The fallout from China’s push into Africa

In Sierra Leone, the Chinese have stepped into the void left by the British, plundering natural resources and threatening livelihoods

The Hill Station Club in Freetown was once the beating heart of Britain's colonial community in Sierra Leone. It was here, in a raised clearing high above the city, that officials would unwind over gin and tonic and marvel at a panoramic view of the lush forest below.

These days, the club stands in disrepair. Its ornate metal railings are rusted and decayed, while the underside of the roof is littered with holes. The building has become just another relic of the British Empire; a symbol of power and influence lost.

Today in Sierra Leone – and much of the rest of Africa – there is a new player in town: the People's Republic of China.

In Freetown, road signs from 2021 celebrate 50 years of friendship between China and Sierra Leone, which gained independence from the UK in April 1961. Indeed, the smooth, wide road that runs past Hill Station Club is Chinese built.

The country's influence is evident everywhere. Several of Freetown's housing estates have been constructed by Chinese companies, as have many of the city's restaurants, shops, and casinos.

Even Sierra Leone's national stadium, based in the centre of the capital, was built by the Chinese, while Mandarin is being taught in the classrooms of primary and secondary schools across the country.

In total, the Chinese have invested £2.3 billion into the nation since the early 1970s.

The country's experience with China is common to much of Africa. While the US and its allies have been busy enjoying the end of the Cold War, China has spent much of the past 30 years putting down roots across the African continent.

Through its Belt and Road initiative, China has built infrastructure throughout Africa and established lucrative supply chains to several dozen nations. Over the past two decades, China has invested £123.85 billion in sub-Saharan Africa, research suggests.

But this expansion into Africa has not always been positive, despite the vital investment it brings. In Sierra Leone, deception, corruption and intimidation, as with the British in the 1800s, have all been deployed to advance and consolidate the Chinese agenda.

A joint investigation by the Telegraph and SourceMaterial explored how Chinese investors – facilitated by corrupt government officials – are plundering the natural resources of Sierra Leone and harming people's health and causing serious environmental damage in the process. It uncovered:

At the same time, China's investments in Sierra Leone have brought undeniable benefits, from new jobs and better infrastructure, to educational programmes. For many, life has improved. "It's better to work with them than do nothing," said one worker at a Chinese-owned quarry outside of Freetown. "I’m earning good money."

Over a cold beer in a swanky central hotel in Freetown, a Chinese businessman called Xiao Peng brags that he has two mining sites inside the sprawling forest that stretches across the hills of Sierra Leone's western peninsula.

The park, which is being considered for UNESCO world heritage status, is home to excellent granite, says Peng – far superior to what his cousin mines in Ghana. He intends to expand his operations and build a large factory, enabling him to polish the stone and ship it to the UK and beyond. "I’m planning to export it all over – UK, Europe, US," he says.

Reporters visited one of Peng's sites, which has laid waste to the surrounding land. The once thick, green hillside has been stripped and sliced open, exposing the grey granite within. Trees that line the dusty road up to the quarry stand bare and twisted.

This operation, which opened in 2022 and sits close to the heart of the forest, shouldn't exist. The park was granted protected status in 2012, forbidding all forms of construction within its boundaries while establishing a 1km-deep buffer zone that runs around its edges.

Yet thanks to poor regulation, there are three Chinese-run quarries unlawfully operating in the park – all visible from Google Earth – which have secured government permits and are pillaging the area's natural resources, despite its protected status.

One permit belongs to Peng's company, Hong Tai. He told reporters it had been relatively easy to obtain and took just four months. He said the government awarded him 32 acres of land in the park's buffer zone, but that he now wanted to increase that to 60.

He added that the Ministry of Lands were happy for him to work in the forest, known as Western Area National Park, believing that Hong Tai's presence would be good for the peninsula's economy.

Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr, the mayor of Freetown, says the government is "turning a blind eye and facilitating corruption" by issuing mining permits within the park's "legally protected" conservation area. "We are not losing the environment because somebody is absent minded," she says. "This is a money spinner. They are making tons of money."

Perhaps aware of the profits at stake, the Sierra Leone government has deployed troops from military barracks on the peninsula to guard over the Chinese quarries, according to park rangers who are responsible for protecting the forest.

The rangers, armed with nothing more than slingshots, have had several run-ins with these troops. Late last year, around 15 rangers visited Peng's quarry to challenge the Chinese workers and warn them against their encroachment into the forest.

"They had been given a licence to work in the buffer zone but were moving further into the forest," says Prince Dumbaya, a local ranger. "We told them: ‘This is our park.’"

But the confrontation turned violent when one of the Sierra Leonean soldiers guarding the site fired shots into the air, says Dumbaya. The rangers reported the incident to their boss, he adds, but were told: "Let the Chinese men do their work."

Peng dismissed any suggestions of wrongdoing in establishing his quarry, saying: "I obtained the approval of the government department and obtained all the mining procedures and legal compliance."

The mining operations have set into motion a spiral of related events.

Alie Thoroniga, a senior ranger, said that China's presence in the park has exacerbated wider issues of illegal land grabbing, which is ravaging the entire western peninsula and creating ugly bald patches throughout the forest.

"The Chinese build roads to their quarries which then opens up the forest for locals," he says. Provided with direct access to the park's interior, people then start hacking down trees and clearing plots of land to build homes on.

This has fuelled widespread deforestation across the national park, which is spiralling out of control. Since April 2021, nearly a quarter of forest cover has been lost – the equivalent of 5,507 football fields, according to data from the World Food Programme (WFP).

At the average rate of deforestation for 2021-2022, just 21 per cent of forest cover will be left by January 2027, the WFP predicts.

The consequences are proving deadly. Mudslides, fuelled by heavy rainfall and soil erosion linked to deforestation, are killing dozens of people who settle on Freetown's hillsides every year, and locals fear a repeat of the 2017 mudslide in which more than 1,000 people died.

Officials have also warned that the rapid deforestation around the park's central dam, which provides water to most of Freetown, could drive muddy run-offs into the reservoir, rendering it unviable in the next three years.

"Then there will be a massive water scarcity problem," says Babatunde Ahonsi, a UN resident coordinator for Sierra Leone.

The dam has also been damaged as a result of blasting operations carried out by a nearby Chinese quarry, claimed one government official, who said there had been minor rockfall in one of the site's tunnels.

Local health is said to have been impacted as a result of the quarries, too. In nearby Tokeh, village leader Alajih Slowe explains that the community's water turned white after Hong Tai began mining in the park. Up to 20 people fell ill with diarrhoea and many had to go to hospital, he says.

Though the alleged issue has since been resolved, Slowe says the government isn't doing enough to protect the forest against the environmental threat posed by the quarry. "This is a very serious situation." Peng said "there are no residents downstream of my operation" and that his quarry does not pollute as "no chemicals are added to the mining process".

It is not just protected forest that is being impacted by Chinese businesses. Sierra Leone's beaches are also under threat.

At Black Johnson beach, just south of the capital, a drilling machine growls with a guttural, mechanical thrum and edges across the golden white sands towards the sea, while soldiers clad in camouflage uniforms and armed with Kalanashivoks watch on menacingly.

They’ve been charged with protecting the 10 gathered Chinese workers – here on "government business," they say – and ensuring that this crescent-shaped beach, an oasis of natural beauty, is dug up in an orderly fashion.

It's a moment that Tommy Gbandewa and his wife, Jane Aspden, have feared since May 2021, when it emerged that the government had accepted a £44 million grant from the Chinese to build a fishing harbour at Black Johnson beach, one of Sierra Leone's most idyllic stretches of coastline.

The couple have lived alone in this paradise since 2009. They share the beach and its sky-blue waters with fishes, turtles and manatees. Behind their wood hut, elusive pangolins and endangered monkeys prowl the forest. But all of this is to be lost.

Under the government's plans, 252 acres of beach and forest are to be bulldozed, covered in concrete and dedicated to industrial fishing and the recycling of "marine waste". "It will be a disaster for us and the local area," says Gbandewa. "We are all going to suffer and the animals will be killed."

However, Aspden says, the project still doesn't have a valid licence from the Environmental Protection Agency, which makes the digging operations that have begun at Black Johnson beach illegal.

The couple have repeatedly challenged the government on these grounds, but they and the wider community have been met with resistance from those in power.

Last week, a day after the drilling began, policemen arrested Aspden, from Britain, and transported her to a Freetown prison, where she spent the night. She was released the following day but charged with "conspiracy to cause riotous behaviour" – a reminder of what is at stake in Sierra Leone's relationship with China.

The harbour is justified by a draft environmental impact assessment, seemingly fabricated, which was compiled by a consultancy firm called Black Eagle. The company has no digital footprint and its listed address in Freetown does not exist. One of the authors of the report meanwhile works for the Ministry of Fisheries, which approved the project.

The report, which is littered with spelling errors and inconsistencies, mistakenly references Yuans, not Leones, the national currency of Sierra Leone, when detailing the resettlement money that will be given to residents pushed out of their homes. And to redress the damage to local ecosystems, it recommends building a "marine park" where orcas, bottlenoses dolphins and manatees "can be trained in captivity to provide social functions."

Yet not everyone is opposed to the harbour. Stella, the leader of Black Johnson village, says the Chinese fishing port will help to bring development to the community, which has no running water, electricity, healthcare or schools. If things do not change, Stella says, residents will remain caught in a desperate cycle of hardship and poverty.

"The harbour will help the community," she adds. "Those opposed to it because of personal interest, they’re not looking at the bigger picture."

For the fishermen of Sierra Leone, the proposed harbour is a source of trepidation. It's expected the site will be predominantly used by Chinese trawlers to offload their catch and be patched up. How much access local boats will have is unclear.

There is fear the port could further harm Sierra Leone's once buoyant fishing industry, which is already being undermined by aggressive Chinese trawlers dominating the nation's waters and decimating its fish stocks.

Sat on Black Johnson beach, weeks before the arrival of the digger, fisherman Hassan Kargbo points to the horizon where a cluster of trawlers – Chinese-owned, he says – are gathered.

"The Chinese planning to build the fish harbour are the same one that owns those trawlers out there," the 26-year-old says. "If the Chinese people own this beach, there is no way for us to survive. We are appealing to the government and to the Chinese people to leave the ocean for us."

Fishermen like Kargbo have struggled to compete for years. A single high-tech trawler can catch five times as much fish in a day as one small village fleet can in a year, with Chinese boats now accounting for three-quarters of Sierra Leone's modern fishing fleet.

The devastating impacts of this are clear to see at the village of Tombo, home to one of Sierra Leone's largest ports, where fishermen are pulling in ever-diminishing catches.

The port is ripe for investment. Amid the frantic scrums of fishermen and buyers that emerge every afternoon, poverty and crime is rife. Fights are commonplace, often sparked by the drug addicts who loiter close to the docked boats, and the central harbour is covered in plastic waste and damaged nets that require constant repair.

Kargbo, who sells his own catches at Tombo, says there was a time when a group of fishermen would regularly make around £80 from a day's worth of fishing. "That's a lot of money for us," he adds. Now, however, they struggle to make £8 between them.

"Before they arrived, we were getting a lot of cash and making good profit," says Kargbo. "Now, with the Chinese here, the fishing is really so hard and tough for us. There is not a lot of catch."

Yet the Chinese presence in Freetown is not all bad. Like all colonial powers, it has brought benefits as well as harms.

Aged just eight, Aisha is already showing an impressive aptitude for Mandarin. Encouraged by her teacher, Sylvia, she tentatively starts singing a song from a Chinese love opera.

Her voice fills the empty classroom, its walls lined with posters written in Mandarin and photos of children learning martial arts. Each note is pitch perfect, the cadence slow and measured. Sylvia nods along as Aisha breezes through the lyrics, smiling with a wide grin at her star pupil. "She's brilliant at getting the tone right," she says afterward.

The young girl, a student at Fourah Bay College Primary School, in Freetown, has been selected for one-on-one lessons and is soon set to participate in a national Mandarin competition, which will see the winner sent to Beijing for a year to continue their studies – a life-changing opportunity.

As part of its association with the Chinese state-linked Confucius Institute, the school runs Mandarin lessons every Tuesday morning for 20 students, as well as martial arts classes. Headmistress Lucy Agbdena says the pupils are enjoying the experience, adding that there are many primary and secondary schools across Sierra Leone which now teach Mandarin.

Alex Vines, the director of Chatham House's Africa programme, said the aim of the Confucius Institute programmes is "building up alumni networks and constituencies sympathetic and familiar with China".

But while the Sierra Leonean government has opened its arms wide to Chinese investments – the latest partnership with China will see a £1bn mega-bridge be built to better connect Freetown with its airport – there is significant weariness among the wider population.

In a survey from 2020, only 41 per cent of respondents said China's influence on their nation was positive – down from 55 per cent in 2015, and a lower share than in all but one of the 18 African countries covered by the study.

With the nation's natural resources – and the livelihoods that depend on them – increasingly under threat, anger is now being directed to the government of Sierra Leone, which, rather than stand up for its people and land, has waved through Chinese exploitation.

"The government allowed the Chinese to operate here," says Slowe, the leader of Tokeh village. "They are to blame."

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