‘We are making palm oil,’ Christian says, ‘would you like to see?’ He leads me through a landscape of palm, elephant grass, and smoky patches of last week’s slash and burn. Young girls from the village, Beautiful faces, giggles, hands waving like flags. You snap me! You snap me! Christian points to a tree that […]
Mende
On standing out….below the radar, in Sierra Leone
I’ve often been asked if I’ve ever felt uncomfortable in Sierra Leone. The answer is yes, when I was there in 2000, during the war. It was a year after ‘the second coming of the demons’, which is how Sierra Leoneans often refer to January, 1999, when the rebels retook most of Freetown. When Joseph […]