Hokeh Tokeh

Does Tom ever do any work?

Le Club Med Africana, Tokeh Beach 2009 by Steph Malyon

It’s not that I pine for Mandallay on my excursions to foreign fields. Still, by the end of a Saturday that is too hot or wet to do anything much but listen to the air-con, I’m ready for anything: even a meeting of the Freetown Hash House Harriers on Tokeh beach, which they tell me is about 10 miles out of Freetown.

I hitch a lift from a “hasher” in a diplomatic Land Rover. I think it may have been one of ours, but off duty as it were.

The road from Freetown to Waterloo is paved with good intentions, and little else. At least as far as Tokeh. As long as I’ve been coming here, it’s been in the process of reconstruction. One day it may be finished, so that taxis and poda-podas can run up and down, taking people and produce hither and thither. Until then, Tokeh is a long way out.

A hand-painted arrow on an abandoned tanker directs us to the beach. We pass a heap of tangled concrete and steel bars, and drive onto the beach, a great arc of white sand, with a flat rocky platform in a crystal sea. We pull up in a glade by the only intact structure, a pleasant villa.

The Hash House Harriers tell me that they are “a drinking club with a running problem”. They give themselves curious names: Brown Nose, Black ‘n’ Pecker, Star Babe. I understand this last is in honour of a West African beer.

We stood around in a circle and shouted at each other. This advanced shouting technique is familiar to me as it is the way people got me to do things at school. I also practise it frequently with the boys. Several of the Hashers are, I understand, management consultants.

After the circle, some of the more energetic hashers ran around in larger circles shouting “On On” and blowing a horn. The rest of us had a very pleasant morning. It had rained heavily the night before, so it wasn’t too hot. We plodged behind the runners though soft warm flood meadows, green blades of grass shooting from glistening water. Every now and then, there would be a cry of “False Trail” when the paper trail the runners were following gave out. Soon afterwards, runners wearing fluffy ears in tooth-grinding hues of orange and green would dash back past us. So we could gently turn around, to resume our conversations and our ambling in the opposite direction. I met all sorts of people.

Then it was circle time again. This time they poured beer over their own or each others’ heads and other body parts, then sang “Swing low, sweet chariot” with gestures.

Several local people watched this patiently. A very persuasive villager called Barry sold me a coconut which he opened expertly with his cutlass. It was full to the brim with cool milk. His friend sold me half a dozen delicious oysters, after which I considered it safest to close my eyes, before anyone tried to sell me anything else.

Brown Nose must have chosen this moment to start telling me how, before the civil war, Tokeh was an outpost of that great French institution the Club Med holiday village: Club Africana Tokeh. It seemed, I reflected, a long way from the Mediterranean, but then M1 and myself are in full agreement that France is a state of mind...

“Bonjour monsieur Mandall, Gentle Member. I ‘ope you have travelled well from Angleterre. I am your Village Chef, Henri Toulouse Lautrec. You can call me Chef. And I will call you Gentle Member."

"Please don't. I find it embarrassing."

"But Gentil Membre, it is an indication of our respect to you. Montez dans mon ‘elicopter, and I will whisk you to ze Club Africana Tokeh. ‘Ave a meringue.”

“No thanks, chef. I’ve just put one out.”

We land in the palm-fringed bay, on the platform of rock. A bridge connects it to the shore. Little golf carts are taking us around like extras in Port Marion. Chef shoos away a film crew for a Bounty advert, and resumes his commentary.

“Ere we ‘ave ze village, ze village bar, ze ‘urts with all ze modern convenience, and ze hunderd bed hotel... and ‘ere is la piece de resistance, ze village dance floor for ze crezzy hokey tokey.

“We ‘ave all sort of diversion for your degustation. There is Jacques Cousteau making ze scuba. See, Gentle Member, where Presidents Mobutu and Giscard play at 'Risque' -"

"I said, please do stop all that 'member' business. I know it's different in France, but still -"

"It is, 'ow you say: "to err is 'uman'?"

I resist the temptation to say that Tou-louse is stupid.

"- et voila Jean-Jacques who runs his classe extra-murale de philosophie, and Brigitte Bardot who is modelling for Paul Gau - "

I awake to find the Hashers packing up the remaining cases of Star beer. I’ve missed the fried chicken and rice. Barry and his mates are drifting away. They did quite well with the coconuts, but, strangely enough, there weren’t any other takers for the oysters.

Beach boys - by Vannessa without Borders

Some kids hang around hungrily, hoping for tips. Club Med kept Tokeh in work, before it got destroyed in the war: ten, twelve years of dreadful comings and goings. Just the busted concrete remains. I don’t look too closely for stains and chips on it.

Now there are a few fishing boats, but, with the road so bad, it’s hard to get it to Freetown to sell the catch. Still, there’s a new hotel being built. Maybe one day the road will be finished. Things'll brighten up yet.

I apologise for late publication this morning. We ran out of internet here.

Wok the Line

Slow down Joanna:

Lumley Beach reaches Cape Sierra at Aberdeen

The enthusiasm with which the ladies of the night greet me in Cape Sierra village ought to be embarrassing, but it makes me smile. I will pass over the telephone call that reached me in the Freetown City Council Chamber, where I was in earnest discussion with the members of the City Health Committee. I must impress on my young friend Mamood to be careful whose telephone he borrows to ring me.

I had arranged to meet Mamood at 6pm to run along the beach as usual, but he was nowhere to be found when I jogged into Cape Sierra village tonight. He does not have a watch. I waited outside the cafe, with the ladies and the little brown baby Frankie. We discuss the night’s work ahead, the bars and restaurants they will visit. "I don't envy your job", I offer, rather gallantly I hope. "We don't like it either," is the reply, "but life is very complicated." The proprietor keeps her eye on us. Somehow I imagine that she is my chaperone, her comfortably padded form guaranteeing my fidelity to Mrs M.

No sign of Mamood, so I jog off down the road to Aberdeen Circle, and onto Lumley Beach. It’s a good two miles from here along the gentle curve of the bay to the Atlantic Bar at Lumley. If the Atlantic's loudspeakers haven’t been fully wound up, you can relax in the big cushioned wicker chairs.

Otherwise, my preference is to use the plastic chairs on the beach where the staff get sand in their shoes to bring your Star Beer or Schweppes tonic water. I like to sit just above the high tide, somewhat smarter I fancy than Canute, watching the light fade into a thick humid sky, feeling the "fresh breeze", that everyone likes here. Between mouthfuls of tonic and free popcorn, I say “fresh breeze” over to myself. I try to copy the lovely soft Freetonian French “r”. It cools you just to say it.

photo by coolasas

It’s a run-walk-run session this evening. It takes me an age to get to the big “Africell” mobile phone advertisement billboard that marks the half way point to the Atlantic Bar. I think this must be the hottest and most humid time of the year. The rains are still just an occasional downpour, though we had strong winds last night, bringing down trees and advertising hoardings. We will have to wait till July before the gods open all the taps. Then everyone who has a house just has to sit inside till the rain stops, or till the house gets washed off the hill or into the sea.

There are empty coconut shells on the beach, but I have yet to locate someone who sells them, so settle for a coolish Fanta from one of the vendors outside the Atlantic. Nobody would mind if I pranced into the Atlantic in my “Stockport 10” running top, but, over the last 19 years, the 3Ms have instilled an iota of shame in me. The funny thing is that Mrs M has taken the opposite tack: once prone to raise a well-trained eyebrow at a misuse of the word “pardon”, she may yet dance naked in the garden beneath a full moon. It is better to travel hopefully, they say.

Wok Tok

Mamood intercepts me on the return journey to Aberdeen. He has been doing his laundry. He says he has not been to wok since I was last here. Between puffs of warm air I explore the significance of this wok. It seems that the Chinese frying pan in question refers to some form of paid employment on the beach, which he does when he is not in school.

I conclude that Mamood is keen to tell me that he has been going to school, and I share his pleasure in this. I don’t normally do this sort of thing, but for the price of two shrimp kebabs at the Barmoi Hotel, I was able to settle the unpaid portion of his school fee on my last visit. As I hope to be coming here for up to three years -  what joy for a freelancer is such a prospect! - I thought I’d at least be able to keep in touch with him, so we can see how it goes. I feel a bit sheepish about this, but my colleague Lance tells me he has four boys in Malawi, where he worked for many years. They are now all adults. He talks of them as fondly as of his grandchildren, and of his other favourite subjects, which include the opera and Premier League football, the latter more useful for small talk here than the first.

Mamood is studying twelve subjects, he tells me in the walking bits, but maths is difficult. Outside the oddly named bar, Family Kingdom, a motorcycle has left a convenient tyre track in the sand. I draw markers across it with my finger: a circle for Aberdeen Circle, a bottle for Atlantic, and the Africell Billboard in the middle. We put numbers underneath, and a zero under Africell. The ladies come past in a taxi, on their way to Roy’s, and stop to say hello.

Mamood and I play hopscotch along our number line. +2 -1. What’s that? +1-2. What’s that?

"I have never seen that thing," he marvels. "They have never taught me this." It is possible that he has realised that I am mad. I say that the number line is the greatest thing in mathematics, and the zero in the middle was invented by an Indian. I don’t know these things to be true, but they are good enough for now.

Mamood says he will come to bring me his maths homework. Not now I hope. It is past my bedtime. We leave early tomorrow for Port Loko.

A freelance is the happiest of men.

Gin-less in Greeneland

Still in Freetown, Sierra Leone

They ran out of gin at the Hotel Barmoi the other night. Perhaps gin and tonic is less of a staple today of than it was in the colonial days Graham Greene wrote about.

I did think of nipping outside the hotel to replenish supplies: our road has a row of hawkers selling sachets of Pegler Gin for about 15p a tot, but then I thought better of it.

So here we all are, waiting for the plane to take us home. I hope that Mrs M and the boys won’t take it amiss, but really I’m not very bothered about the delay. Yesterday the manager, Miss Newlands, moved me to a new room with a Plasma Gold air-conditioning device. Also, if I poke my nose out onto the balcony for a minute, I can glimpse, through the tangle of water tanks and palm trees, a rocky cove with small surf breaking over it and the Atlantic beyond. That, and the gentle whoosh of the Plasma Gold, certainly beats fighting the boys for the computer in the cupboard we laughingly call Daddy’s Study.

We certainly have interesting company here at the Barmoi. Quite a lot of the guests are foreign and white. There are the modest ones in sensible shoes, who pull their own wheelie bags, and are wonderfully polite to the staff. I met one at the ministry the other day, and she turned out to be impossibly clever and well-read. Then there are the chaps who do something up-country and quietly spend their days off watching football and drinking beer. To the despair of my boys, the beautiful game does very little for me.

Our visitors include local colleagues and dignitaries who join us by the pool. The hotel also receives a number of young ladies, who come and join a few of the gentlemen for drinks of an evening. I saw some of them in the village outside the hotel, where I popped in to buy a packet of dried Peak Milk for my tea, and stayed for a chat at the bar. They’re so friendly here. A very nice lady gave me her coffee-coloured little boy to hold.

I do wish you could get a good cup of tea here. Fortunately Mrs M allowed me to bring some Cooperative tea bags, even though these aren’t normally allowed in number 72, where the naked leaf prevails, as does proper butter.

A lot of the talk is whether or not it’s worth trying to get out by Accra Nairobi and Cairo to Frankfurt, or just waiting for things to change. Most of us are making the best of it. The other night, I managed to separate a young man from his Blackberry where he was constantly looking up the latest ash forecast, by persuading him to order a lobster, on the grounds that it would be slightly cheaper than a club sandwich and chips. The restaurant served up four grilled lobsters without blinking, but not before the waitress had popped out to apologise that the kitchen had run out of rice. Would we mind chips instead?

8 minutes to Aberdeen or Eternity

Freetown, Sierra Leone

Things aren’t what they were. They’ve put seats in the helicopter that ferries us from Lungi Airport over the Sierra Leone River to Aberdeen. And Aberdeen links Cape Sierra to the capital Freetown.

The way things were (thanks to roystonford)

In the old days, we squeezed around a mountain of luggage in the middle of the fuselage, and sat on a bank of ragged foam cushions against the sides. If we were lucky, the washing line strung across the tail carried a few grubby pairs of ear defenders. And sometimes we even received a security briefing from a young man in a singlet. “Don’t worry”, he'd say, “about the vibration as we come into land: these guys [the Russian pilots] are experts.”

It’s the same Soviet-era helicopter, and feels as though it has been recycled with a job-lot of old hardware from a former satellite republic. Neither the battered gunmetal door nor the safety record inspires confidence, but then neither does the hovercraft (it tends to sink), the ferry (bow doors stuck open) nor the road (5 hours in dry weather).

At least the helicopter flight is brief: eight minutes to Aberdeen or Eternity. And now we can go to the Maker in a proper seat facing a flat-screen video presentation of Sierra Leone’s gorgeous beaches.

There are even real windows to look out of, though it’s mostly blackness beyond Lungi airport perimeter, for Lungi village only has kerosene and candles. But as we draw closer to Freetown, the marvel of electricity illuminates a little more of Aberdeen than it did the last time a freelance contract wafted me this way.

Yes, anyone would think that things are looking up here in Sierra Leone, despite all that global misery that our would-be leaders can’t quite handle back in Blighty.

Aberdeen, Grafton, Murray Town, Regent Road. Mrs M will feel quite at home, if ever I earn enough airmiles to get her here. From Kissy in the East to Lumley in the West (I think), Freetown is a sort of crazy Monopoly board invented by a mad hatter. Its roads and settlements are scrawled over hillsides, ravines, swamps, riverbeds and bays, and as often than not the name of each has more than a hint of the old Mother Country.

I hear that IMATT, the International Military Assistance and Training Team, has continued the tradition of applying British names to this corner of Africa. The hub of their staff accommodation is called Leicester Square (£560 rent with a hotel if you land on it). Perhaps if you can’t pay, they send you to Coventry Street (£28 rent with no house).

Well, it’s fine by me, because everyone says that the British Army and IMATT have done a great job in helping bring about and hold onto a delicate peace here for nearly a decade. If things are looking up, or at least not looking as dreadful as they might, it must be, in most part, thanks to the maintenance of that peace.

It’s hard for a soft old freelancer not to get a bit emotional, and feel a tiny bit proud of our boys and girls.

Still we like not to overplay the fact that we are the old colonial power. So we leave the coat of arms at home, and work far too hard at everything till our short sleeved shirts and M&S chinos are drenched in sweat. This is a source of great amusement to our African counterparts who wear good quality suits or tailored Africana and shiny brogues in well air-conditioned offices.

There’s plenty to talk about after so long out of town. Who is in, who’s out, who’s been sacked for corruption, or got a job at the Bank? What’s happened to Macaulay? What of Gloucester? It’s enough to bring on a small rash of Shakespeare. The Thane of Fife had a wife. Where is she now?

As I write, the date of my return to Marple Bridge and Mrs M at Mandall Mansions is a little uncertain, thanks to an Icelandic volcano.

Cork and the Wider World

I knew a pair of Irish doctors, Fiona and Brian, who went off to work in either Peru or Zimbabwe. They were from Cork, where they corresponded with a journal called Cork and the Wider World. How marvellous to say your home town and the whole world in one breath. I gained a respect for Cork and for Ireland at that moment, and have never lost it.

Marple Bridge is also in communion with the cosmos. I don’t mean through the cultural outings to Disneyland arranged by our specialist language college. I’m thinking more of the Stockport Metros: “Friendship through Lacrosse”. Families from Mellor, Poynton and other local lacrosse clubs receive a touring youth team from Anne Aroundel Lacrosse in Maryland every two years, and take a touring team over there, in between. That’s better.

Mandall 3 tells me that Jimiyke is in town. M3, our youngest, has more antennae than Fylingdales. He can pick up a signal from friend or foe, foul-mouthed celeb or pregnant head of physics, before you can say semi-conductor. I caught him checking out a furniture van on Marina Drive, yesterday. Then he got lost in Big Brother briefings when was supposed to be on MyMaths.co.uk. M3 says he’s no good at maths. So why does he have such an infernal memory for number-plates?

Jimiyke lives in Freetown, Sierra Leone. He takes his name from an American celeb called J-Mike or similar. Jimiyke was a boy-soldier, but found his way back to school, EducAid, where he became Head Boy last year. Then he suddenly became ill with dreadful maladies that turned out to be hepatitis. Thanks to the school and their friends, he travelled to England for treatment, where he also proved a great ambassador for EducAid at schools which support it.

Jimiyke, EducAid and Sierra Leone have been on M3’s radar for a while. Indeed, it was thanks to M3 that, last June, Jimiyke’s English headmistress Miriam and her Sierra Leonean husband Alhassan came to the Mellor village fete.

Alhassan and Miriam hit the Mellor Church Fete in African garb

We had a May Pole, and country dancing in the evening. Alhassan clearly thought our ethnic dancing was nuts, but joined in anyway.

Alhassan died soon after he went home. Just like that. It happens a lot in Freetown when there isn’t time or money to get you out of the country to a decent hospital. EducAid lost 4 students last year.

Son of a junior wife, Alhassan never got a formal education, but met and married a British teacher, Miriam. Together they set up EducAid, now a network of schools in Sierra Leone. Then, last July, driving through Freetown, Alhassan, to all appearances a handsome and fit young man, had a headache. He thought it might be malaria, which is common, so after dropping Miriam off for a meeting, he headed off for some pills. He passed out at the wheel and hit a telephone pole, which was home to a swarm of bees. (Telephone poles in Freetown don’t carry much in the way of phone conversations). Too ill to move, he let the bees sting him over a thousand times. He died some days later. Nobody knows whether the bees, malaria, or some other condition killed him. Nobody can tell you these things in Sierra Leone, any more than they probably can in Haiti. He just died. Of course.

Jimiyke is staying in Stockport with a teacher whose class he’s been skyping. He’s also completed his medical tests, and is fine. I expect M3 will find out more soon. Or perhaps we'll hear on Miriam's blog from Freetown. It's always a good read.

Meanwhile, I must pay the deposit for M2’s Lacrosse tour. Rather Maryland than Disneyland.