by SIMON AKRAM
My Land Rover broke down twice on the first day. The first time—30-odd miles into the bush—the fan-belt snapped, the engine boiled over in a filthy froth, the brakes and steering seized up and the dashboard lit up like a Christmas tree. A young man vanished on a motorbike to a nearby village and came back with a replacement belt of the wrong size. As the tropical night came on fast and dark, a small mechanic from a nearby quarry upended himself in the engine cavity, only his legs visible. He built a bracket to stretch the oversized belt. We moved on.
An hour or so later, on a wretched road in clouds of dust, a front tire went down. The bolts on the spare were the wrong size for the wrench. More passers-by appeared, and by torchlight a local friend who had come to help chiselled notches in the bolts with a screwdriver till he could force them loose. I got home after midnight, filmed head to toe in laterite dust. It was fitting, somehow. Just another chapter in the saga of purchasing and owning a car in a post-conflict African state.
Last year I moved to Sierra Leone to work as a correspondent for Reuters. This desperately poor country is still recovering from the bloody civil war that took place in the 1990s. I was initially without private transport, and soon learned to cut about the muggy capital Freetown on the back of motorbike taxis called “Okadas”. When “Upcountry”—the colonial-era phrase still used to describe all territory beyond the capital—I occasionally got around by UN helicopter, but more often by limping bush taxi or a hired geriatric jeep. Such vehicles can be relied on to consume the day’s rationed drinking water in their gurgling radiators.
Last December I was in a government bus, returning from a tense by-election in the east of the country, when a tire blew at 50-odd miles per hour. The jalopy swung wildly across the road. The driver expertly held the skid and brought the bus to a standstill before we rolled into the scrub. Afterwards I noted that the maximum passenger capacity hand-painted on the side of the Mercedes was approximately twice what its German designers would have suggested. I decided I needed my own wheels.
This was plausible enough because I had just inherited a sum of money from my grandfather, who died last year. He was someone I had long associated with an immaculately waxed car parked outside his genteel home in south-east England. To use this money to buy a car of my own seemed fitting.
But acquiring a vehicle in Sierra Leone would prove challenging. It is nearly impossible to conduct business transactions in an environment without trust. The task introduced me to areas of the beleaguered state that I had come to cover, a country that only recently lifted itself from last place on the UN human-development index. Gross National Income per capita in Sierra Leone stands at $340. One in eight women here will die in childbirth.
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