ALLISON CROSS

I was driving to Bo last month, crammed in the back of a 15-year-old Mercedes, when we were stopped at a police checkpoint along the highway. The officers were checking that citizens had paid their annual local tax of 5,000 Leones (about $1.50). He barked orders at the vehicle’s other occupants, all Sierra Leoneans, and then turned to me. He asked if I’d paid my local tax. As a visitor, I wasn’t supposed to pay, a detail I’d already confirmed with several different people. I knew he’d pocket the money straight away and I wasn’t in the mood to indulge bribery.

I decided to play dumb and started to ramble. “But I’m a tourist!” I said. “I’m only here for a short time and I’ve been to Bo and Freetown and I love your country and your beaches and the cassava leaf…”

His eyes lit up. I’d found his weakness: praise of Sierra Leonean food.

“Have you tried all our dishes?” he asked, suddenly relaxing his stern-cop-routine. I said I had. I told him my favourite dish was groundnut soup. He threw his head back and laughed and then waved the car on.

Sierra Leoneans love it when you praise their food. Their staple dish is cassava leaf cooked with palm oil, which is served on a generous portion of rice. Sometimes it’s cooked with goat meat or fish. I’ve met many people who eat this same dish three times a day. But I can’t get used to this dish, which gives off a very pungent odour and looks, as Chris so thoughtfully said once, “like baby crap.”


After three or four bites, I usually can’t stomach any more of it. As I told the police officer, I’ve developed a liking for groundnut soup, a curry-style dish cooked with peanuts and palm oil, and I’m sure many other ingredients I’ve never been able to identify. But I sometimes have difficulty getting this dish down too, given the propensity of women here to lace their groundnut soup with a generous handful of hot peppers.

Eating in Sierra Leone is certainly a challenge. Lots of Freetown restaurants serve Western, Lebanese and Indian food but it’s expensive and I’m getting very tired of eating out. I’m not much of a cook, and given the fact that we don’t have steady power at home, my meals generally consist of noodles, soup, sandwiches and pasta. Buying milk, meat or yogurt means you have to eat it within a few hours because it very quickly goes bad in the heat. Mangoes and bananas are available for fairly cheap, as are apples, although you have to pay a bit more for those. The milk is sold sealed and unrefrigerated and if it remains so, is good for about a year. But it tastes like preservatives.

The best meals I’ve had so far have been at the beach. Freshly caught and cooked swordfish is served with a generous helping of rice. The worst dish I’ve ever had is something we’ve affectionately started calling pig slop. Served on the street in a bowl, it contains: attieke (a rice-like substance made from cassava), spaghetti noodles, a hard-boiled egg, raw onion, raw cucumber, a dollop of mayonnaise, a squirt of ketchup and topped off with a small, whole fish. Like the cassava leaf, I was fine until about four bites in when I got a good look at what I was eating.