Since my student days at the London School of Economics (LSE),
I wanted to find out what "The coming anarchy" (Robert
Kaplan) in West Africa really looks like. So I went to Sierra
Leone, a failed nation ravaged by a ten-year civil war. As the
first Western journalist, I made it to the Koidu diamond mines
deep inside the bush, then controlled by the notorious rebels
of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF). An attempt to interview
Charles Taylor, the Liberian dictator suspected of running the
"blood diamond" trade, got me arrested and expelled
from the country. Travelling on to Nigeria, I did my first oil
story on the fight of a Niger Delta tribe against the environmental
havoc caused by the Shell oil corporation.
