonial domination (‘When the missionaries came,’ the Kenyan independence leader Jomo Kenyatta observed, ‘we had the land and they had the Bible. They taught us to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened them, they had the land and we had the Bible‘). But the Scottish explorer Mungo Park, who trekked through West Africa in 1795 in search of the Niger River, recognised the region’s potential as a target for more sincere evangelists. A Muslim salt trader who had heard that Park was a Christian offered him a rice supper if he would write him some verses as protection against wicked men. ‘The proposal was of too great a consequence to me to be refused,’ wrote Park, who existed on the edge of starvation, often going days without food when the wretched villages he passed through had nothing left to give or sell. He took a piece of chalk and covered the trader’s writing board with verses from the Bible. When he had finished, the trader ‘washed the writing from the board into a calabash with a little water and, having said a few prayers over it, drank this powerful draft.’ Then, ‘lest a single word should escape, he licked the board until it was quite dry.’ The episode persuaded Park that since Islam had only recently taken root in the region and was not yet entrenched in people’s hearts, it would not be difficult to convert West Africans to a more enlightened creed such as Christianity.
Today, Islam has gained a firmer foothold. Along with animism it is the predominant religion in Guinea-Bissau and most of the rest of West Africa. The fundamentalist Christians are undeterred by this, for it too is part of the plan. It was prophesied, they tell me, that Christ would return before the generation which saw the re-establishment of Israel dies out. Taking 1948, when Israel was born again, as a starting point, this gives us another thirty years, at most. In the season before the return of Christ, the Bible says, there will be a period of world rule by the Antichrist, with whom Christians will fight a long battle. This battle will culminate in Armageddon.
For the missionaries, Muslims are the Antichrist, the rise of Islam a fulfilment of the prophecy. The final battle is already underway – the End of Days has begun – and they are the Christian soldiers charged with fighting it (this perhaps explains Freddy’s equanimity in the face of the stoning of his mission house in the south). I could find no reference in the Bible to Islam, and no evidence to back up their story, but the missionaries have no doubts, and no hesitation in telling the people of Guinea-Bissau, where relations between followers of different faiths have hitherto been peaceful, that Muslims are bent on eradicating Christ’s followers from the earth.
9
Although Christians remain a small minority in Guinea-Bissau, in recent years the evangelists have begun to make inroads, and the proportion of converts is edging upwards. When all else fails – and in this part of the world all else very often does fail – the religion of the white man can be a tempting last resort.
Lalas, a burly, dark-skinned young Pepel man with an uncomfortably penetrating gaze, is helping to build a new mission in the town of Mansoa in the interior. He lives in a small house at the edge of the rice fields in Bissau, with his wife, his two baby children, his mother and three sisters. A few years ago he renounced his playboy ways and converted to Christianity (‘I used to have many girlfriends at the same time,‘ he admits with embarrassment, ‘I broke a lot of hearts’). He is now a zealot. Over a coffee in the mission canteen one morning he sets about winning us around to his new creed. He asks the usual questions about why we do not attend church and why we have let Satan overpower us, and then pulls out his trump card. Last week, he announces, he was preaching in a village near Mansoa when two teenage boys ran to him and told him that their friend had been killed playing football. The unfortunate boy had been kicked in the chest and died immediately. They asked Lalas to help, so he went to the pitch, stood over the prostrate young footballer, who had by now been dead for several minutes, and prayed. Miraculously the boy recovered. Lalas sees the miracle as proof of Jesus’ power; that the boy might not have been dead but merely winded or unconscious does not occur to him. He looks at me defiantly, silently challenging me, asking how I can continue to doubt in the face of such overwhelming evidence. His icy stare is unnerving but his fanaticism renders argument futile, and as Ebru fixes me with a glare that tells me to back down I manage not to rise to the provocation.
A few days later Lalas takes us to his house by the rice fields. He introduces us to his mother, Maria, who gets up from her seat on the veranda to welcome us. In her sixties and the bearer of seven children, she remains elegant, slender and upright in a boldly patterned blue, green and beige dress which matches the headscarf that covers her close-cropped grey hair. Her skin is smooth and clear, a few lines around her squinting, tired-looking eyes the only signs of aging and of the difficult life she must have led. The house was built for her by Lalas. Half of it, where she and her three daughters live, is made of mud; the other half, in which Lalas resides with his young family, is whitewashed brick. A corrugated-iron roof covers the whole, propped up on wooden poles. Around the small, bare garden, where two goats munch at weeds in the shade of a single papaya tree, a few sticks of bamboo mark out a border, beyond which stretch acres of brilliant green. A light chatter rises like woodsmoke off the fields, as women with babies straddling their backs bend to pluck sheaves of rice grass in the fading early evening sun. We sit on stools on the narrow veranda, and Maria tells us how she converted to Christianity.
‘When I was a child I would have liked to go to school, but my father refused to send me,’ she begins, her voice a slow, dignified murmur. ‘The Portuguese ran the schools in those days, and he thought they would kidnap us and sell us into slavery.’ Maria’s tribe, the Pepel, provided the first slaves to be taken from the country by the Portuguese - a century after it ended, the trade was still terrorising minds and distorting lives. ‘As a young teenager I lived in Bissau. I got a job as a cleaner for a Portuguese family, but when my father found out he took me away to my village in Biombo and told me to get married. He didn’t trust the Portuguese, so he found me a husband and I had to marry him.’
Fortunately, Maria was pleased with her father’s choice of groom. ‘He was handsome and I liked him, but it didn’t matter what I thought - I had no choice. I couldn’t have refused my father’s wish.’ The wedding celebrations went on through the night. She was happy at being married, but disappointed to have lost her job with the Portuguese, who contrary to her father’s fears had treated and paid her well. As we talk and the weakening sun sinks behind the palm trees, swallows divebomb the sides of the house, braking just in time to slip into their nests under the eaves. The rice fields slowly empty, as the women make their way home for the night. They greet us with a wave and a smile as they pass.
Maria’s husband was a weaver, and she helped out by taking the clothes he had made to the market. Soon they had a son, Lalas, but by then her husband had contracted the illness that would kill him. ‘We don’t know what he died of,’ says Lalas, who is now in his thirties and cannot remember his father. ‘In those days you didn’t know the cause – people just fell ill and died.’
Left alone with a baby boy, Maria had no plans to remarry. ‘When I married I was a virgin, and I didn’t want another man to know my body,’ she explains. ‘My mother was keen for me to marry again so that I could have more children, but for four years I resisted.’ Among the Pepel the family line passes through women rather than men, and her mother needed granddaughters to ensure the survival of her lineage. Eventually her persuasion bore fruit, and Maria married her late husband’s brother. She would already have been close to this man, for in a Guinean child’s life uncles are often of more importance, and more involved, than fathers (a father may die, but a child has many uncles, and in such a hazardous environment it is prudent to spread the risk). The brother-in-law, who had played a part in Lalas’s upbringing, would have seemed a natural choice of second husband.
The new couple moved back to Bissau, and Maria bore her husband five daughters and two sons (three of the daughters, pretty young teenagers, sit near us as we talk, combing and plaiting each other’s hair). Her husband was good to her at first, but as time passed and she grew older his interest in her waned and he took a second, younger wife, to whom he devoted most of his attention. This is not unusual; a number of other Guinean mothers would tell me similar tales. Like the tradition of marrying your late husband’s brother, polygamy evolved as a means of helping communities cope with a dangerous environment - safety in numbers was a critical defence mechanism, and close conjugal bonds had to be discouraged in favour of looser and larger groupings. The survival of the custom into modern-day Guinea-Bissau, however, has left a wreckage of embittered wives. Maria left her husband and took her children with her. When he refused to support them she took to buying fish at the port and selling them in Bandim market. Somehow, with help from her brothers, sisters and cousins, she scraped by.
Then her youngest son died of malaria, and it was this tragedy which prompted her conversion to Christianity. Most of Maria’s tribespeople are animists. As rice farmers in the coastal wetlands the Pepel have an especially strong relationship to the spirits of water and soil, and the Muslim proselytisers who swept through the interior in the eighteenth century therefore gained few converts among them. When faced with disasters such as the death of a child, the Pepel rely on irān– the spirits that dwell in sticks, trees, animal horns, the earth and the sea - to identify the origin of the problem and combat the sorcery that caused it (no misfortune is accidental or undeserved: either someone has cursed you, or you have sinned or neglected your religious duties). The irān are reached with the help of a living middleman, a witch doctor, who communicates with them via the spirits of your ancestors. You must propitiate the ancestors with regular offerings and sacrifices if you want them to intercede in your favour.
Maria had performed her share of these rituals, but they prevented neither her son’s death nor her husband’s betrayal. Her ancestors were failing to honour their side of the bargain. ‘I was tired of the things of the world,’ she says. ‘I was tired of performing sacrifices. I bought and sacrificed many cows and pigs to change my life, to make my family healthier and protect them against bad things, but nothing changed. I saw my family falling sick and dying.’
Her son had found Christ some years earlier, persuaded by a friend after many months of discussion. Unlike Dan, who believes the errant Ed is now burning in hell, Lalas cannot accept that his own father, an animist, is suffering the same fate. ‘At that time people didn’t hear the Word of Christ,’ he explains, ‘so he didn’t have the chance to find Jesus.’ The consequences of acknowledging that Portuguese and Latin American missionaries were working the country throughout his father’s lifetime, and that he may well have been exposed to Christ’s message, are too painful for the son to bear. Although he aspires to complete submission to the hard-line fundamentalist creed, Lalas is as yet unable to take the final step; he retains vestiges of softness, of flexibility, of mercy, and cannot quite reconcile himself to such an intransigent God.
‘Christianity has made my life better,’ Lalas says. ‘I have achieved my dream of building a house for my mother, I have work at the mission, and I have a young family.‘ He links these improvements unquestioningly to his religion; since they came to him only after he converted, he concludes, it must be his conversion that brought them about. It is easy, of course, for the Western observer to be cynical about such logic, but in this country, in this dirt-poor district of a dirt-poor city, these things – a job, a house built of brick, a healthy family – must indeed seem miraculous. Lalas must be almost unique among his peers. How else to explain what has happened to him, then, but as a signing-on bonus from his new God?
I ask Lalas about irān children. According to Pepel belief, a child born albino, epileptic, blind or with a deformity is likely to harbour harmful spirits. Such children bring misfortune to their families, potentially imperilling an entire lineage, and must therefore be sent back. Traditionally, babies suspected of being irān were “taken to the sea”, from whence irān children come, and left on the beach by the water’s edge. Those who cried out or screamed were clearly unhappy and did not wish to return to the ocean, so they were spared and taken back to the village. But some babies lay quietly, and allowed the lapping waves to carry them away. These children – irān children - were said to have gone back to their real home. Taking children to the sea is now illegal, but Lalas is one of many who suspect it still takes place in secret. ‘I think it happens,’ he says. ‘I have heard about it, but these days it is hushed up. It is the work of the devil.‘
While her son has been talking, Maria has busied herself cradling her baby granddaughter in her arms and whispering her praises to her daughter-in-law. Seeing Lalas at peace had an effect on her. ‘I saw my son healthy and happy and realised that the Lord was working for him. I had had enough of all the ceremonies, so I became a Christian. God has set me free now.’ This is the other part of the missionaries’ offer, the part that goes deeper than the material improvements Lalas has enjoyed: join us, they promise, and you will be liberated from the stern gaze and stringent demands of the ancestors. I ask Maria how it felt to stop communicating with her forefathers after they had dominated her life for so long. ‘It was very difficult,’ she replies, ‘but I don’t miss them. I am happier now and my family is healthy. Finding salvation in the Lord has given me happiness.’
Not all Guineans are so easily won over. Fernando, a young zealot who teaches English at the mission, is the only Christian in his family. He wants to convert his mother, but she says she has too many sacrifices to perform first. Giving up animism does not just mean cutting the centuries-old link with the ancestors; to truly follow Christ you have to believe that the ancestral spirits do not exist, that they are nothing more than a primitive myth. Although there are similarities between the two belief systems, this killing off of the ancestors requires a greater psychological rupture than is demanded of the born-again American missionaries, who were brought up with the mysteries of the Holy Trinity and the Resurrection before they devoted their lives to Christ. Fernando describes conversion as a process. Many Guineans do not complete the journey, he says. ‘Some people gradually come closer to the Lord and forget the ancestors. Others go some of the way and then turn back to animism. Satan is very powerful.’
10
The next day, a Sunday, we go with Dan to the morning service at the local Evangelical church. We arrive about halfway through, two hours into the service. The church is a whitewashed rectangular block on a dusty square, hidden from the market road by a line of scruffy houses. The congregation, numbering around three hundred, sit on comfortable, cinema-style chairs as a well-fed Sierra Leonean pastor lectures them from a stage at the far end about Jesus’ healing powers. The churchgoers are turned out in their Sunday best. The men wear shirts and trousers or jeans, the women colourful dresses, their hair freshly oiled and plaited. Children, also dressed up, wander around freely. We are shown to seats near the back, just as the bread and miniature plastic cups of wine of the communion reach our row. Beside us sit three serious-looking young boys, listening intently to the pastor. Behind us a tall man and his plump wife take turns holding a baby. Although the ceiling fans do not turn, the many windows and the cool tiled floor keep the heat from becoming oppressive. It is a comfortable and, by Guinean standards, opulent environment. Like the mission building with its high whitewashed walls, it tells the congregants that prayer will bring them material as well as spiritual wealth – an escape from a life of deprivation.
At first, the service proceeds in an orderly fashion. The trays of bread and wine are passed around quietly and the pastor, whose voice is amplified by a generator-powered microphone, holds most people’s attention. Then the choir replaces him on the flower-bedecked stage, and things begin to go awry. Two electric guitarists lead the twenty young choristers through a series of upbeat hymns in the Gospel style. The first few are sung in harmony, but the synchronicity gradually breaks down. Some of the singers begin to race through their verses, leaving more sluggish colleagues lagging behind. Others stop singing altogether. Members of the congregation join in, although not everybody sings in time and a few experiment with completely different hymns. One or two content themselves with loud wails. Most people remain seated, but a few decide to stand up. It is as if a dormant computer virus has been activated, causing multiple and apparently random malfunctions in the system. Behind us, the tall man passes the baby to his wife and rises to his feet. He closes his eyes in prayer.
Slowly - and there is no more accurate way to describe it - all hell breaks loose. The Sierra Leonean pastor has reappeared on the stage. This time he is more animated, his face bulging and sweating as he shouts his way through a passage from the Bible. The choir sings louder to try to compete, which prompts the dissident singers dotted around the pews to ratchet up their own discordant hollering. The tall man standing behind us has begun to sway, his eyes clenched shut. He is shouting, ‘Rema! Rema! Rema!’ (the Word, the Word, the Word), and then ‘Kema! Kema! Kema!’ (I burn, I burn, I burn), each word louder than the last. He repeats the mantra again and again, increasing the volume each time. When he finally reaches a crescendo, he yells out at the top of his voice, ‘KEMA! KEMA! KEMA! O nome de JESUSSS!’ Children look up at him, alarmed. Even a few adults glance round, although the cacophony building in the rest of the hall means only those in the nearest rows can hear him. To our left we see a woman in a red dress staggering down the aisle, her head in her hands, sobbing. A few rows in front of us a man in a suit is standing with his back to the stage, his hands and face turned beatifically upwards, singing and smiling, his song bearing no relation to any of those chanted by the different factions of the choir.
Then the sound of a woman moaning breaks through the din like a shudder. On the stage a chorister in an orange and white print dress is looking to the heavens and whimpering, her face anguished, transported. Her moans grow louder and more piercing, until suddenly she collapses and falls backwards to the floor. She is quickly led away by two men, still wailing as she passes down the aisle. Another choir girl, infected by her colleague’s delirium, soon follows suit. Among the pews, congregants shout or murmur different prayers. Several wave their hands above their heads. The air is heating up. The atmosphere is intense, frenzied, uncomfortable for Ebru and I as outsiders. I look around, but people I recognise barely acknowledge me. Two of Maria’s daughters stare as if seeing me for the first time. Young children gaze up at their ecstatic, keening parents with a mixture of confusion and fear. The pastor is still on the stage exhorting into the microphone, but his voice is drowned out. His flock have taken flight into their own private worlds. ‘God is here today,’ explains one of the boys sitting next to us with a smile. ‘Rema! Rema! Rema!’ begins the man behind us again, his wife breast-feeding their baby next to him, no sign of emotion or surprise on her face. ‘Kema! Kema! Kema!’ Anarchy prevails, until finally the Sierra Leonean gives way to a young Guinean pastor and suddenly the place is calm, as if nothing has happened.
‘None of these people are drunk,’ the new pastor announces, twice, no doubt addressing the sceptics among us. We make our exit soon after, feeling shocked and drained, religion’s role as an opiate never more evident. Dan, who seems nonplussed by this outpouring of emotion, his Anglo-Saxon conservatism clearly better suited to a more sober style of worship, tells us that the services are not always so rapturous. There is a hint of condescension in his tone, un-erased by several years of living among Africans (it is an attitude we have come across before in his compatriots’ reluctance to allow Guineans to take charge of mission projects).
We walk through the market, reflecting on what we have seen. On a street where a few days earlier we had seen a crowd of revellers and drummers dancing around two sacrificial cows which were lying on the tarmac with blood gushing from their freshly slit throats, a new throng has gathered. In its midst a young woman in a white T-shirt and jeans lies curled up on the ground, the merciless sun beating down on her thin body. She has fainted in the heat. Dan, who although not medically qualified runs a clinic that distributes herbal potions and aspirin, crouches to feel her pulse. Her heart is beating fast and he says she probably has anaemia. Before long, the woman rises to her knees. Her large eyes look dazed and her high forehead is caked with dust. A crucifix hangs from her neck. She starts to pray, gazing beseechingly to the heavens, but appears to be on the verge of another collapse. I buy her a bottle of Coke from a nearby shop in the hope that the sugar and water will revive her (the crowd parts to let the white man through). At first she ignores me and continues to pray, but eventually she takes the bottle and gulps down its contents. Dan assures me that the Coke will be sufficient to ‘get her where she wants to go,’ like a top-up of petrol in a car. The woman stands up, and wanders off down the street without thanking me. She probably thought God had sent me. Maybe He had…
11
In need of a break from the nightly attacks on our secularity, we leave the mission and take the small passenger ferry to the island of Bubaque in the Bijagós archipelago. It is late December, and although the Bijagó people are predominantly animist, Christmas and New Year are public holidays and the ferry is full of people returning from the mainland for the festivities. It leaves Bissau’s Pidjiguiti harbour two hours late, and the passengers take advantage of the delay to get drunk. Some have brought jerrycans full of palm wine; others buy bottles of beer from the on-board café. On deck a speaker belts out loud West African pop music. Passengers lean on the railings, drinking and chatting merrily. A few dance, clutching beer bottles and waving their arms in the air; the women jerk their backsides provocatively, in time with the music. The sea is flat and calm, the air hot and moist.
The forty-mile journey takes four hours. Two smaller boats, which have hitched a ride to save fuel, bob at the end of ropes in the ferry’s wake. After two hours we pass the first of the archipelago’s eighty or so islands: a muddy strand of beach, a long fringe of palm trees, thick dark forest behind. Only a handful of the islands are inhabited, with a few more settled temporarily during the rice-growing season. This one appears deserted, although from this distance we cannot be certain – many Bijagó villages are hidden deep in the jungle, away from the shore where they would be exposed to flooding and attack. (The Bijagó are notoriously hostile to outsiders. As far back as 445 BC the Phoenician captain Hanno, who sailed down the African coast from Cadiz, was shocked to find the islands inhabited by ‘hairy, swift, monstrous wild women who could not be subdued even with bonds.’ Two thousand years later the first Portuguese explorers met their deaths here. Early slavers, too, encountered fierce resistance and quickly switched their attention to the mainland. And in the colonial wars of pacification, the islanders were the last to be quelled.)
Half an hour later we pass another far-off islet. It is long and low, barely rising above the still sea; in the haze of the late afternoon it shimmers like a mirage. This island too appears empty of humanity, but with the aid of binoculars I make out a small village, thatched roofs resting atop tiny mud houses, nestling among the trees behind the mangroves. A villager, a tiny speck even through the lenses, emerges from the forest, perhaps after a day spent hunting bush rats. A woman is sitting on a stool beside a house, sifting rice. In the foreground a lone sacred ibis scours the beach, its curved black bill burrowing for grubs.
Dusk draws in, and as we pass through a narrow channel between two jungly islands we can feel the archipelago closing in on us, its tropical intensity enveloping the boat in heat, damp and stillness. As we round the far end of the starboard-side island the pungent smell of smoked fish reaches the deck. It is the first sign that we are nearing a human settlement. Ahead of us we see wisps of smoke rising through the palm trees of Bubaque. The ferry carves a wide arc to avoid a submerged sandbar and sweeps round to the right along a channel, with the island and the smoke and the palm trees now close by to our left. A man stands in the darkening sea with a broad fishing net. Behind him two women bend to pluck shellfish from rockpools. On deck the drunken dancers, their numbers now swelled to several dozen, whoop and cheer as we near our destination.
At last the dock comes into view, a high cement platform supported by thick iron pillars. A dense, jostling, hundred-strong crowd is waiting for the ferry, held back from the jetty by a thin rope. They are there to meet relatives returned from the mainland or to trade with the new arrivals or wheelbarrow their belongings to their homes. There are hustlers, ready to grab the few white visitors and lead them to hotels. A fellow passenger warns us that there are probably pickpockets too. It seems thewhole island is there.
Once again you are forced to relinquish control. We scrum with the others for a place on the narrow gangplank, leaving behind the safety of the well lit deck and plunging into the littoral darkness. We barge through the expectant crowd, pretending we know where we are going. Ignoring the many offers of assistance we choose a rough dirt track to escape the throng, and hope it will lead to a hotel. After fifteen minutes humping our backpacks through a labyrinth of unlit lanes, we stumble with relief on a guesthouse.
The islands are full of mysteries. On our first morning, on the terrace of Bubaque’s only bar, which overlooks the jetty, we meet Michel, a middle-aged Senegalese conservationist with a 1950s crew cut who has come here to teach local people how to fish without depleting stocks to extinction. As we walk in he greets us in French and asks us to sit with him at his small table. He looks tired, his eyes swollen, and is drinking strong black coffee. We exchange pleasantries and establish one another’s business, but we cannot help noticing that his mind is not on the conversation. He keeps shaking his head, as if recovering from a shock, and gazing thoughtfully out over the calm sea. Ebru asks him if he is all right. ‘You see many things here,’ he replies darkly. ‘What kind of things?’ I ask. ‘Inexplicables,’ he whispers.
He has spent the previous night on the island of Canhabaque, an hour’s boat ride southeast of Bubaque. Even by Bijagós standards, Canhabaque is traditional, replete with forest spirits, shrines containing the dead souls of the ancestors, and giant cotton trees harbouring malevolent irān that must be constantly placated with offerings. The island’s inhabitants guard jealously its many sacred sites; despite a long campaign of “pacification” they were never fully subdued by the Portuguese, and were exempted from the hut tax to which the rest of the country was subjected. A close-knit community of rice farmers and bushmeat hunters, whose economy is still based on barter, not cash, Canhabaque is closed off from the modern world, and remains wary of strangers.
Michel was unprepared for its enigmas. Walking down a village lane in the early evening he saw a dead snake on the ground, its body twisted like dried kelp. He was told it had been killed by the amulet, or gris gris, of a passing witch doctor. The witch doctor had been unaware of the snake’s presence, but his gris gris was so powerful that the snake only had to approach and its fate was sealed.
At night Michel was given a hut to sleep in, but he was allowed no rest. ‘I was terrified,’ he says. ‘A village woman spent the whole night running back and forth outside my hut, screaming at the top of her voice. She sounded mad, as if the devil himself was inside her. She didn’t stop until dawn. It wasn’t just the noise that kept me awake – her bloodcurdling screams gave me the shivers. I was cowering inside my hut listening to her padding around just outside the door.’
Michel discovered in the morning that the panicked woman had been conversing with the spirits of the forest, asking them what this interloper was doing in the village and whether his intentions were benign or evil. But his troubles did not end there, for at dawn he was summoned to see the village chief, who welcomed him by ranting angrily at him in Bijagó, a language Michel does not speak. The tirade lasted over an hour. ‘I asked my companion what the chief wanted and whether I was being taken prisoner,’ he says, his fears echoing those of the eighteenth-century explorer Mungo Park, who during his voyage to the Niger was regularly held captive by village chiefs. Park had to buy his freedom with his dwindling store of provisions, but Michel had not come similarly equipped. ‘The chief wanted palm wine or rum in return for his hospitality in putting me up for the night, but I didn’t have anything to give him. I didn’t even take pencils or paper with me in case they would think I was spying for the government. They are afraid of the government because it tries to tax them.’ He finally placated the chief by giving him some francs, which could be used at a later date to buy rum in Bubaque, and was allowed to go on his way. ‘It’s very traditional in these islands,’ he sighs, exhausted and unused to such irruptions in his life, ‘very traditional.’
The following day, Christmas Day, we spend on the beach. A short walk from the dock, down a rough path through low bush, a curve of white sand sheltered by nodding palm trees stretches below a red, jungle-covered cliff. Clumps of mangrove dot the shore. Dolphins frolic in the waveless sea. A few hundred yards across lies another island, deserted. A gaudily painted fishing canoe works the channels between the sandbars as a light breeze disperses the heat from a watery sun. There is no sound.
As so often in West Africa, however, ugliness lurks amid the beauty. At first we have the beach to ourselves, shared only with a heron standing haughty in the shallows. But we are soon joined by a group of young boys. They are barefoot, dressed in rags, and they cluster around us, pulling playfully at the legs of small brown crabs and chattering cheerfully to each other about the brancos. When I pull out my binoculars to look at an overflying palm-nut vulture, three of them run in front of me and pose, thinking that I am wielding a camera. After some minutes I notice that one of the boys is quieter than the others. Like them he sits on the sand watching us, but he doesn’t laugh with them or join them in torturing crabs. His face is darker, more serious, for he is sick, with a hacking cough which convulses his small body. His ribs are clearly visible under his taut skin, and his upper arms are thinner than his shoulders and elbows when they should be thicker. He wears only a pair of dusty shorts. The skin on his legs and arms is badly chapped, resembling the scales of a dried fish.
After a while the boy moves to sit huddled in front of us, his arms folded around his chest. It is a hot day, but we realise that he has moved from the shade of a palm tree to a patch of sunlight, for warmth. He sits shivering, his silence broken by violent coughing tremors. The other boys ignore him until after a few minutes sitting there alone he stands up and, without speaking, walks into the snake-infested bush behind the beach. He bends over and vomits the bilious yellow liquid that indicates malaria, Guinea-Bissau’s biggest killer. He looks round to check that I am not watching. I turn away, ashamed.
The other boys notice our concern and at last wander over to him. Ebru asks one of them to take him home to his mother. He obeys and, putting his arm around his friend’s shoulders, leads him up the path away from the beach. As they walk slowly away I am surprised to find tears in my eyes, and guiltily relieved that I am not completely inured to poverty’s cruelty.
12
That evening we celebrate Christmas with Michel at a provisions store owned by his cousin, Mame. The brick-built store, a small, one-room rectangular block with a raised floor, sells bread, tinned food, candles, bottles of Portuguese wine, beer, soap, onions, garlic and the Maggi cooking stock that has become ubiquitous in West Africa. Its owner also cooks excellent Senegalese fish and rice dishes, which we devour sitting at a little wooden table on her tiny veranda, overlooking the main dirt street of Bubaque village.
Mame is a large, serious woman with shiny, clear brown skin and distrustful, distracted eyes that seem always to be looking at something others cannot see. Her mother was Bijagó and her father a Serrer from Senegal. Born in the islands, she returned here twenty years ago after her first marriage broke down. She is not a happy woman. In the past, she explains, women here were powerful. According to Bijagó custom the first human being was a woman, and island society was organised on matrilineal lines. Women had a hand in all aspects of life. They owned the houses, cultivated the land, and chose their husbands; they sat on and occasionally headed the councils of elders which made vital community decisions about where and when to farm and whether to go to war; priestesses played an important role in spiritual matters, and had the power to punish errant kings and chiefs. The fiercest women even took part in slave raids.
That has all changed now, laments Mame. Women do all the work but receive no appreciation for it from their menfolk. As well as shouldering responsibility for domestic duties and child rearing, they are expected to farm, fish, or earn money to feed their family. ‘Men spend their time drinking and sitting around chatting, while their wives tire themselves with work,’ Mame says. She looks over crossly at Michel for agreement, which he delivers with an obedient nod.
Mame’s first marriage was doomed from the start. Serrer tradition dictates that girls must marry a cousin chosen for them by their father. Mame was fourteen, the selected cousin in his thirties. ‘I had five children with him over nine years, but I was miserable. He was no good. He drank, did nothing around the house, and as soon as I’d had children he lost interest in me.’ Her words echo those of Maria in Bissau. Eventually, like Maria, she left the man, but this infuriated her family (of which her husband was also part) and she is convinced that they turned to sorcery to punish her. ‘I fell sick soon after I left my husband and I couldn’t get rid of the sickness,’ she says, bending forwards in her chair and peeling a small onion in preparation for dinner. ‘It went on and on. The family had cursed me. I had to get away.’ Leaving her children with her mother, she travelled through Mali to Niger, Burkina Faso and the Ivory Coast in the hope that distance from the source of the curse would cure her. A few months after she left, however, her mother died – long-term plans in this part of the world are so often thwarted - and she had to return to Senegal. She tried to explain herself to the Bijagó side of the family, her mother’s side, but they were deaf to her pleading. Only by performing a series of costly sacrifices, they told her, would she be able to cleanse herself of her sin and slough off the curse.
It was at this point that she met her second husband, Raoul, a Béninois who already had several children from previous marriages. A devotee of the Celestial Church of Christ, a small sect founded by a carpenter in Benin in 1947 after a revelation in a forest clearing, Raoul told Mame that if she joined the sect she would no longer have to worry about the curse (here again was Christianity’s promise to set Africans free). Mame was not convinced about the church, but she fell for Raoul and it was not long before they married. They departed for Bubaque, leaving their children dispersed among her sisters in Senegal, and set up a small guesthouse to service the island’s fledgling tourist trade. ‘For a long time we worked well together. We worked hard. He looked after guests and ran the bar and I did the cooking for the restaurant and the cleaning.’ She pauses and gets up to wash a knife in a bucket of water next to the shop, her movements heavy and ponderous. The jovial Michel, who is listening sympathetically to a tale he has heard many times before, orders a bottle of red wine and insists we each have a glass. The shop sees a steady flow of customers, who emerge from the thick surrounding darkness to buy beer for the festivities; Mame banters good-naturedly but firmly with the many who try, in vain, to haggle the price down.
‘Everything was going well,’ she continues, ‘until one day Raoul said he was leaving for Togo to buy merchandise. He didn’t come back for nearly three years. He didn’t call me or write to me once. We‘d had a son together, who was born with a serious heart problem. He had to stay in Senegal because the hospitals are better there. I sent money every month, and whenever the tourist season here finished I went to visit him. Raoul did nothing.’ She is speaking loudly now, still angry two years after the event. ‘He only phoned when he heard our son was in a coma in hospital. He waited until then to make contact!’ Mame hung up on him.
The boy died. Soon after, Raoul appeared in Bubaque. ‘He didn’t even say sorry. He said he’d been ill so he couldn’t get in touch. For three years!’ She refused to let him into the guest-house, but one of her daughters begged her not to leave him in the street and she relented. They slept in separate rooms for a while, but Mame’s rage did not abate and she moved out, to the shop where we now sit. ‘I had to start again with nothing,’ she says, ‘no husband, no business, no money, no home.’
She sleeps on a string bed inside her store. The shop is so cramped that during opening hours she has to stand the bed on its side against the wall to allow customers to enter. She works from dawn until after midnight, trying to get back on her feet, and sends money to Senegal to pay for her children’s schooling and lodging. Every day when she goes to the market she walks past the old guesthouse, which lies empty and untended. Raoul sits outside it all day, drinking and playing chequers with friends. Mame never greets him, though he makes regular attempts to persuade her to come back. ‘He knows the guest-house doesn’t work without me,’ she says. ‘He doesn’t know how to cook or clean. Guests leave after one night because it’s so dirty.’ This at least is a small satisfaction, but the real shock for Raoul, she believes, will come later. ‘He gives nothing to his children. Children don’t ask you to bring them into the world -it’s your choice. You bring them, so you must do everything you can to help their development. One day he‘ll need his children, but they will know he has neglected them.’
I ask her if she plans to find another husband. She wants an older man now, she replies without hesitation, her ideas of romantic love long since jettisoned. ‘You need a man who will be a partner. You do your work and he does his. I want someone who is responsible.’ Michel takes a swig of wine and smiles sadly, fully aware of female suffering. When our food is served we eat in silence. Mame does not eat with us. She sits watching the dark street, frowning at things we cannot see and from time to time emitting sharp, angry sighs, like a geyser that is about to erupt.
13
On hearing that I am writing a book, Michel is keen to tell me about his work as a conservationist. One morning he takes me down to Bubaque’s small market and shows me a stall selling shark fins. The dried, yellowing fins, shaped like breaking waves, are laid out flat on a plastic sheet on the ground. Traditionally, sharks were thought by the Bijagó to have special powers, and they are still represented in local dances and on masks, but Chinese demand for their body parts for use in soup has proved irresistible to the islanders, and the revered fish are now under threat.
The average Guinean would have to work for two months to earn what he can make from selling just one kilo of fins, so when shark dealers come calling from Senegal and Guinea-Conakry it is hard to refuse their business. Once a shark is caught, its fins are sliced off and its body thrown back into the sea, where if not already dead, it bleeds to death or is eaten by other sharks. A number of species have already become extinct in Bijagó waters. Others will die out soon if the fin trade continues. ‘The trade is unbalancing marine ecosystems,’ Michel says. ‘But it’s not just sharks - many fish species are in danger because of overfishing by local people and by foreign boats which plunder our seas.’ (For the past two weeks, he tells me, the Guinean government has been holding in custody a trawlerful of Spanish fishermen who exceeded their quotas.) As well as thinning out the food reserves available to the Bijagó people, the depletion of fish stocks is likely to harm tourism, for the majority of overseas visitors to the islands are European sea anglers in search of tarpon and other large game fish. ‘What will people turn to when the fish run out?’ Michel asks, frowning and turning his palms skyward.
He already knows the answer to his question, but is unwilling to elucidate. There is one subject that nobody in the Bijagós wants to discuss. It is the islands’ dirty secret. Mention it and even the most garrulous clam up. They look at the floor, inspect their fingernails, and shift uneasily in their seats. Then they hastily change the subject - it is far too dangerous to talk.
The story begins on a hazy afternoon in 2005, when a fisherman on a beach near Quinhamel on the mainland spots a strange object floating in the shallows. On closer inspection he sees that it is a white brick, tightly wrapped in transparent rubber. Intrigued, he wades in to retrieve it. Soon after, he sees another of these bricks, washed up further along the beach. He shows his unusual catch to his fellow fishermen, and together they puzzle over its purpose. They rip open one of the packages, and find that the bricks crumble when rubbed. After some deliberation they conclude that it must be fertiliser. Dozens of packets of fertiliser are bobbing in the surf! The fish-starved sea has yielded up a rare bounty: respite for struggling farmers, a tonic for the parched soil, the promise – for once – of a rich harvest.
The fishermen gather up the packages and, like warriors bringing back the spoils of victory, convey them to their village. The villagers crowd around, singing and dancing. This year they will eat! Their children will grow strong! Maybe – is it possible? – their infants will all survive the year. They give thanks to the ancestors. Some daub their faces with the white powder. They go out into the fields and scatter the precious crumbs.
Instead of thriving, however, their crops wither and die. A few villagers, moreover, are behaving strangely, as if possessed. Have they been cursed? Has the treacherous ocean tricked them? The villagers’ hope quickly turns to bleak despair; now it will be more difficult than ever to feed their families. They are still despondent several days later, when two mysterious, white-faced strangers appear among the huts. Like the wandering gypsy Melquíades in Macondo, they emerge from the forest bearing gifts. Colombians (like Melquíades), they offer the villagers huge sums of money in exchange for the remaining white bricks and their silence. The packages, it turns out, contained not fertiliser but cocaine, for the Colombians had chosen Guinea-Bissau as a staging post on the cocaine route to Europe. The white bricks came from a ship that had sunk at the end of its ocean crossing, its intended destination the Bijagós archipelago. As in Macondo, nothing in the islands, perhaps nothing in the country, would ever be the same again.
The Bijagós lie at the end of the shortest transatlantic crossing from South America. The eighty islands, thick with jungle but largely devoid of inhabitants, are an ideal venue for illicit activity, and in particular for smuggling. The Colombians use small boats and specially fitted planes to import large consignments of cocaine from their homeland. Then, having broken up the packages into smaller, more easily portable loads, they despatch the drugs by sea or across the Sahara to the lucrative markets of Western Europe.
Geography is not the only attraction; the traffickers also prey on the country’s poverty. Were you in possession of the Guinean government’s entire annual budget, you could afford to purchase no more than a couple of tons of cocaine – less than is landed on the islands every month. With the coffers so threadbare, public servants’ salaries are paltry, and the Colombians do not need to part with a large share of their profits to buy official acquiescence. Even if it had the motivation to fight the trade, however, the government lacks the means. It cannot support an effective police force, army or navy. The country has no prisons, the air force no aircraft, the navy no ships. Compared with the heavily policed cocaine channels through the Caribbean to the United States, the route through Guinea-Bissau is a cakewalk. The South Americans have free rein.
Some Guineans are benefiting from the trade. Drug mules from the Bijagós who make it to Europe, many of them former fishermen, not only grow wealthy themselves; they also send a proportion of their profits to relatives back home (despite the global recession, remittances from overseas have soared since the drug traffickers arrived). The powerful are also reaping rich rewards. Like wreckers swarming over a treasure-laden galleon, Guinea-Bissau’s politicians, army and police have been scrambling for a share of the loot. It is rumoured that a former president transported cocaine in briefcases to Europe, taking advantage of his immunity from customs searches. Others have grown rich by providing security to the Colombians, by helping them elude arrest, or merely by looking the other way. The capital, Bissau, is in the midst of a minor building boom: smart new villas are springing up, with gardens, iron gates and security guards - all funded, according to local people, by drug money.
But these benefits have come at a cost. The global illegality of cocaine dooms those involved in its distribution to subterfuge. The trade therefore becomes a magnet for the devious, the unscrupulous and the violent. By making drugs illegal to avert social problems at home, Western governments deflect the challenge of dealing with them onto developing countries. Battles for control of the industry have torn apart Colombia and rocked northern Mexico, and as European consumers blithely powder their noses, Guinea-Bissau, too, has suffered its first cocaine casualties. Drug addiction is on the rise (a well-known dealer lives next to the mission in Bissau; the Christians have tried in vain to persuade him to forsake his evil ways); politicians and journalists who speak out against the traffickers have faced threats and intimidation; and the contest over access to the trade has turned violent: blood feuds have broken out between police groups, army chiefs have been assassinated or kidnapped, and coups d’état, after a decade of stability, have muscled their way back onto the political scene. The people of Guinea-Bissau, meanwhile, are caught in the crossfire - what appeared to be a lifeline has turned out to be a noose.
The airstrip on Bubaque, appropriately, is a thin white line cut through the bush and hemmed in on both sides by dense forest. It sees no daytime traffic, but on Christmas night and for several nights thereafter we are woken in the early hours of the morning by the drone of small planes passing overhead. After a few seconds the noise grows quieter and then stops. On some nights there are two or three such interruptions. Occasionally the sound from the motor abates but does not fall silent, as the aircraft slows before continuing on its journey. These latter planes do not land, but drop their cargo over the sea and call in small motorboats to retrieve it. The traffickers are continually devising ways to elude European Union patrols, and regular use of Bubaque’s airstrip has become unsafe. The air drops are a new tactic, and we hear too of a visit by a group of South Americans to Canhabaque, to stake out that island’s suitability as a staging post. They poked around for a while, asking locals if there is an airstrip (there is not) or a forest clearing (there is) where they can land small jets or helicopters, ostensibly for flying in tourists. The islanders – poor and hungry - are in no position to resist.
14
It can be hard to get at the truth in West Africa. For any single event, there are multiple versions of how, why, when and where it happened. Even something as momentous as the death of a president can take months, perhaps years, to unravel. Sometimes, a definitive version of the story never takes root, and discussion and rumour, unsated, must move on reluctantly to their next assignment.
João Bernardo Vieira, alias Nino, President of Guinea-Bissau for twenty-three of its thirty-five years as an independent nation, died sometime in March 2009. We know this because photographs of his bloody corpse were posted on the internet a few days later. Until their publication, unconfirmed rumours of the assassination had been swirling around the country like a dust storm. As it went on its way, dancing through villages and towns, the storm picked up scraps of information. Nino was shot! No, he was hacked to death by machetes! He was shot and hacked to death. He was killed in his palace – no, in his house! The story whirls around the streets and compounds, up the rivers, over the rice fields, in and out of the cashew trees, growing, swelling, changing shape and picking up speed as it advances.
Was the president even dead at all? No, it is impossible! Nino is invincible, immortal, he has special powers to ward off enemies. Did he not defeat the Portuguese in the south almost single-handedly? Had he not already survived half a dozen, a dozen, a hundred attempts on his life? The dust storm changes direction, its progress slows as the consensus grows that Vieira is still alive and merely wounded, that soon he will address the nation and reassure the people.
With the release of the pictures, however, the Chinese whispers ratchet up again. They become a cacophony of speculation, theory and reportage of varying authority. Not everybody, of course, has seen the pictures. Even the capital has only a handful of internet points; the rest of the country has to rely on second, third, fourth-hand information from friends or relatives who have seen the photos, or who know someone who has seen them or claims to have seen them. Nino is dead, that much is certain (the pictures were released to prove this), but was he shot, dismembered, decapitated, or a combination of all of these? Who took the photos? How did his killers breach his defences? Who, most important, ordered his death?
I have seen the photos, with my own eyes. I am not relying on second-hand sources, merely on the honesty of the photographer and of the morgue attendants who stand by the corpse. The pictures are macabre. They show the bloated body of the former president lying on cold white tiles, like a dead seal on snow. His cheeks are puffed out, his swollen eyelids closed. His torso is covered in the little red gashes of gunshot wounds, as if a clumsy tailor in trying to undo a tacking stitch has torn the material away with the thread. But it is on the head that the killers really went to work. Contrary to some rumours the head is still in place, but the scalp is rutted on top with a deep, bloody crater. Huge, red, viscous lacerations snake outwards from this crater like molten lava - the killers appear to have been digging for his brain, desperate to ensure his annihilation, to make certain that he could not plot a terrible revenge.
Three years after the murder, nobody has been arrested. A hasty and perfunctory investigation turned up no leads. The new government, wary of fuelling further instability, is keen to move on, to leave old wounds unopened. But this is tropical Africa. In this climate old wounds do not heal, they fester. And we are talking about the death of the president! Of the dominant figure of the past four decades! It cannot just be brushed under the carpet. And so the speculation, the rumour, the suspicion continues. Still no one knows what happened.
A few facts have settled, like a sheet unfurled over a meadow, and become widely accepted. On the evening of the first day of March, 2009, the head of the army, General Tagme Na Waie, was killed by a bomb that exploded under the stairs in the military headquarters in Bissau. Tagme was a Balante, Nino a Pepel. The Balante, one of the country’s largest ethnic groups, have dominated the army since the War of Independence. Nino himself was a hero of that war – he was such a brave fighter, they say, that when he walked through a village even the monkeys clapped. But the Balante’s grip on the armed forces rankled with him, and his enmity with Tagme was well known. He may have held Tagme responsible for an earlier attempt on his life, which he only survived thanks to his supernatural powers, and may have plotted the general’s murder in revenge.
But wait! We are straying from the facts, allowing ourselves to wander! The dust storm of speculation has swept us up! We must remain grounded, and keep a hold on the elusive truth. We must be guided by what is known, not by what is conjectured.
What is known is that on the morning after Tagme’s death, armed men (soldiers? police? hitmen? who knows!) broke into, or negotiated their way into Nino Vieira’s house. Were they supporters of the general, who had promised that if anything happened to their leader they would come for the president? Were they Colombian or Venezuelan drug traffickers or their representatives, who had come to punish Nino for his failure to pay them for a two-million (or two-billion) dollar consignment of cocaine? Were they from a police or army faction which needed the president out of the way in order to establish a foothold in the narcotics trade? Each of these – and other renderings besides - is possible, each believed by many to be true.
Given his legendary pugnacity (which would have been with him from birth: members of his clan are said to fight like hyenas), it is likely that Nino put up a struggle. Indeed, it is now widely accepted that it took both machetes and bullets to fell him. The photographs support this story, but what of another story: that he disappeared when his killers arrived? That he became invisible, vanished, only reappearing when the intruders had pummelled his wife almost to death? While this would tally with his reputation for supernatural powers, where does it leave Nino’s image as a hero, a warrior?
Again, however, we are straying into the realms of hypothesis, allowing ourselves to be carried off by gusts of hearsay. We must not be diverted; we must not let ourselves drift away from the facts. All we know for certain is that some time after the arrival of his attackers, the president’s mutilated corpse was photographed in a morgue. The country’s two most powerful figures were dead.
The figure of João Bernardo Vieira is a difficult one to pin down. This heavy-set, jowly bull of a man bestrode his country’s political scene for nearly four decades, but beyond its borders little is known of him. Guinea-Bissau is a small, poor, forgotten country. No spotlight is ever shone on it, and Vieira has escaped the scrutiny to which other African leaders have been subjected. Dig around a little, however, and a disturbing picture emerges. While the world‘s attention was elsewhere, it seems, Nino was busy pillaging his nation. Like the more notorious post-colonial dictators – Mobutu, Abacha, the madman Idi Amin – he treated his land as his personal fiefdom, helping himself to its riches and brutally squashing anyone who dared to stand in his way.
‘Nino destroyed everything,’ Eduardo Gomes had told me back in Bafatá. When Vieira ousted Luiz Cabral from the presidency six years after independence (Amílcar’s corrupt, incompetent half-brother had taken over the PAIGC after its founder’s assassination), Gomes had had high hopes. He had distrusted the Cabrals, believing they wanted to make his country a colony of Cape Verde, and saw Nino as a patriot who would have Guinea-Bissau’s interests at heart. Nino, however, had other ideas. ‘He governed for himself,’ Eduardo complained, ‘he didn’t want to help his people.’ The old man, who endured years of exile and imprisonment at the hands of the colonists, then delivered the fatal blow to Nino’s memory. In a voice no louder than a murmur, as if he was still unsure, nearly a year after Vieira’s death, that such things could be freely uttered, he said: ‘He was even worse than the Portuguese.’
Little good came of Nino’s twenty-three years as president. His trajectory in power, indeed, brings to mind the catastrophic reign of Plato’s archetypal tyrant, described with such relish in the Republic. Like that despot, Nino came to power as a protector, full of smiles, saluting everyone he met and distributing land to the people (Eduardo Gomes was one of many who fell for his charms). He promised a renewed focus on agriculture and an end to corruption, but despite massive injections of foreign aid his reign was an economic disaster. Public sector salaries went unpaid for months, sometimes years; infrastructure was not maintained, much less improved; food production slumped; poverty deepened: Guinea-Bissau was even poorer when he died than when he had taken office.
His political legacy was no healthier. Like Plato’s tyrant, once he had tasted power he turned from protector into wolf. Having promised democracy on his accession, it took him eleven years to legalise other political parties. He was ruthless in suppressing opposition. Potential rivals were either executed or disappeared; the government was hollowed out, its best men removed. Jimi, a high-ranking United Nations staffer I met in Bissau after we returned from the islands, told me: ‘Many of Nino’s opponents just vanished. He was an evil man.’
Plato’s dictator was ‘always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader.’ Nino, true to the archetype, triggered his country’s civil war in the late 1990s when he fired the head of the military, Ansumane Mane, on suspicion of arming rebels in neighbouring Senegal. When an independent inquiry found that it was Vieira’s own men who had supplied the weapons (by which time the war had claimed six thousand lives and shrunk the economy by a quarter), he was forced to flee into exile in Portugal.
On his return, he quickly made up for lost time. He welcomed South American drug dealers, turning Guinea-Bissau into what the United Nations has labelled ‘the world’s first narco-state.’ He and his cronies grew rich on the proceeds of the trade. He bought houses in Belgium and Portugal and stashed millions of dollars in foreign bank accounts. It was rumoured that he himself took advantage of trips to Europe to transport large quantities of cocaine. Like drug dealers elsewhere, Nino’s vehicle of choice was a Hummer with blacked out windows.
But despite his calamitous record, he clung to power. How did he do it? How did a man who was feared and hated by most of his people, who had no support among the military (the entire army turned against him during the civil war), and who had so many enemies in high places maintain such a grip on the country? For Guineans, there is only one possible answer. Street traders, hotel workers, a policeman and Jimi the United Nations man all told me the same thing: Nino had special powers. He was protected by some unseen but impregnable force. He could reverse the course of a bullet aimed at his heart. He could make himself invisible. He could conjure the death of opponents from thousands of miles away (it was the sudden death of Ansumane Mane that paved the way for his return from exile). How else could he have survived for so long, they ask. Many of his subjects believed he was immortal.
To nurture and replenish his powers, Nino drew on the darkest of methods. It is said that after he fled to Portugal during the civil war, ten clay pots were found in his abandoned palace, each one containing a human head. Allegations are hard to prove, of course, but it is widely believed, and not just by the scurrilous, that the heads were the fruits of human sacrifice. In a final, eerie reminder of Plato’s tyrant, who ‘tasted the entrails’ of human victims, Vieira, it is said, would drag his quarry deep into the forest and offer them up to the spirits. He would then devour their hearts.
As well as stamping out his enemies, Vieira also intimidated those close to him. He officially had two wives, but his libido was legendary. He took special pleasure in seducing the wives of his colleagues; if the cuckold found out and confronted him or reported the discovery to others, Nino would have him killed. A well-connected doctor working in our district in Bissau told me about a friend of his who ran a state-owned company. The friend was close to Vieira, having helped him garner votes among the Mandingo people in the east. One day he returned home for lunch to find the president’s bodyguards stationed outside his house. They told him they had orders to let nobody pass. ‘But this is my house, my wife is in there,’ the man pleaded. ‘If you try to pass we will shoot you,’ replied one of the bodyguards calmly. The man left, but he talked, outraged at the betrayal. A few days later he was found in his office with a gun in his hand and a bullet in his head. Vieira said it was suicide, that his friend had shot himself after an argument with his wife. ‘But why would he kill himself?’ asked the doctor with a chuckle, amazed that anyone would think of peddling such a story in such a macho society. ‘Why didn’t he kill his wife?’
Nino’s luck – or his magic powers – eventually ran out. ‘The strongest,’ wrote Rousseau, ‘is never strong enough to be always the master, unless he transforms strength into right and obedience into duty.’ Nino never achieved this transformation. He relied on force and fear; as a fighter, from the clan who fight like hyenas, he knew nothing else. ‘He had to die like that,’ said the mild-mannered Jimi. ‘If you live by violence you will die by violence.’ It is hard to find anyone who disagrees. Jimi said he knew nobody – nobody! – who mourned the president’s passing; Guineans are curious to know why Nino died and who killed him, but the belief that the world is a better place without him is universal.
15
We head back to the mission in Bissau, where the assault continues. The Americans and Guineans chip away tirelessly at our defences. The Bible, of course, is their chief weapon. They quote from it a litany of passages that they believe prove Jesus‘ divine parentage. Dan prints out an article from the internet which claims that there was only a one in several trillion chance (he gives a precise number) of Old Testament predictions about the virgin birth coming true. He lays it before me on the kitchen table as if he has found a diary entry in which I confess to something I have always denied. ‘How can you doubt Christ’s divinity when there is so much proof?’ he asks. When, frustrated, I wonder aloud how such a figure can be arrived at when there has been at most one virgin birth since the dawn of time (making it, for now, a one-in-infinity chance), he moves on, unshaken, to another piece of evidence.
Dan converted at the age of nineteen. There are Guinean missionaries who were even younger when they were re-born. Missionaries’ children (who are quiet and serious and well behaved but appear somehow otherworldly and icy) are born into fundamentalism. Their whole lives will be given to Christ. Prayer, Bible-reading and proselytising will occupy their days and dominate their thoughts: all else is frippery. Christianity offers Africans freedom from the old ancestral ties, but in the hands of the missionaries this freedom comes at a price. Submission to the ancestors is replaced by submission to Christ (‘deny yourself, and take up your casanke,’ Jesus commanded his followers in Tony’s Sarakole Bible). The old chains are replaced by new ones, a new master usurps the old; African converts are once again enslaved.
But what if the missionaries are wrong? What if there is no God, or if eternal life can be attained without devoting your life to Jesus? All their efforts, all their sacrifice, will be wasted. Their whole lives will have been redundant, their existence no more useful to themselves or humanity than that of one who dedicates his days to lotteries or games of chance.
There is, of course, another possibility, more disturbing in its implications: that the missionaries may be right. Among them are intelligent people, who like Dan and Lalas will have weighed carefully the arguments for and against their chosen path. Who can be sure that they are wrong, that the rest of us have a monopoly on the truth? It may be that they alone will make it to heaven while everybody else burns in hell. The missionaries’ persistent attacks do not convert me to their creed, but they sow doubts. While Ebru is repelled by their message and appalled at their use of terror as a recruiting tool, I wonder and waver, my mind perhaps made less certain by exposure to West Africa’s whirl of fantastic stories. I borrow Dan’s Bible, realising as well as he does that this must be how it starts, how they begin to win over African converts (it occurs to me that this – the fear of hell, doubt, investigation - is how Dan himself started). I realise too that unlike Guineans I have had the benefit of many years at school and university, and yet still the missionaries have penetrated my defences. With no education and with their critical faculties less honed, Guineans, trapped in a maelstrom of Christianity, animism, Islam and Westernisation and not knowing which of these gods to follow, are much more vulnerable to their arguments.
Reading Dan’s Bible, Christ’s admonishments on hell surprise me with their stridency. ‘He that believeth in the Son shall have everlasting life,‘ he said, ‘and he that does not obey the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him.’ The wrath of God leads to eternal damnation in a ‘furnace of fire,’ where there will be ‘wailing and gnashing of teeth.’ I had forgotten these strictures, and had come to believe that hell was a human invention, designed by the powerful to frighten, dominate and sell pardons to the masses. But here was Jesus, no friend of the powerful, spelling out the grisly fate of those who shunned his message. Belief in the biblical Jesus, it seemed, was not possible without belief in hell; by urging Guineans to give up everything for Christ and warning them of the consequences should they desist, the missionaries were merely echoing their master’s call.
After a few days of this we leave again, this time for the south, a quiet, remote part of the country near the border with Guinea. It is a land of dark forests and languid rivers. Men still hunt for food, with bush rat, squirrel, monkey and snake supplementing rice and fruit in the local diet. The poor condition of the roads makes it difficult to take produce to market to sell for cash, and the economy, unchanged for centuries, is based on barter and exchange (rice for cashews, for instance, or fruit for fish, or thatching a house in return for digging a well). Modernity has barely touched the region: a passing car draws crowds.
Our passing car contains a crowd. The Peugeot seven-seater, or sept places, is the most luxurious form of public transport in this part of West Africa. An estate car modified to incorporate a third row of seats where the boot should be, it is designed to seat seven passengers and a driver. Journeys, which follow fixed routes, begin when the vehicle is full. There are regular stops to take on and offload passengers and produce (often the slowing vehicle will be assailed by packs of baying, desperate-looking women who stream out of the forest and plead with the passengers to buy the onions, potatoes or cakes they carry in buckets or crates on their heads). When a top-up of fuel is required and a petrol station located, the engine is left running and a plastic funnel placed in the filler hole. An attendant holds a square of gauze over the opening of the funnel and pours in the fuel from a glass bottle.
If you are seated in the front or middle row of the car, and provided you are not averse to hard seats, chickens pecking at your ankles, clouds of red dust billowing in through un-closable windows, or droplets of the driver’s frequently-expelled spittle blowing back and spattering your face, your journey is fairly comfortable. For those seated in the back, however, life is more difficult. Nobody is eager to bring up the rear; those ensconced further forward will turn down hefty bribes to swap places with you. Three people can squeeze into the back row, but none has the luxury of movement. Shifting from one buttock to the other to avoid contracting haemorrhoids, for example, is impossible, for there is no room to either side. Your legs, moreover, are bent double in front of you, since the seat is raised only a few inches above the floor and that floor is cluttered with jerrycans, machetes, holdalls and sometimes live goats. You can extend your legs by edging two or three centimetres backwards, but this will leave your head jammed up against the low metal roof, a position quickly rendered disagreeable by the bumpy, potholed roads.
Those in the back row, then, are guaranteed a joyless ride, but even the front and middle rows are only comfortable if the driver sticks to the seven-passenger limit. Often, he cannot resist the temptation to wedge a few more in to each row, turning the sept places into a neuf or dix places. This is snug, but it is not the worst of all possible worlds. On our way to the south, our driver takes on sixteen passengers and three chickens. Some passengers are forced to stand up, contort their bodies like the trunks of olive trees, and lean over the middle row from the back row and the front row from the middle. Ebru and I, seated, find our heads nestled in armpits, our shoulders used as armrests. Neighbours’ elbows act as safety belts. Nobody complains as our conveyance fills up – when there are fourteen people in a car designed for seven and built for five, a couple more bodies do not make a significant difference.
Our driver, the source of our discomfort, is a willowy Muslim man in a thick black robe and white skullcap. He is nervous. Sweat streams down his long hooked nose from under his cap and drips onto his lap. He grips the steering wheel tightly, as if he might fall through the floor if he lets go, and hunches over it to be closer to the road surface in front. His anxiety is well-founded, for in his hands the Peugeot, normally a placid old hack, becomes a wild and uncontrollable brute. Whenever the driver takes his right hand off the steering wheel to change gear, his left hand moves instinctively in the opposite direction, as if to compensate. This causes the car to veer sharply across the road and the passengers to gasp in alarm. He regains the wheel just in time to stop us ploughing into the forest; that there are so few cars in the south, and therefore very little oncoming traffic, is our salvation.
Sometimes the loss of control is deliberate. When the car reaches the top of a hill, the driver, sweat now pouring in torrents from his brow, switches off the ignition to allow us to descend with the aid of gravity rather than costly petrol. As we career downhill, hurtling through villages and hoping that the press of other bodies will cushion us in the likely event of a crash, terrified children and animals scatter from the road like sparks from an anvil.
Towards the end of the three-hour journey, a rotund, stern-looking woman in the back row asks the driver to stop to let her and her three chickens out. ‘Where?’ he asks. ‘At the mango tree,’ she replies. The road is lined on both sides, as far as the eye can see, with mango trees. ‘Which one?’ asks the hapless driver, gripping the wheel and staring intently at the tarmac. ‘That one there, straight ahead,’ the woman says crossly, clicking her tongue at his stupidity. At this point, none of the driver’s options is straightforward; bewildered, he keeps driving. ‘This one!’ the woman shrieks after a few seconds. ‘Stop!’ We screech to a halt and the woman climbs out with her chickens, still clicking her tongue. The number of passengers is down to a more manageable fifteen.
16
Eventually we reach Buba. Once the most important town in the south, it is now no more than a village. Its long, sloping main street, bathed in watery sunlight, is silent, undisturbed by the noise of motor cars or mopeds. A market leads off down a narrow lane, but most of its stalls are empty of goods and they peter out after twenty yards. There is a bureau de change for the occasional traveller crossing to or from Guinea, but it rarely has any money. The village baker seldom has any bread, nor the egg seller eggs (our fellow sept places passengers stocked up on provisions before we left Bissau). There is nothing to do, so nobody does anything. People lie on benches or shop counters, dozing in the intense, cloying heat. Groups of men sit about, drinking green tea. Even the river which runs past the foot of the main street, the ambitiously named Rio Grande, cannot muster the energy to flow, instead merely filling up and emptying out with the tide. Signs of life are faint.
We slip into the slow routine. From our guesthouse down by the river we wander up into town, pausing from time to time in the shade of a tree to look at a pig or vulture, or simply to escape the fierce sun. Two young children relieve us of an empty plastic water bottle (nothing here is wasted). Under a large mango tree a girl lies face down on a bench asleep while her friend sells us a bunch of bananas. A stray dog scents a morsel of bread we have found and follows us sadly along until it is shooed away by protective locals throwing stones. When the tide is high enough, I take a swim in the sluggish river. Crabs scuttle off as I squelch across the muddy shore. A red and black gonelek bird flits among the mangroves. By the forested far bank, boys in dugout canoes slap paddles onto the water to frighten fish towards their nets. The heat is suffocating, and the cool, brackish water comes as a relief.
The tranquillity of the Rio Grande today hides a turbulent and troubled past. In the sixteenth century the surrounding region was the site of intense slaving activity, with three thousand captives exported from the jungle each year. It was not unusual to see twenty or thirty ships stationed in the river’s calm waters, waiting to be filled with human cargo. For it is here that the Atlantic slave trade begins.
Guineans first encounter their future nemesis in 1446, when Pepel villagers looking out to sea espy what they take to be a flock of giant white sea birds gliding south towards them, skimming the surface of the still ocean. The villagers gaze on in wonder, but as the creatures draw nearer their awe quickly turns to consternation. The white shapes, they realise, are not wings but sails - the sails of large ships bearing rapidly down on them. Panicked, they sound the alarm and take cover in the bush. As the ships reach the shore they watch in horror as dozens of men, their faces as ghostly white as the sails, stream out and wade through the shallows towards the beach.
Repeated invasions by marauding tribes from the interior have made the coastal people hostile to outsiders, and they treat this new maritime threat seriously. As the white men reach dry land, the villagers gather their spears and charge. Battle is joined on the sand, but the intruders have more men and more weapons and they overwhelm their assailants, killing the bravest and taking several others captive. While the survivors flee into the bush, their unfortunate kin are shackled and ferried out to the waiting ships. This tiny crop of men and women are the first victims of a European hunger for cheap slave labour that will engulf the whole of West Africa, swallowing up over nine million lives and spitting out and leaving for dead the three million who are too weak to survive the Atlantic crossing. Taking advantage of their initial economic and technological superiority, for four centuries the strong will plunder the weak and ensure that Africans remain a few paces behind, permanently exploitable, permanently on the wrong side of the balance of power.
The marauders took their captives home with them, to Lagos in Portugal, where a witness saw the wretched cargo being unloaded. ‘Some kept their heads low, their faces bathed in tears,’ he reported. ‘Others struck their faces with the palms of their hands, throwing themselves at full length upon the ground…And though we could not understand the words of their language, the sound of it right well accorded with the measure of their sadness.’
The sponsor of that first voyage was the Portuguese prince, Henry, known to history as Henry the Navigator. Austere and humble in his personal life - he wore a hair shirt and abjured alcohol and womanising - the prince had expansive plans for his country. He had first sent naval expeditions southwards in a vain search for Prester John, the fabled Christian priest-king of central Africa, but his later forays had different motives. His country had recently occupied the Cape Verde islands and it had plans to farm them; for this it needed labour, and none came cheaper than slaves.
Happily for the devout Henry, the Catholic Church blessed his endeavours. Medieval European Christianity held that the enslavement of non-Christians was justified as a means of saving their souls. Pope Nicholas V issued a papal bull that gave Portugal the right to ‘capture, vanquish and subdue Saracens, pagans and unbelievers, and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery.’ The legitimacy this conferred emboldened Prince Henry, and the pontifical injunction to ‘convert the captives to his use and profit’ encouraged him to step up his activity and increase his investment in the new venture.
He began by sponsoring direct raids on African villages. The English pirates Drake and Hawkins joined in, ‘going every day on shore to take the inhabitants, with burning and spoiling their towns.’ (John Hawkins’s coat of arms displayed a slave in chains; both he and Drake would later be made knights of the realm. As an Englishman brought up on tales of these men’s heroism, one is uncomfortably reminded of a line from a song, You Can’t Blame the Youth, by the reggae musician Peter Tosh. ‘You teach the youth about the pirate Hawkins, and you said he was a very great man,‘ the Jamaican sang.)
But these early raids were costly for the slavers - Africans never failed to put up a fight and dozens of Portuguese were killed. After Columbus’s discovery of the Americas triggered an explosion in the demand for slave labour – there were now large profits to be made from selling captives to the Spanish, who having wiped out the natives of the New World were seeking a fresh supply of manpower to grow sugar in the Caribbean and mine South America‘s gold – Henry the Navigator’s successors realised that a more efficient system would be needed (‘You teach the youth about Christopher Columbus, and you said he was a very great man,’ sang Tosh, who in 1987 fell victim to Jamaica’s murder epidemic, his native land still bearing the scars of the slave trade).
The Portuguese turned to Africans to do their dirty work. They formed business relationships with chiefs, offering them European merchandise – guns, knives, looking glasses, beads - in exchange for men, women and children. The chiefs could have refused these gifts - their counterparts further south in Gabon never allowed the Portuguese to establish a foothold in their country - but instead they chose cooperation; the lure of the white man’s wares proved irresistible.
The chiefs’ choice, like the spark that starts a bush fire, would give rise to a vast international industry. Over the next four hundred years millions of Africans would be harvested, checked for defects, flat-packed into container ships and exported across the Atlantic. Purchased in Africa for rum and guns, the slaves were exchanged in the Americas for sugar, which was shipped back across the ocean and sold to sweet-toothed Europeans. At each stop in this triangular trade, huge profits were made.
For the ordinary African, excluded from these machinations, the chiefs’ choice is the first act in a long nightmare. Until that moment it is only the white man he has had to fear. This is peril enough: the slaver-turned-clergyman John Newton is asked by one captive if his shoes are made from ‘Black Skin’, and rumours are rife that the white man captures the black for the purpose of eating him. But when his own people become slavers too, the African finds himself in even greater danger. Who can he trust now? To whom can he turn for help now that the chief entrusted to protect him has turned from gamekeeper to poacher? Nowhere is safe; at no moment – day or night – can he drop his guard. The old certainties – tribal loyalty, community, the dependability of chiefs – have evaporated. Now only his closest family can be relied upon; his world, once so stable, has become a Hobbesian horror of all against all.
The chiefs begin by selling the slaves they have acquired in war. When this supply dries up they start new wars, raiding neighbouring villages along the coast and venturing inland to plunder from other tribes (travelling in the interior in the late eighteenth century, Mungo Park passes numerous burnt out villages, emptied of their inhabitants by itinerant bands of professional slavers). While the chiefs are rounding up their victims, Portuguese boats ‘hover like vultures in every river,’ waiting to ferry the captives out to the larger slave ships anchored at sea - for tens of thousands of West Africans, the banks of Buba’s Rio Grande are the last they will ever see of their continent.
Park makes his way back to the coast with a caravan, or coffle, of slaves. They march twenty miles a day for two months under the searing tropical sun, ‘tied together by their necks with the thongs of a bullock’s hide.’ Many of the slaves are ‘ill-conditioned.’ When one becomes too sick to continue, he is replaced by a young girl from the village they are passing through. Park, who records that a prime female slave costs the equivalent of twelve muskets or ten elephant tusks, looks on with pity as the girl is readied for her journey. ‘The poor girl was ignorant of her fate until all the bundles were tied up in the morning and the coffle ready to depart,’ he writes. ‘Never was a face of serenity more suddenly changed to one of the deepest distress; the terror she manifested on having the load put upon her head and the rope fastened around her neck, and the sorrow with which she bade adieu to her companions were truly affecting.’
The people of the Bijagós islands are among the most feared slave raiders. At first the Europeans attempt to take them captive, but they prove impossible to control and foment frequent rebellions on slave ships and plantations. Many of those who are exported commit suicide in the belief that their spirits will return home. The slavers soon realise that perseverance is futile, and begin to enlist them instead as allies. The islanders, lured by Portuguese rewards of rum, brandy and weapons, prove willing accomplices.
The Bijagó have a reputation as able and ruthless warriors. As boat-builders, sailors and swimmers, they are unmatched in West Africa; their seventy-foot war canoes can hold several dozen fighters and travel on the open sea. Historically, the Bijagó’s warmongering has mainly been directed against each other -battles between islands have waxed and waned over the centuries - but after the arrival of the Portuguese this infighting is put on hold, as the islanders turn their attention to slave raids on the mainland.
The raiders’ targets have little hope of escape. In the dead of night, daubed in coal, red ochre and clay and with their heads bedecked in feathers, detachments of twenty or thirty Bijagó warriors take to their boats and paddle swiftly over the calm sea towards the river mouths of the continent. They leave the canoes in the lee of the banks, and move stealthily through the forest towards their sleeping quarry. Upon arriving at an unfortunate village they surround it, while a few envoys work their way silently down its lanes, setting fire to each house. The villagers emerge from their blazing homes dazed and panicked, only realising that they are under attack when they see that their neighbours’ houses, too, are in flames. Most surrender immediately, terrified by their attackers’ reputation. Those who try to escape are hacked to death.
War is not the only source of slaves; looting one’s own people proves equally profitable. The chiefs dip into their own tribes, even their own villages, to satisfy the Europeans’ demands. They sell off criminals, and distort local laws to encompass a wider array of crimes. Enslavement becomes the default punishment for even the pettiest of misdemeanours. If you fall from a tree and die, your whole family can be sold into slavery for cursing you. Debtors who are late repaying loans are dispatched to the waiting ships. Accused criminals are made to drink poisonous red water: those who vomit are pronounced guilty and handed over to the slavers; those who manage to swallow the water are deemed not guilty, but instead die of poisoning.
The Europeans prey on African poverty. Their depredations set in motion a vicious spiral whereby the slave trade reduces food production; reduced food production increases hunger; and hunger leaves the people more vulnerable to slave raids. Agriculture is assailed from all sides. Since strangers can no longer be trusted, trade in food stops, forcing everyone to fend for himself. But to protect family members from marauding slavers (who do not shrink from stuffing stray children into sacks, never to be seen again), cultivation of crops must be moved nearer to home, away from the most fertile land. This makes it harder to grow enough to eat. As the raids intensify, moreover, energy, time and money must be diverted from agriculture to defence. Farmers spend what little they have not on seeds and livestock but on guns and spears. Fortifying villages becomes more urgent than filling granaries - the Balante reinforce their settlements with watchtowers, moats and spiked walls; other tribes build impenetrable compounds with two-foot high entrances and labyrinthine tunnel systems protecting the main living quarters. With the slavers targeting the best of the farmers - the strongest, most productive men and women – food supplies shrivel. Hunger seeps across the land, presenting easy pickings for the raiders. Mungo Park sees people voluntarily offering themselves as slaves ‘to avoid a greater calamity.’ Parents sell their children because they can no longer feed them. Slave ships fill up just by offering food.
At the time of the slave trade, less than a quarter of a million people lived in the area that is now Guinea-Bissau. During the eighty years when slaving there was at its most intense, nearly two hundred thousand men, women and children were seized and dispatched across the Atlantic. Their journey was hellish. John Newton reported that the captives would be crammed into ships like books upon a shelf. ‘I have known them so close that the shelf would not, easily, contain one more,’ he wrote. ‘The poor creatures, thus cramped for want of room, are likewise in irons, for the most part both hands and feet, and two together, which makes it difficult for them to turn or move, to attempt either to rise or lie down without hurting themselves or each other.’ One in seven of those taken did not survive these conditions. Countless others perished during the journey to the ocean.
But it was not just the captives themselves who suffered: slavery also shattered the lives of those left behind. Although the trade ended in the middle of the nineteenth century, its destabil-ising effects on the societies of West Africa are still perceptible today. Trust was shattered: people living in areas gorged on by the slave trade remain less trusting of their neighbours, and even of family members, than those in areas that were left unscathed. The trade upended social structures, too: the institutions that had evolved over millennia to help West Africans cope with their harsh environment – chiefdom, the administration of justice, the community, the tribe – were all corrupted, sometimes beyond repair. Social upheaval and the breakdown of trust have proved an explosive combination. Over a century after the end of the trade, the regions from which slaves were plundered are less stable – more liable to erupt into civil conflict, more prone to coups d’état - than any other part of the continent.
They are also poorer. Before slavery, the countries whose people would fill the slave ships were among the richest in Africa; today they are the poorest. The subversion of trust contributed to this impoverishment. Without trust it is impossible to do business: buyers who doubt sellers are reluctant to purchase their products, lend to them, invest in them or employ them; sellers who distrust buyers are unwilling to extend them credit or work for them. Businesses must therefore remain small to survive, and commerce limited to minor transactions. The trade also depleted the region’s manpower. By targeting working adults and teenagers it robbed West Africa of its brightest prospects, of those who would have driven their economies forward and shepherded them into the modern era. Agriculture withered. Large swathes of the land were emptied, cutting off the exchange of goods and ideas. Manufacturing, whose profitability could not match that of slavery, never got off the ground.
The psychological impacts were no less crippling. ‘The people are gentle when they have no communication with Europeans,’ wrote Newton, ‘but the intercourse of the Europeans has rather had a bad than good influence upon their morals.’ The trade debased both rulers and ruled. Dangling their wares before African eyes, the slavers nurtured a fatal greed for their worthless but exotic trinkets. The desire to acquire usurped the old community values; chiefs who had been revered and often loved were exposed as gluttonous and venal, and their people’s faith in them as foolish. Leaders’ tastes were imitated by their subjects, and imported cloth, jewellery and liquor came to be preferred to the produce of Africa. The European had proved himself a superior manufacturer and a wilier businessman (one eighteenth-century Sierra Leonean chief aspired not just to the products of Europe but the guile, admitting he ‘wished to be rogue as good as white man’). Honour and duty had given way to seedy compromise, and from that point on the black man would view himself as inferior to the white. ‘This was the greatest damage done to the Negro by slavery,’ observed the Trinidadian writer VS Naipaul. ‘It set him the ideals of white civilisation and made him despise every other.’
17
Our guesthouse in Buba is the property of Gabi, a large, peroxide-blonde Romanian, and her diminutive Guinean husband Cassama. They met while Cassama was studying economics in Romania during the Cold War (his country’s socialist government was loosely allied to Russia), and returned to his homeland after they married.
West Africa has softened their communist leanings. On our second night we are surprised by the arrival of Wade, Katie and their two young children. Wade and Katie are American evange-lists who work at the mission in Bissau. We had had dinner with them once at their house, and they had spent the evening regaling us with tales of Wade’s extraordinary healing abilities (we had listened politely, wondering which of us was furthest from sanity; seeing them now in the guesthouse as we arrive back from a swim in the river, Ebru conjectures, only half in jest, that they might be pursuing us).
Before moving to the Guinean capital they had lived in a mud house in Kolda, the fly-blown Senegalese border town we had passed through on our way to Bafatá. There, they told us with wonder in their eyes, a local Muslim family had appeared one day on their doorstep and presented them with their three-year-old daughter, who had been having regular and alarming seizures. The parents believed she was possessed by evil spirits, but Muslim and animist holy men had failed to cure her, and they were bringing her to these strange white Christians as a last resort.
Wade, a giant of a man who towers over his petite blonde wife, took the girl in his arms. He noticed that she was wearing a pendant containing Islamic script, and instructed the parents to remove it. Then he prayed over her. The girl’s seizures never returned. Her parents paraded her around the town with joy, singing the praises of the Christian miracle workers. ‘But it wasn’t us who cured her,’ the devout Katie told us, ‘it was Jesus. We love Jesus so much.’
On arriving at the guesthouse in Buba, Wade provides another demonstration of Christ’s munificence. He asks Gabi if she has any ailments, and she tells him she has had a splitting headache for the last week. Wade places his hands on her head and prays. The headache immediately clears. ‘It was a terribly painful headache,‘ Gabi tells me a couple of days later, speaking Portuguese with a lugubrious Romanian accent. ‘I’d tried aspirin and other medicines but they made no difference. I couldn’t get rid of it. The American offered to try to heal me, and I had nothing to lose so I let him try. I haven’t had any pain since.’
Gabi, who is as assertive and garrulous as her husband Cassama is mild and quiet, renounced Christianity as a teenager and, swapping gods, became a committed communist. She is in no doubt, however, that it is to Wade’s healing powers that she owes the disappearance of her headache. She realises that this is difficult for Europeans like us to accept, but her three decades in West Africa have made her less certain about how the world works. ‘You might not believe any of these things now,’ she tells us, ‘but if you stay here long enough, you will.’ They are words we will have frequent cause to remember.
In an ideal world, Buba would be a good starting point for the next stage of our journey, to Sierra Leone. If the roads were passable and safe and one could find reliable public transport, it would be possible to head south to the border with Guinea, along the coast to its capital, Conakry, and then south-east towards Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone. Unfortunately, travel in this part of the world is never so simple. The road to the border, Gabi tells us, is atrocious, littered with large potholes and in parts completely fallen away. The road on the other side is worse. Cassama warns us, too, that the notorious corruption of officials on the Guineén side might double or treble the cost of the trip. Since these obstacles deter all but the most desperate from using the route, travelling by public transport would involve many hours, perhaps many days, of waiting for vehicles to fill up.
The above are minor impediments, however, compared with those placed in our way by the regional security situation. The military government in Guinea has been massacring opponents and preparing for civil war. Both the French and British governments advise strongly against all visits to the country, and Guinéens in Senegal and Bissau have given us similar counsel. Our alternatives are limited. There are no flights or ships from Guinea-Bissau to Sierra Leone, and the much longer overland route which bypasses Guinea takes you instead through the Ivory Coast and Liberia, both of which are themselves recovering from civil wars and are also on European governments’ travel blacklists. This leaves heading north by sept places to Gambia, or to Dakar in Senegal, and then flying south, back over Guinea-Bissau and Guinea, as the most feasible solution (although even this route means braving West African airlines, nearly all of which are banned from European airspace due to safety concerns).
The traveller wishing to reach Gambia or Dakar from Guinea-Bissau must first negotiate the Casamance in Senegal, which borders Guinea-Bissau to the north. The decades-old rebellion in this region means that it too has been placed on Western governments’ lists of no-go areas, and coming down from Dakar at the beginning of our trip we had avoided the most volatile districts by circumnavigating Gambia and entering Guinea-Bissau in the east. The prospect of retracing those same, gruelling steps fills us with gloom (even the normally cautious Ebru talks of taking instead the shorter, more direct route), and the length of the trip and the poor condition of the roads mean that it too is not without hazards. The shorter route north traverses rebel country, where in the preceding weeks there have been several deadly skirmishes between separatists and soldiers. It is an option that two months ago we would not have considered, but now, accustomed as we are to having a looser grip on our destinies, it is this path that we decide on.
18
Gabi’s husband Cassama joins us for the sept places journey back to Bissau, where we will pick up onward transport to Senegal. He is taking the guesthouse’s generator to be repaired (we have spent the last few nights with just candle and moonlight for illumination). The sept places has only nine passengers, but there is a problem with the engine, which cuts out ten minutes into the journey. Fortunately we are at the top of a hill, and a push by two of the passengers is all that is required to restart the vehicle. Fifteen minutes later it cuts out again, and then again shortly after that (on this last occasion, one of the pushers has to run back to retrieve a pistol that has fallen out of his pocket and clattered unnervingly onto the hard surface of the road). The fourth time the engine stalls, the combined pushing power of all six of the male passengers is deployed in vain, as the ignition stubbornly refuses to ignite. No further progress is possible.
There is no alternative but to wait. While the driver pokes hopefully at the engine, the passengers wander across the road and sit on the ground in the shade of a ponderous, deep-green mango tree, the dried-out forest at our backs. What we are waiting for is unclear. The few cars that pass all stop to offer help, but since nobody knows what is wrong, we wave them on. The minutes pass, then the hours; nobody complains. After a while the driver hitches a ride to the nearest town, twenty miles away, presumably to find help. Under the mango tree, the men smoke cigarettes, the women chat. An older passenger lies down in the dust and falls asleep. From time to time someone gets up to go and have a look at the engine, and then saunters back to us, nothing to report. All around is silence - it is too hot even for birds to sing, and as noon approaches the trickle of passing vehicles dries up, the occasional scurrying monkey now the only sign of life. Heat haze liquefies the surface of the long, straight road, turning it into a steaming grey broth. It is good weather for waiting.
After some time, a car approaches and drops off our driver and a mechanic. They set to work, but give up after a few minutes, stumped. We wait some more. Fortunately, our driver has also found a rope on his expedition. When eventually a crowded minibus comes past and stops to offer assistance, the two vehicles are tied together. The sept places passengers get up from the shade of the mango tree, shrug, and climb back into the car as if nothing has happened. We are towed off to the nearby town, where we change to a trustier conveyance.
This is not the end of our travails, however, for as we approach Bissau we are stopped at an army controle, or checkpoint. These are ubiquitous in West Africa. On the outskirts of almost every major town and many minor ones, you will find a small group of soldiers sitting under a makeshift wood and straw shelter, ordering vehicles passing into and out of the town to stop. Their raison d’être is not always obvious. In areas where there is unrest, such as the Casamance in Senegal, they seek weapons and the drugs that are often sold to purchase them. If they are lucky, they will stumble across a rebel fighter (although savvy passengers can avoid checkpoints by trekking in a wide arc through the bush on foot before rejoining their car further on, out of sight of the soldiers). In more peaceful regions, while their ostensible purpose is to ensure that drivers have the correct papers and their passengers’ identity cards, the soldiers’ principal objective is to extract bribes to supplement their meagre salaries. Most often it is the drivers who pay the bribes - even if their documents are in order, it is seldom difficult for the soldiers to find something amiss with their vehicles - but sometimes passengers are asked to get out of the car and present the contents of their baggage.
This is one such occasion. Our fellow travellers have little to show, but one soldier, a tall and fierce-looking man in wraparound shades, takes an interest in the brancos’ rucksacks. He points at them with his pistol, and asks us to empty them onto two small chairs. The other passengers are indignant that he is picking on the foreigners – ‘guests in our country‘ – but we remain outwardly calm as we unpack our bags, knowing that any expressions of anger or frustration will increase our risk of arrest or extortion.
Once we are halfway through, the chairs piled high with clothes, underwear and books, the soldier tires of the charade and orders us to be on our way. The nether reaches of our bags, where any illegal objects are most likely to be hidden, remain undisturbed. Cassama and the other passengers, who have been standing by us to ensure we make it through the controle intact, mutter angrily about the soldier’s venality, and amid much huffing and puffing we pile back into the car and continue on our way.
The soldiers’ vigilance is unusual. On our outward journey from Bissau to Buba we had avoided a bag check by mentioning the name of the Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson to a football-loving cadet. Since then, however, the game had changed, for in the intervening days the country’s numerous checkpoints had failed to halt the passage into the capital of one of its most wanted men. Rear-Admiral José Americo Bubo Na Tchuto, the former head of the Guinean navy, had spent two years in Gambia, having fled Guinea-Bissau in fear of his life after a failed attempt to oust Nino Vieira in a coup. With Nino dead, Admiral Bubo, weary of exile, had decided to return home. Leaving Gambia in a dugout canoe, he had made his way through the waterways and forests of his homeland, walked into the United Nations building in Bissau, and demanded refugee status. Although Bubo was widely suspected of being involved in the drug trade through the Bijagós - as head of the navy he was perfectly placed to grab a slice of the action, and he was renowned for being generous with the rewards that came with his position - the United Nations, constitutionally bound to grant him asylum, had refused the government’s requests to hand him over for trial. (He would only be freed several months later, when a group of renegade soldiers took him under their “protection” and made him the figurehead for their own coup attempt. Within weeks of his release, and despite the United States labelling him a “drug kingpin” and banning American citizens from doing business with him, Bubo was reappointed as navy chief.) Those staffing Guinea-Bissau’s checkpoints, meanwhile, chastened by their failure to catch the fugitive but oblivious to accusations of shutting the stable door after the horse had bolted, were now putting on a display of relative efficiency.
As we finally near Bissau, seven hours into our three-hour journey, Cassama, who has been quiet and pensive throughout, places his hand gently on my forearm and asks me my views on Wade’s healing powers. A trained economist and committed communist, Cassama is torn between scepticism and wonder at the sudden cure of his wife’s headache. If you stay here long enough, you will believe in these things, Gabi had told me. Her husband’s old beliefs were seeping back in, jostling aside the scientific view of the world he had brought back with him from Romania. He asks me very respectfully whether, as an educated writer, I can think of a rational explanation for Gabi’s rapid recovery. Conscious that the profession of traditional healing might not have survived for so long if nobody had ever felt better after visiting a medicine man, I remind him of the placebo effect that is so apparent in clinical trials, and of the healing powers of positive thinking; nor, I add, can coincidence be ruled out. He nods, but is unconvinced. ‘You don’t seem sure,’ he says, accurately diagnosing my doubts. ‘I’m not,’ I find myself answering. ‘It could have been Jesus, too.‘