A VIEW OVER SALONE

In late 2012, I was fortunate and privileged to join the EU Election Observation Mission to Sierra Leone. Two months in such a culturally rich and extraordinary land is a bountiful well for stories, too may to tell here I am afraid. So I've decided to steer away from the elections and just recount one memorable afternoon, the timing of which was not all ideal, but that is another story. . .

Xavier (Media Expert, Richard Howitt (MEP) Chief Observer, Mags (logistics) and self at Koidu Heli-field for CO's trip to Kono.

The pilot scolded me for allowing our jeep to drive too close to the rotors. “We’re very precious about our chopper!” He bellowed in a thick Russian accent, patting his reddened forehead, his burly torso jumping out of a side door.  I apologised, quickly and profusely.  I had never driven to a helicopter before, particularly one sat out on an unmarked field, somewhere in the depths of west African, hidden behind swirls of fallen bush grass.  They said the chopper would only wait ten minutes, I was already fifteen late.

Trundling awkwardly along the dirt track, I could hear the pitch and whine of the revving blades.  As we got closer, a steady intermittent swoosh, the elevated sound of a focused scythe cutting the hay, filled the air.  The palms flapped in the non typical breeze.  Scores of children in pristine white shirts and blue uniforms stood-by holding their foreheads, in case their frowns might fall off.

 “You’re welcome aboard”, the captain smiled after his terse scolding.  I climbed into the spacious cabin, the hot air thick with the stench of fuel and sweat.  The cabin rocked gently as the rotors floated past, heavy and brutish.  Two men sat silently at the end of the cabin, neatly dressed, brown tan shoes, pressed trousers, flamboyant shirts - civil servants of some kind.  They dozed away in the wretched familiar heat unaware of or unaffected by my presence.  A metal bench ran down the sides of the cabin. In the centre of the floor a thick rope net pinned down bags and boxes. I pushed my modest knapsack underneath.  Through the small porthole, I saw my driver pull away and the children, jumping and waving furiously in the grass.  I sat onto the bench, draped in a makeshift red cushion, hardly thick enough to disguise the clanking seat underneath.  The cabin door opened, a young man, dark haired, uniformed, pristine, military, stepped out and walked over to me.  Smiling, he handed me a card and headphones.  Without removing his black sun glasses, he asked had I flown with them before.  I shook my head. “You’re welcome. Put these on, it gets very noisy. Do not take them off until we reach Freetown. Read this card. We are diverting to Bo for a pick up. Flight time is approximately one hour.”  He turned and walked back to his seat.  I looked at the card, frayed, pawed and disintegrating with faded colour pictures of safety procedures.  I tucked it into the cushion split beside me.  The captain jumped into the cabin and climbed into the cockpit.  The metal door slammed shut with a clank and a wheel spun on the inside like the seal between the bulkheads of a submarine.  We were locked in now.  The air was wet, hot and heavy like a sauna or perhaps more like under the lid of a freshly stewed chicken casserole. The young officer sat into a jump seat and buckled in.  The civil servants slept away.  I wiped my brow and closed my own belt.  

The oven shook and rattled as the rotors energised.  The thunderous sound was now muffled somewhat by my headphones.  I watched the shadows on the field flit by quicker and quicker.  The grass, stalks as thick as branches, flapped like my mother’s laundry in the vortex created by the whirring propeller.  The children clutched each other, waving, falling, laughing and then screeching with excitement as grass, sand and pebbles filled the air until they faded into the dusty mist.  The cabin rattled and bounced.  The young officer lifted his pristine polished boot and pressed it against the bench. We swayed and, then, rose up; up above the ochre grass and sienna dust, freckled with blue trousers and less white shirts, up above tin roofs and swaying verdant palms, up past the cobalt coloured hills into the cyan blue. The officer, tapped his forehead with a small neat white cloth. I sipped some tepid water.

We drifted steadily across the sky, away from Kono, swaying a little here and there, sliding just above the canopy of dense green jungle, thick with a myriad of plant-life, innumerable shades of green, creeping up through colls and over peaks, cascading down the sharp black slopes of diamond hard landforms, an ocean of endless, vast, pristine forestation.  At times, we skirted so close over the peaks, it felt as though I could have put my hand out the window and trailed my fingers along the tops of the trees, as though dipping my fingers into veridian water from the side of some speeding boat.  All the while, the civil servants slept and the pristine officer stared through his pitch black lenses. I peered through the porthole.

They said these things were not very reliable and, now, here I was floating like a freshly steamed dim-sum in this hulking white creaking monstrosity above an alien, inhospitable forest, under the hood of which north, south, east and west meant nothing.  I stared out onto the endless forest in which a man from a rocky outcrop in the north Atlantic, or any man might, reliably, have little chance of surviving.  Here I was then, with vast dark jungle and fear of flying conspiring in the sweltering heat of an ageing Russian Sykorsky to drive to me to utter madness and yet, staring through that porthole across the rushing tide of evergreen, my throat clutching to thin streams of cool air struggling through a broken vent, I don't think I ever felt so at peace. Funny that.


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If you find yourself in Salone one day, here’s a few things you might like or need to know.

Chuck Chuck Plum.  This bizarre fruits is a cross between a bony fish and pineapple. I kid you not. Its flesh, soft, spongy, yellow and running with juice, is full of sharp little spears. Its flavour is unique, pear, pineapple, lemon, kiwi and something else . . .

Landing at Lungi.  The pilots must love this place, they bank the plane, putting its reputation to the test for a fast and steep descent onto the narrow peninsular landing strip. “Welcome to Lungi International Airport and Freetown, where the temperature is 30C”.

Grilled Barracuda, Tiger Prawn or Lobster.  One day, when Sierra Leone’s tourist industry is at full steam (and it won’t be too long now), this exceptional delight will be affordable only to Russian oligarch’s - mark my words.

Rice. Local Salonian rice has got to be some of the most flavoursome in the world.

Country Fowl.  It sounds like a nasty event somewhere outside the capital, but this is in fact the local chicken - a hybrid of dinosaur and duck, it is as tough as an old boot but the sweet sweet meat is simply delicious with pepper sauce.

Koidu Bikers. A colourful band of taxi bikers who come close as possible to being a national emblem with brightly coloured hats, jackets and sunglasses spinning perilously about the highways and byways of the east.

Boss-Boss. When the rains starts to pelt down and shake up the forest, out come the creepy crawlies and boy do they come out. Umbrellas up, flame throwers to the ready . . .

Cassava. Burn it, boil it, bake it, stew it, fry it, chew it, grind it.  It is to Salone what the spud is to the Irish.

The Sunday Run.  Take a city of two million, give them a morning off before Sunday prayers and what do they do? Go a twenty mile jog, right? Right. And, if you can sing - all the better.

Paramount Chief.  Nothing unusual about chiefs in Africa, but you gotta love the word Paramount. African English is often glorious to listen to and no better place than Salone to enjoy its richness and preservation of an older style.

Broken Bo.  The essential hand washing utensil is ubiquitous and now available in plastic!

Average.  Only in Salone can you have the best club, bar, restaurant in town and call it “Average”.

Opoto.  If you’re white, you’re one.

Red on the outside and green on the inside (and vice versa). Salonian Politics summed up.

Jelly. No it is not coconut, its jelly.

Pregnant women and snakes.  If you don’t want to get bitten, keep a pregnant woman by your side (diesel also works by the way.)

Connections.  Africa is a small place too. The Congolese President, Joseph Kabila, his wife is from Yengema in Kono and pally by all accounts with Koroma, President of Sierra Leone, whose wife is also a local lady.

Roads. The topic of discussion when the rest of humanity is discussing the weather.

Bu Bu. Salone’s vuvuzwuela.

Pepper soup.  Salonian cure all

Puto Puto. Ubiquitous red mud on the roads.

Bonfire. It burns bright and all night long and through it the spirits talks and bring resolution to disputes. If only all bonfire could do the same.

Firing.  It is worth knowing that parts of Elizabeth Quays in Freetown are not where you want to be hanging out and you definitely don’t want to find yourself being fired by witches and black magic practitioners down there.

Krio.  National language.

Iphone.  As useful as a chocolate iron in Salone.

When the trees begin to talk.  What on earth this means I have no idea. I have tried to fathom it, but I think its true meaning lies only deep within the mythic and spiritual consciousness of Salonians. But there is something beautiful about the idea or the notion that, for example, elephants only come out of the forests when the trees begin to talk . . .

Some sketches from the field . . . 

LETTER FROM MBANDAKA: NEW LIGHT ON THE HEART OF DARKNESS

 FEAR is not putrid, nor is it black like a perilous void.

The day, the hour, the second one smells fear is a moment in a place called ‘fear’, but it is, in reality, the moment just in advance of it (to be or not to be).  It is a place of anticipation, expectation, deliberation, prevarication but mostly it is a place of dreaded premonition; the last moment of now.  

Flowers never smell so fresh nor fragrant, nor do colours seem so vibrant nor the faintest sparkles of love so intense as a time to decide; to walk towards the unknown;  the present moment - a moment of high definition  - before the plunge. There lies the colour of fear;  as though orchestral strings pull through a lingering refrain, where a viola follows and somehow metal and wood and human blood conspire to pull the diaphragm close to the core of hurt - of things past and known - and tears rise like distant final kisses; the moment before a sigh of almost eternal resignation.

There are no accidents in a universe in which planets circle as they spin  by the billion, by the unfathomable zillion.  What could be more unknown or unknowable than the universe?  Yet, why do we not cower in fear when we look at the stars?  In the infinitesimal diminutiveness of our humanity lies a truth.Fear is not about what is out there, it is about what lies within.

In the baking heat - upon a parched broken apron, staring into the fusilage of a small over-serviced aircraft, propellors revving, the earth shaking, that man’s hand pressed against my chest (“ wait!”), heads stooping, sweat, heat, fuel, the carcasses of old planes broken into the weeds and earth - my only thought was - how beautiful, even this place - yet, how potentially, beautifully final; this Heart of Darkness.

I remembered Sundays and Jonny Weissmuller and Maureen O'Sullivan and Cheetah and black and white cliffs and black ‘sherpas’ carrying head loads over broken rope bridges and terrible cliff falls (before ever Sylvester Stallone took to rock climbing).  I remembered  the ROAD TO . . .   with Hope, Lamor, Bing.  But this was nothing like that.   I remembered rohdodendrons (is that how you spell them?). I remembered falling into water; cerulean, deep, silent (my first lesson in vulnerability (and rescue).  I remembered sparkling things - bright turquoise, purple, deep blues, and Red - like my first toy sports car. And, I remembered the pitch of sorrow, losing my friend. Why? I remembered flying around my room in a cardboard plane (was it this?). Alone.  I remember sitting in my superman tee-shirt in warm sunshine, it hugging my skin like a shell.


As the plane was about to land, I remembered how I had held hands with my eyes, though mine were full of fear. I offered a biscuit (biscuits make even a thumping heart go still). The dark viridian sheen of jungle loomed until an orange streak of earth appeared and we ditched towards it, engines roaring.

Later, in the suffocating water-drenched air, my eyes lurched about. In Darkness. Black. Blinding blackness.  Even the crickets had died. No shadows. No ghosts.  The sky was drained of stars and hope; or so it seemed.  Yet, even here, I learned, hope does rise and it rises early.  Before the sun lifted, voices began to sing.  Somewhere in the shadows, while another generation of Conrad’s men lay in the crucible of fear, dying, the morning air filled with song. Others gathered and the voices sang on; sweet, low, chanting, rythmic, flowing like the river, thick, deep, eternal, scattered with the debris of broken things. Layers and layers of melodic incantations spiralled into the morning dew, inviting the dawn, outsinging the myriad birds. 

The chorus was tuned to the debris of broken lives; aware, conscious, alive to all their starvations, sicknesses, poverties and desperations - no place to bury the dead (too many to remember), - no place to go for the educated (they risk death anyway), no future for talent (what is to eat today?). Men mourn with brutality and women just grow into old men.  And yet, these voices float like silken veils, haunting adagios on every sunrise.  So it seemed, in those first hours, in the Heart of Darkness, mankind looks to the universe but does not cower with fear.  Here too it is the soul, not the eyes, which looks to the stars.  And it is not weeping, hopelessly, but awaiting rescue - patiently.  

Words and Images (C) Colm V Fahy 2012
(MBANDAKA; DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO, DECEMBER 2011).

As an adjunct to the above scattering of diary notes from my first days in Mbandaka, Western DR Congo, Province of Equateur in 2011, I realised that my long held suspicion of Joseph Conrad's much heralded "Heart of Darkness" was well founded. Apart altogether form the fact that it is poorly written and often unreadable, it is the product of a fantasist and a rascist, from the mind of a man who may have claimed to have experience of the Congo, but is more likely to have observed it form the safety of a a colony enclosure and bothered little to have any contact with those beings on the ground who happened to be suffering humans.

IN NOMINE AVE, MARIA, PAELLA, AMEN.

There is a nifty new(ish) station at the end of the Madrid-Valencia rail line built (when there was money) to house the relatively recent AVE extension to the Mediterranean port city.  Alighting from the sleek white bullet train, you will find a connector bus to the proper train station (which was built over a hundred years previously and to which all other trains go) only 500 metres away!  I am sure there is a perfectly logical technical explanation for this oddity, but I am inclined to believe that the seeming duplication was to provide for a necessary safe-stopping-distance in the event any future potential runaway AVE might be doing the troublesome speed of 300 kilometres an hour.  If ever such a thing were to happen, I suspect that it would be too much of a risk for any city centre to bear, not least the centre of Valencia with its cocktail of pricey medieval and Roman architecture and the bloody prospect of overcrowded tapas bars being shot through by several thousand tons of steel doing the sort of lightening pace at which Wall Street bankers turn economies to ruin (if  am wrong the other explanation is probably only entertaining for train spotters). (BTW, I use the banker metaphor deliberately as it has a certain, pathetic relevance to Valencia)

As it happens, we were staying  out to the east of the city towards the coast and so  instead of hopping on the connector north to the city centre station, we strolled eastwards in the direction of our hotel. Valencia is a city at once one of the most surprising, exhilarating, unsettling, dysfunctional, over-dressed yet entrancing cities in Europe.  How on earth has the Mediterranean become so famous for everything but Valencia?  It is a bit like forgetting to mention to invited guests that your dithering granny is staying for dinner, but forgetting to mention that your granny was the Duchess of Alba. (Who? - a troubled woman with alot of class (and cash)!)

To the novice visitor, Valencia  is somewhat of a lost soul and the recent economic meltdown has done nothing to detract from that niggling impression.  It is bad enough that its resplendent coastline with over six kilometres of wide sundrenched beach (a rarity in the Med) is separated from the historical core by three kilometres, but the yawning gap is also compounded by a landscape blighted with decaying city apartment blocks and commercial units falling to ruin with dilapidated signposts (“Alquiler” (to rent)) making for an ominous gauntlet.  The signs of the explosive and catastrophic property boom are scattered all about.  Towering mirrored office blocks (many tenanted by low grade chain hotels) and half completed apartment towers stretching all the way from the  east side of the city to the coast stand witness over dusty streets to significant economic and environmental trauma.  Half completed roads and abandoned commuter rail lines reflect what happens when greed and planning corruption conjoin just as the financial well runs dry.   The palms trees fan the streets in brilliant sunlight.  Nothing moves.  It is as though the world has been transformed into an Havanna-esque parallel universe vacated as a set for some new Sergio Leone movie; The Good, the Bad and the Downright Incomprehensible.   

On the wharf, huge warehouses, hangar’s for the world’s greatest yachts (in another era), stand empty.   Had this been the scene of an apocalypse? Did the Day after Tomorrow happen yesterday? Did the Mayan’s prediction for 2012 have a certain specificity to the port of Valencia, in April?  Only the fading Prada, Breitling and Hublot signs remain as evidence of the hyper-indulgence of the America’s Cup which launched here in 2007.   The odd stripped hull remains among the clattering perspex sheets and invading pigeons. The wind whistles and for a moment you can hear the thumping Mediterranean beats, the raucous partying crowds, the popping champagne, the slamming cash registers. But it is just water lapping on the peer, loosened decking creaking under foot, wooden beams that sway and clank.

Once there was optimism that things might last, that things which had not happened yet might yet happen.  The Valencia Tourist Office at the AVE station handed us maps with streets that do not exist.  I kid you not.  A magnificent flyover bridge stops as its eastern buttresses hit the ground: the tracks it carries for some intended light rail transit terminate in a brick wall.  To its flank, 1970’s apartment clusters, broken, half abandoned or squatted surround pavement-less streets, pitted with potholes.  Bitter oranges hang in the trees whose roots break the asphalt.   In an adjacent lot of about three acres to the front of us but beyond which the trumpets of a docked cruise ship sounds, a large sofa sits idly, dust spouts whirling about its broken coasters.  Buses roar out of sight whirring sea-faring tourists to and from the old city via some indirect (less disfavourable) route.

At the beach front, fewer than half the optimistically oversized restaurants are open.  It probably is packed in summer.  The beach is large, clean, wide, white and empty.  Ironically, we have passed through a hell to get to a haven.   The marina is empty bar the last remaining flottilla of yachts yet to be impounded by the London Sheriffs (or maybe the Russians own them: who knows, who cares).  They rock and bob side to side tethered, adrift.  We stop in one of the less than half empty restaurants and order Paella Valenciana.  What else?  It is poor.  We should have known better. So here is a place where Spain excels at undermining itself, as though it needed to, allowing a proliferation of poor quality establishments charge over priced menus for poor quality produce.  Quite sadly, they have done what even Los Indignados failed to do: they have anchored themselves permanently on some of Spain’s primest real estate.  One can only hope that the optimism which built so many goliath eateries will NOT prevail. We look beyond the sand back toward the city, over the roofs of abandoned cranes, over the walls.  The city beckoned.

Just as it seemed there was only the rotting carcasses of dinosaurs to  wander through (imagine winning a trip to Jurassic Park after an outbreak of myxomatosis) we happen upon the Arts and Sciences Park suffused with turquoise light under a dusk sky.  Here we found not only an abundance of evening strollers but a wealth of startling architecture and feats of engineering that really make the eye pop.  Could Logan’s Run have been filmed here? West World? Star Trek?  Necks twist and crane to understand, see, scope and investigate what must be one of the Europe’s neatest architectural secrets.  Having survived the post apocalyptic landscape of the reckless builder’s Valencia, here we tumble into something by far more visionary, captivating, ethereal, subversive; a thing meant to last, a place meant to say something about Valencia and Valencians. The City that gave the world ‘the bridge builder’, Santiago Calatrava, also has something to say about its love of art, music, science, nature and culture; and it does so in grand style housing centres for the arts and sciences in buildings which themselves are feats of science and works of art.  What this says about Valencia is that it is a city which was raided by speculators and prospectors and contractors and bankers and greed and recklessness, but these are not the character traits of the people of this city.  If this sounds naive then the city itself, immersed in eons of mediterranean cultures, remains a fitting testament to the true nature of Valencia and its people.

In every nook and cranny of its labyrinthine streets, the old city speaks about the civility and culture that underpins the place which is synonymous with paella but not so synonymous for the intensely alluring architectural heritage, refined artwork,  handsome streetscapes and wonderfully preserved historical legacies.  One need only scope the exquisite ceiling of the Silk Market with its tens of individually sculpted representations of traders and noblemen of the early medieval period.   Elsewhere, the city is filled with ancient churches, gateways, terraces and monuments, including city ramparts at the remaining gates of the old city walls.  At night, the street lamps cast a pale yellow glow about the pink stone walls rendering a timeless mystical quality of old Arab street scapes not unlike parts of central Jerusalem. In a place such as this, it is not all surprising that religiosity and ceremony feature as anchors in a cultural calendar. What is surprising is that these ceremonies are still of an intensity  and authenticity that  harp back to the frenzied send-offs that must have heralded the departure of crusaders to the east; thrilling and chilling in equal measure.

Their eyes dart left and right. Though it is Holy Thursday, it is not Christ but Satan who comes to mind at the sight of the rtiualistic spectacle:  hooded types the likes of which I have only seen in Rosemary's Baby, Stigmata, or some other film of sacrificial nastiness, perhaps even more lately in one of the Harry Potter movies.  One of the “penetants” spins.  His sleek cloak twirls after him as though he were a fleeing vampire lifting on the breeze, He disappears behind the church. It is mid evening about eight o’clock.  The blazing sun that earlier set fire to the clouds above our heads is sinking and the crimson light is fading to lilac and quickly then to grey.  A full moon dances behind the scattering clouds.  The spire of the church is drenched in a silver light. The air is thick with the scent of frankincense; the smell of the dead.  In the courtyard, families are gathering.

At the front of the church, a street leads to an open square.  The sound of drumming suddenly fills the night air; a throbbing,  slow, deep, deliberate, bass  like the beat of a pending war or the signal of a looming darkness.  The sound gets ever greater, more vigorous and menacing. The crowds swell.  On the plaza, hundred of 'penetants' gather in cloaks, gowns and garments of every imaginable colour and combination.  They stand aligned holding silver and golden staffs, some of them with candles alight on top.  Each group is separated by a uniformed drumming marching band.  The drums pound in unison. Dum dum dededum. Dumm dumm dededum.  The pounding excites the awaiting crowd.  A buggle hails.  The drumming stops.  The hundreds and hundreds of penetants stand to attention. Suddenly the buggles hails again. The drumming starts fiercer than ever and then the march begins.  They file past us in hundreds, possibly a thousand or more; hooded penetants, marching to the beat of the drums. The crowds stand silent, obedient, watching, chests pounding. 

Are the chevaliers leaving? Is there a war?  Do gallions await at the port? The staffs hit the black street with the deliberacy of anxious spears. Feet pound in unison. The passing out parade of a battalion of storm troopers could hardly be more startling if such a thing were real. On and on on it goes, like the a prepared invasion. Not since I first saw Zulu Dawn and my own upper lip felt as wet as Michael Caine’s have I felt so exhilarated and yet unnerved. For here, unfolding before my eyes is not just some traditional homage to the fate of Christ some two thousand years ago.  Here is the the seedling of Christian fanaticism which purged Spain of the Moors and Islam. Here is the oppositional statement of  Christian victory on the Iberian Peninsula played over and over year in and year out.  Is it benign religious practice and remembrance of is it a reminder of victory, feverish determination?  

It is hard to come away from such an experience and not reflect at how determinative culture especially religious culture is; how wondrous but potentially intractable; how uplifting, ecstatic and unifying it can be but also how damning, cruel and divisive. The parade marches into the night, into the early hours, drums pounding.

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Valencia is a place far removed from the simple delights of saffron, rice, mussels, chicken, beans and rabbit. It is a city of a people unashamedly replete with all the paradoxes of human nature;  driven by desire to be creative, expressive, joyous, full of hope, endeavour and survival and yet surrounded by and infused as much with the injuries of its own follies and obsessions as the expressions of its own enlightenment. For my money, any city that awakens the senses to the complexity of the human condition, is a city not to be missed.

Here are a just few reasons to visit Valentia;

Valencia Aquarium; Ok I do not agree with the whole dolphin thing, but apart from that this is a really quite magnificent.

Valencia market (in the old town);  It is fairly traditional but also bloody huge. Some lovely tile work under the domes.

Sagradi; It may be a chain serving Basque style pintxos, but its clean, fresh and the food is totally yummmmieeee

Barrios; check out the traditional barrios between the city and the coast, which shelter some of Valencia’s most charming neighbourhoods and architecture with echoes of cities like Montevideo and Lisbon. Great food to be had too!

The Beach; One of Valencia’s best assets is a 20 minutes bus ride from the city centre.

The Old Silk Market; Take the guided tour for 3€ to get a fuller appreciation of this heritage site.

Ice Cream; How does smoked salmon take your fancy? If that sounds too fishy, then you might like the violet or marietta biscuit flavours of authentic creamy style italian ice cream at

Easter parades;  Seville is gone commercial and too hectic. See the real macoy in Valencia and hide amongst a predominantly local spectating crowd.

Opera; Valencia is up there with the top Opera destinations in the world regularly hosting leading performers, performances and conductors in several world class venues. What could be better than Opera followed by feed of Paella?