Boom, Boom!

Have you heard the one about the Liberian Minister's secretary's mother's tombstone? More strange tales from the career of dynamite pedlar Anthony Weale

Corruption, they say in West Africa, is paying a man to do something that he ought not to be doing; bribery is paying a man to do something that it is his duty to do anyway. Practical politics revolves around this simple maxim.

My first experience of practical politics was in Liberia. A few days before I arrived there in 1980, after a coup, the government of Liberia had been taken one by one to the beach in Monrovia and shot. The new government, under Master Sergeant Samuel Doe (who himself came to a sticky end some years later), found itself lacking in experience and short of ready cash. After taking advice from the Americans, who were the power behind the throne, the new administration introduced a number of measures designed to raise money. One of these measures involved slapping heavy duties on most exports. Liberia in fact had only two significant exports, rubber and iron ore, which were to be partially exempt. A minor export, like explosives, was not. This tax would have put my small company out of business in West Africa if we didn't rapidly do something about it.

So I rolled up to the Ministry of Commerce, as usual without an appointment, the telephone system having collapsed, hoping to see the Minister and explain what the consequences of this export levy would be. After bowing subserviently to a number of his civil servants, each of whom wore dark, reflective sunglasses, carried a tommy-gun and was dazed with Indian hemp, I was allowed into the Minister's outer office and told to wait there.

In the office, which was littered with greasy plastic plates and screwed-up bits of paper, was a stout lady draped across a typewriter, fast asleep. Hesitant about waking her, since she was a good deal bigger and probably better armed than I was, I sat patiently, looking at her and at a large brown paper parcel leaning against the wall. In due course, the lady stirred, stretched, caught sight of me and demanded to know what I wanted.

'To see the Minister about export duties,' I replied.

'But you do not have an appointment,' she countered.

'But it was impossible to make an appointment,' I said. 'No phones, no telex...'

'You should write a letter to him in yo' best handwritin' statin' yo' proposals,' she said.

She looked as though she was about to pass out again, so I asked her what was in the large parcel leaning against the wall. She said it was her mother's tombstone. Her mother, it transpired, had died two years before. I wondered if there was another even larger brown paper parcel buried under the floorboards. But no, mother was buried at Yekepa, miles away, and she, the loving daughter, had been unable to get the stone transported to Yekepa and set on the grave. It was a constant source of grief.

'Well,' I said brightly, 'if you will let me see the Minister, I shall arrange to have the stone transported to your mother's grave, and what is more, my people will set it in the ground for you.'

Two minutes later, I was in the Minister's office. He too was asleep over his table, but he woke abruptly and greeted me with, 'Ah, the Philistines are upon me...' I explained my presence, and though no promises were made, we paid no export levies and nobody ever complained. Perhaps the infrequency of any exports from our plant had something to do with it.

We did indeed deliver the gravestone. One of our drivers took it up to Yekepa, where he got drunk and disappeared for a fortnight. It was six months before I found out that he had placed the stone on the wrong grave.

* * *

West African politics always make me think of George, senior foreman at our small explosives factory. George was a tall, affable and fearless man, with a taste for the Pan Am air hostesses who used to stop over for three or four nights during return flights from Nairobi to New York. Some of the air hostesses, it has to be said, had a taste for George.

A month before the Master Sergeant came to power, the police arrested George one evening without charge, locked him up in a freight container, fed him on rice cooked in diesel oil and gave him 15 lashes a day, to keep him on his toes. He put up with this for a month. At the end of the month, just before the coup, he was asked to sign a confession admitting to treason and sedition. He refused, so was beaten again, more vigorously than usual, driven at high speed to the middle of nowhere, thrown out and told he was free.

Two days after the coup, when beer had begun its healing work, George was arrested again, this time not by police, who had all fled into the bush, but by soldiers, who stood him up against a wall to shoot him as a traitor to the new regime. He was saved in the nick of time when a passer-by, our Ghanaian freight manager, persuaded the soldiers that George had spent the previous month incarcerated on the same charge under the old regime.

George gave me the impression, when he told me about it, that he found the whole episode hilarious. Given the recent history of Liberia, I wonder what happened to George.

* * *

Now and again, I had reason to pay a visit to Europe. My French customers usually made purchasing arrangements in their head offices, acting on technical advice from the field. Price negotiations were held in France. One day, after a spell in Paris, I called at my headquarters in London, where a couple of Mauretanian government officials came to see me. Mauretania had important iron mines, and bought its explosives from France. The two officials suggested that I might like to quote for some of this business. All I had to do was give them a price, as high as I liked; they would then add 20 per cent to it, 15 per cent for them and 5 per cent for me into an account of my choice. I was not persuaded.

But their visit encouraged me to try and do some business in Mauretania. It is a desert country, with only two significant towns, both on the coast, with the Sahara to the East and the Atlantic to the West. As usual, I arrived in the dark at the capital, Nouakchott, took the inevitable clapped-out yellow taxi to the only hotel, and flapped my predictably useless telex confirming my booking at reception. The sofas and the floor were covered with dozing visitors. No joy here, I thought – back to the taxi.

My Senegalese cabbie wasn't sure, but he had heard that there was a new hotel further up the coast, not completed yet, but it might have a room. Off we went, passing groups of tethered camels in the late twilight. Half an hour later, dark buildings emerged silhouetted against the glow of the Atlantic. Standing beside the car, I could see little, but the driver could – Africans have eyes like owls. He led me through what I assumed was a doorway. A candle was lit as I entered, revealing a robed Arab sitting at a small table. To say that the hotel was incomplete was an understatement - it was a building site. Did they have a room for the night? 'Certainement; suivez-moi.' I followed the Arab with his candle through what seemed like miles of dusty passages. He opened a door, pulled a string, and there was light – about 40 watts. 'Our principal chamber – with light,' he announced. There was an old cast-iron bed, with bedding. I expressed warm appreciation, and asked about food. Back through the passages and into what was obviously designed to become the grand dining-room. There were a few rough tables and chairs, illuminated by two 40-watt bulbs.

The only food was bread and grilled fish. Might I have a beer? 'Monsieur, this is a Muslim country. We do not drink beer. But there is a bottle of Johnnie Walker – you will have to drink that.' More friendly locals emerged from the shadows, bearing trays, and for the next hour or more I consumed unleavened bread and fish, and under their admiring gaze drank a large part of a bottle of whisky from a tumbler.

Eventually I retired to my bed, joyfully escorted by my new friends. In bed, I lay reading for some time, then put out the light and listened to the mighty Atlantic, happily expecting to hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn. What I heard was a scratching noise, and whatever it was, it was a lot of them. God, I thought, it's rats! Then I felt something plucking at the bed. Sweating cravenly, I pulled on the light string again, and stuck my head out. And there they were – not rats, but crabs. Crabs teetering over the floor and swinging on the bedclothes. Pale long-legged crabs, their black eyes on little mobile stalks. With the light on, they scuttled off the bed, away to the farthest corners of the room, scrambling over each other with their beady little eyes waving about, looking longingly either at me or at the unglazed window – it's difficult to tell what a crab is actually looking at.

I left the light on, and I think I may have fainted. By the morning, all the crabs had vanished. My Arab friends declined payment for their hospitality; they reminded me that they were merely the architects. They gave me mint tea and more bread and fish. By lunchtime, I had sold 30 tons of ammonium nitrate, used as a bulk explosive, to the national mining company, to be shipped in from Norway. To my relief, I saw nothing of the two Mauretanian officials. I set off cheerfully for Freetown.