On the rare chance that anyone is passing through Voinjama in northern Liberia, I cannot recommend highly enough the Lofa Lodge, Bar & Restaurant, run by the charming and attentive Scham, who will order in peppered chicken, serve chilled Star beer with Bob Dylan in the background, and attach a small torch to his head to shed light on a chess game and advise on moves.  Given where he is, where Africa is crumpled, ruthless and unsure of how to react to its own failures, Scham does a fantastic job in providing power, water, sancuary and a sense of tranquility. 

At Alex’s waterfront restaurant in Freetown, a man stood waistdeep in sea-water, eating fire and runnging the flames around his torso, while far out at sea lightening streaked across the night-sky signalling the coming rains. Alex’s is one o fthe finest restaurants in Sierra Leone, where you can get a lobster the size of your head for just over US$10. There’s no wine list, just Star beer, or Heinekin, and it seems the Sierra Leoneans don’t go in much for vegetables — a few strands appear by the side of my plate.   The lobster was plain, grilled and to die for.

From Sierra Leone’s main airport there are three choices to get into town. One is by an old Soviet helicopter. The second is a drive that takes around fourteen hours. The third is a 45 minute trip on a delapidated old car ferry, jammed with dusty four-by-fours, with a saloon bar upstairs where you are entertained by a comedian and a tap dancing dwarf.  Its colourful and wild, but who on Earth ever thought of building an airport that almost inaccessible to the main city?

I’m off to West Africa now to look at how the intervention by Britain and the United States into Sierra Leone and Liberia almost a decade ago has succeeded or failed — or more likely is on that long path that could take decades before the prosperity overrides the threat of war. We plan to re-trace the journey of Graham Greene who in 1935 with his cousin Barbara travelled through Sierra Leone to Liberia encountering 20-foot high stilted Devil dancers, ritual village dancing, military commanders accused of war crimes, drunken Paramount chiefs, boasting politicis and malarial missionaries.  Let’s see what we find.