The journey to Rogbonko is supposed to take three hours from Freetown. It takes us a lot longer, but the journey offers the chance to get a good look at both urban and rural Sierra Leone. We leave the city on a road that declares itself ‘built with the support of the EU’. The streets are lined with photogenic shop-fronts, their walls adorned with painted adverts or premier league football teams or signs that beckon you in ‘to relax and refresh yourself’ or ‘charge your phone here’. There are roadworks everywhere, apparently part of the incumbent president’s re-election strategy. Women proffer pineapples and bananas from baskets on their heads while cars overloaded with petrol containers of palm wine wait at checkpoints. After a couple of hours the smooth tarmac gives way to a dusty red track that is still surprisingly comfortable. The shacks are replaced by banana trees, sugar-cane and blackened fields that bear the mark of recent slash-and-burn farming. Processions of tiny children march along the road balancing piles of dried palm leaves on their heads. Everyone waves and shouts ‘potho!’ (foreigner) enthusiastically as we drive past.
Rogbonko lies in a clearing of lush forest in the Tonkolili district in the Northern region, an area that was mainly under rebel control during the civil war. Sheka Forna, whose family founded this village but who himself grew up mostly in London, has set up a ‘village retreat’ for those wanting to sample traditional village life. His sister has established a thriving primary school to serve the vast child population. We stay in thatched clay huts but with slightly less traditional stone floors and beds. The water is provided in buckets and we eat local rice and groundnut stew. The villagers are friendly, particularly the many young children who follow us around and insist on shaking our hands and repeating their hellos and goodbyes several times. We had been told that Rogbonko was predominantly Muslim and were asked to dress appropriately, though the village is full of bare-breasted women pounding rice and shelled palm nuts. The brand of Islam here seems to be fairly relaxed, with a little church co-existing next to the mosque and many families apparently of mixed religion. We stop and chat to a few groups, buy some raffia baskets, and peer into various cooking pots, while chickens and baby goats stumble over our feet. We spend the evening in an open-walled lounge lit by oil-lamps, listening to the cicadas and the bustle of the village. The next day we borrow the dugout canoe that the villagers use to cross the stream between the village and their rice fields. We drift along past women washing their clothes and their children, propelled by a guide using a shovel as a paddle and two boys who help steer with a bamboo pole and their feet.
The only signs of the recent conflict are the signs for USAID and UN reconciliation and reconstruction projects that are dotted around the area. Moses, who has accompanied us from Freetown, spent most of the war in a refugee camp in Guinea, which he actually remembers fondly. He learned several languages and received a basic education, although now he is struggling to find a permanent job and can’t afford the university career he craves. Most conversations quickly turn to the war, but the Sierra Leoneans we meet talk about the future with an admirable optimism. Projects like that at Rogbonko are, hopefully, just the beginnings of a trend towards sustainable tourism that could make that future a little brighter.
