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Irish Times
27-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Julianknxx on the roots of his art: ‘You go through war, seeing death – that trauma never leaves you'
Julian Knox has been reading about prisons. 'I was trying to find a language for the interior world,' he says. 'I read about a test they did. Where there were prisoners that swear a lot, it was because they didn't have a language for the things they were saying.' Born in Sierra Leone , the artist, who works as Julianknxx, fled the country's civil war with his family in the 1990s, at the age of nine, finding a home in Gambia before arriving in London as a teenager. We are speaking in Sligo on the eve of the opening of his astonishing work Chorus in Rememory of Flight, and it is hard even to conceive of a language for all he has seen, thought and imagined. Take Sierra Leone itself: it is a country where more than 20 languages are spoken, including, overarchingly, Krio, an English-based creole. A former slave-trading station, the capital, Freetown, was set up in the late 1700s by freed slaves. The usual colonial arsenal of tricks followed: take a country or region, pillage its resources, destroy its community and political structures, rewrite its history in a way so twisted as to make all this seem reasonable, then bewail any later lack of stability. READ MORE Julianknxx found his own voice first in poetry and now in a blend of poetry, art, music, film and performance. 'I wouldn't say I switched,' he says. 'I wanted to layer multiple ways into looking at Sierra Leone. I find the visual references that were there [for it] were more what the media shows. So if you read a poem and leave it to people's imagination, it's quite limited to what they see. So I made a film as an anchor to the poems.' The poetry had come while studying at Waltham Forest College, in east London. Like many exceptionally intelligent and creative people, Julianknxx was both misunderstood and frequently bored. When he arrived from Gambia, the college assessors hadn't trusted his grades. ''How do I know you didn't make these up? How do I know you're not a child soldier?'' he was asked. 'I think he wanted to make a joke,' the artist says drily. 'I think I leaned into poetry because it was like a way to quiet my mind.' The combination of poetry, music and film allows for ideas, senses and emotion to creep through in the gaps, where words aren't quite capable of the work. This, as so many know, is about finding a way to communicate what you can't articulate, all the more significant as a language itself is lost. Julianknxx's film In Praise of Still Boys, from 2021, explores his return to Sierra Leone after two decades. Suffused with blue, the film is a meditation on the sea, the wisdom of elders, and the boys he meets, who could have been him. An image from the 2021 Julianknxx film In Praise of Still Boys. Photograph: Studioknxx 'In Praise of Still Boys is made for these boys. It's made for me when I was 15. Back then being in art spaces wasn't a thing. I didn't know I was going to be an artist. I only understood art from a western perspective,' he said at the time. That idea of perspective is vital to his work, and should you think that something to do with Sierra Leone, or with postcolonial black experience, may have nothing to do with you, it would be to miss a fundamental point: this work is about humanity, and every single one of us is both implicated in and affected by the threads of its stories and meanings. [ Former child soldier turned literary sensation returns to Sierra Leone Opens in new window ] As I watch the multichannel film, then wander other galleries at the Model to see longer passages based on the different segments, I feel a sense of falling out of a set of certainties and into an openness, through which the vast potential of the world and its myriad peoples extends. And while the artist's encounters, filmed across nine European port cities – Lisbon, Hamburg, Berlin, Antwerp, Barcelona, Rotterdam, Amsterdam and London – are with black residents, it is a global story of people, trade, slave trade, settlement, resettlement and, most crucially, humanity. Anger, or rage, for me is an indicator that something is not right. So the work is about how we dream up a new way of living, a new way of seeing, another way of coming into this dialogue — Julian Knox It is a story that has resonated: the artist's works have been shown at Tate, at the Gulbenkian and Gagosian, and other major spaces across Europe. The Model's director, Emer McGarry, saw Chorus in Rememory of Flight at the Barbican, in London, and knew she wanted to bring it to Sligo, to run over Africa Day on May 25th, alongside Marianne Keating's new film, No Irish Need Apply, about the realities of Irish migration to England during the 20th century, which the Model commissioned for Sligo's municipal Niland collection of Irish art. Chorus in Rememory of Flight by Julianknxx, installation view, Barbican Art Gallery. Photograph: Eva Herzog/Barbican Art Gallery Chorus in Rememory of Flight, Julianknxx. Photograph: Eva Herzog/Barbican Art Gallery Chorus in Rememory of Flight, Julianknxx. Photograph: Eva Herzog/Barbican Art Gallery Chorus in Rememory of Flight, Julianknxx. Photograph: Eva Herzog/Barbican Art Gallery There are episodes of great beauty in Chorus in Rememory of Flight, but there are also occasions for anger and despair: a dancer shimmers at the water's edge in Marseilles; a group sing in a livingroom, bringing the accumulated truths of hundreds of years across time through harmony. But there are also ignorance, exclusion and prejudice. 'In Germany they really say, 'Africa, the continent without culture',' one woman says. But, as Julianknxx reminds me, she also says, 'If we don't unlearn racism, we might miss the love of our lives.' I ask him about anger, and he smiles. He smiles a great deal in conversation, and he has an utterly engaging energy, as if he can hardly contain the joy of being able to communicate in art, although there is an added hint that this is also perhaps a defence against the underlying shynesses of a child uprooted again and again. 'Anger, or rage, for me is an indicator that something is not right. So the work is about how we dream up a new way of living, a new way of seeing, another way of coming into this dialogue. It's not refusing to talk about it, but there are other ways we can look at this.' When you think about love, he says, 'it's not just the romantic relationship but all the other ways that we can miss out on being loved, or loving or learning from other people. If I allow my prejudice to stop me from engaging, it's not that I'm stopping something, but I'm also losing something.' Still image from On Freedom of Movement (wi de muv) by Julianknxx. Photograph: Studioknxx Looking at some prejudices through this lens, ideas about 'dominant' cultures become extraordinarily crass. I think of some of the things I learned at school, for example about Picasso's 'discovery' of African sculpture in the early 1900s, as if it took a European eye to make it meaningful rather than 'primitive'. Criss-crossing Europe, and finding participants through word of mouth, Julianknxx allowed their 'encounters' to lead the piece. One artist in Lisbon asked to be filmed as she slept, because, she told him, 'I'm tired of talking about blackness and want to rest.' Image from Black Corporeal (Breathing by Numbers), 2022, by Julianknxx. Photograph: Studioknxx 'It's hard for me to write my history,' he says, 'when my history is being told by the oppressor.' Instead, it is to be found in fragments and traces, songs and movement. Movement is important, and there are extraordinary sequences of dance across Chorus in Rememory of Flight. 'I have to trust the body. Our postures betray us. The memory in my body. It's in our DNA, you know,' he says, describing the 'deep work of finding what my body is actually saying'. [ Sierra Leone: One of the most dangerous countries in the world in which to give birth Opens in new window ] There is a great deal there. 'You go through war, seeing death – that trauma never leaves you.' He pauses, his arms coming to cradle his torso. What is he thinking of, I ask. 'I don't want talk about that.' As we sit, the peacefulness of the quiet afternoon settles around us. Did Brexit unleash a greater racism? No, he says. It gave permission for voices that had already been there to become loud. The thing is, we all have different impulses contending with one another in our heads. 'What scares me is that good people have the potential to do really bad things. As a kid I learned that evil might come from the most unexpected places. We all have the potential to be like that if we are scared.' The most dangerous people are frequently those who are utterly convinced of the good of their own rightness. To watch Chorus in Rememory of Flight is to become immersed in a landscape of beauty, joy, pain, rage, celebration, injustice, ignorance, power and unexpected glory, almost drowning in it all, before coming up dancing to see the world anew. Lines from songs remain in my head: 'thousands of hands will catch my soul …', 'we are what's left of us …' Days later, I'm still parsing it. We are the remnants of our pasts, part of the displaced fragments of peoples, or saddled with false certainties of arbitrary global 'centres', but we are also all that we choose to make of what remains to us: we are our choices, our openness, our kindnesses. We are our own hope. As I leave, I ask the artist, after all his years in London, what language he thinks in. 'English?' he says, after a pause. 'But in my head I sing in Krio.' He smiles at the thought. Julianknxx's Chorus in Rememory of Flight and Marianne Keating's No Irish Need Apply are at the Model , Sligo, until Saturday, June 21st
Yahoo
30-03-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Author John Green meets a young tuberculosis patient
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Author John Green has been obsessed with tuberculosis (TB) since 2019, when he first visited Lakka Government Hospital in Sierra Leone and met a young TB patient named Henry Reider. In his latest book Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection (Crash Course Books, 2025), Green explores the history of the bacterial disease, highlighting its impact in different eras of history. And he calls attention to the present reality of TB, a curable disease that nonetheless kills over a million people each year due to stark health care inequities around the globe. In this day and age, Green argues that injustice is the root cause of TB cases and deaths, and that we can collectively choose to correct that injustice and finally snuff out the deadly disease. Related: 'We have to fight for a better end': Author John Green on how threats to USAID derail the worldwide effort to end tuberculosis At the time, I knew almost nothing about TB. To me, it was a disease of history — something that killed depressive 19th-century poets, not present-tense humans. But as a friend once told me, "Nothing is so privileged as thinking history belongs to the past." When we arrived at Lakka, we were immediately greeted by a child who introduced himself as Henry. "That's my son's name," I told him, and he smiled. Most Sierra Leoneans are multilingual, but Henry spoke particularly good English, especially for a kid his age, which made it possible for us to have a conversation that could go beyond my few halting phrases of Krio. I asked him how he was doing, and he said, "I am happy, sir. I am encouraged." He loved that word. Who wouldn't? Encouraged, like courage is something we rouse ourselves and others into. My son Henry was 9 then, and this Henry looked about the same age — a small boy with spindly legs and a big, goofy smile. He wore shorts and an oversized rugby shirt that reached nearly to his knees. Henry took hold of my T-shirt and began walking me around the hospital. He showed me the lab where a technician was looking through a microscope. Henry looked into the microscope and then asked me to, as the lab tech, a young woman from Freetown, explained that this sample contained tuberculosis even though the patient had been treated for several months with standard therapy. The lab tech began to tell me about this "standard therapy," but Henry was pulling on my shirt again. He walked me through the wards, a complex of poorly ventilated buildings that contained hospital rooms with barred windows, thin mattresses, and no toilets. There was no electricity in the wards, and no consistent running water. To me, the rooms resembled prison cells. Before it was a TB hospital, Lakka was a leprosy isolation facility — and it felt like one. Inside each room, one or two patients lay on cots, generally on their side or back. A few sat on the edges of their beds, leaning forward. All these men (the women were in a separate ward) were thin. Some were so emaciated that their skin seemed wrapped tightly around bone. As we walked down a hallway between buildings, Henry and I watched a young man drink water from a plastic bottle, and then promptly vomit a mix of bile and blood. I instinctively turned away, but Henry continued to stare at the man. I figured Henry was someone's kid — a doctor, maybe, or a nurse, or one of the cooking or cleaning staff. Everyone seemed to know him, and everyone stopped their work to say hello and rub his head or squeeze his hand. I was immediately charmed by Henry — he had some of the mannerisms of my son, the same paradoxical mixture of shyness and enthusiastic desire for connection. Henry eventually brought me back to the group of doctors and nurses who were meeting in a small room near the entrance of the hospital, and then one of the nurses lovingly and laughingly shooed him away. "Who is that kid?" I asked. "Henry?" answered a nurse. "The sweetest boy." "He's one of the patients we're worried about," said a physician who went by Dr. Micheal. "He's a patient?" I asked. "Yes." "He's such a cute little kid," I said. "I hope he's going to be okay." Dr. Micheal told me that Henry wasn't a little boy. He was seventeen. He was only so small because he'd grown up malnourished, and then the TB had further emaciated his body. "He seems to be doing okay," I said. "Lots of energy. He walked me all around the hospital." "This is because the antibiotics are working," Dr. Micheal explained. "But we know they are not working well enough. We are almost certain they will fail, and that is a big problem." He shrugged, tight-lipped. There was a lot I didn't understand. After I first met Henry, I asked one of the nurses if he would be okay. "Oh, we love our Henry!" she said. She told me he had already gone through so much in his young life. Thank God, she said, that Henry was so loved by his mother, Isatu, who visited him regularly and brought him extra food whenever she could. Most of the patients at Lakka had no visitors. Many had been abandoned by their families; a tuberculosis case in the family was a tremendous mark of shame. But Henry had Isatu. I realized none of this was an answer to whether he would be okay. RELATED STORIES —10 of the deadliest superbugs that scientists are worried about —'It is a dangerous strategy, and one for which we all may pay dearly': Dismantling USAID leaves the US more exposed to pandemics than ever —Massive tuberculosis outbreak sickens dozens in Kansas He is such a happy child, she told me. He cheers everyone up. When he'd been able to go to school, the other kids called him pastor, because he was always offering them prayers and assistance. Still, this was not an answer. "We will fight for him," she told me at last. Editor's note: This excerpt, from Chapter 1 of "Everything is Tuberculosis," has been shortened for the purpose of this reprinting. Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection In "Everything Is Tuberculosis," John Green tells the story of Henry Reider, a tuberculosis patient he met at Lakka Government Hospital in Sierra Leone. Throughout the book, he interweaves Henry's story with scientific and social histories of how tuberculosis has shaped our world — and how our choices will shape the future of Deal
Yahoo
26-03-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
He's Best Known for The Fault in Our Stars. That His Latest Book Is About the World's Deadliest Disease Actually Makes Perfect Sense.
Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Henry Reider talks like his words can't keep up his thoughts. It makes sense. English is his third language after Krio and Mende—all of which are spoken in his native Sierra Leone. Reider is also a creative, whose mind dances between anything from his university studies to his YouTube channel, or to whatever it is he's talking about at the time. While he speaks to me from his home in Sierra Leone, a rooster crows in the background, punctuating his sentences like a barnyard hype man. Rather than distract from what he's saying, though, it makes it seem all the more important. He's excited and passionate. He speaks quickly, as if he might not ever get the chance to say the words again. If I didn't know any better, I would never have guessed that, just a few years ago, Henry Reider nearly died being choked to death by his own lungs. 'People should understand that tuberculosis is not just a disease of the past,' Reider told me. 'It is still affecting millions of people today, but it is preventable, treatable, and also curable.' Reider's journey of how he contracted and (spoilers) ultimately recovered from multidrug-resistant TB is told in Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection by John Green. The book, which was published last week, tells the story of the disease and how it molded—and continues to shape—human history. The book might seem, at first blush, like a departure for Green, who's best known for his bestselling young adult novels, such as The Fault in Our Stars and Looking for Alaska along with his cleverly packaged memoir The Anthropocene Reviewed. But Everything Is Tuberculosis is, in many ways, a quintessential John Green book: one that grapples with the issue of mortality and our conflicting desires to both help and hurt one another, all within the backdrop of the coming of age of a young man, Reider. Reider met Green when he was 17 years old at the Lakka Government Hospital in Freetown, Sierra Leone. The author was there to learn about the country's maternal care system as part of his support for the global health nonprofit Partners in Health. Reider, now 25, acts as the book's heart and hero, giving the reader a view into his life that's both intimate and, often, unbearable to witness. We must witness it, though, the book insists. We must witness the pain, and the fleeting but precious moments of joy. We must witness Reider's struggles to find medicine and keep his torturous hunger at bay, and his near-superhuman ability to maintain hope throughout it all. While his story is the frame, the book also dives into the scientific and cultural history of tuberculosis, told with the intelligence, wit, and tragedy that have become hallmarks of the author's work. In this book, Green acts as a kind of exasperated Ms. Frizzle, if Ms. Frizzle lived in Indianapolis and seemed to only wanted to talk about TB. The approach works, letting the reader learn about the disease in fun ways ('Did you know tuberculosis gave us the cowboy hat?') but also underscoring the horrific unfathomability of TB ('Still, over a million people died of tuberculosis in 2023. That year, in fact, more people died of TB than died of malaria, typhoid, and war combined.'). Above all else, though, the book is an attempt to make the case for TB's relevance today. Despite the fact that many believe that the infection is a thing of the past—think cowboy Arthur Morgan coughing in Red Dead Redemption 2 or Fantine wasting away in Les Misérables—tuberculosis is still very much with us. In 2023, 10.8 million people worldwide were infected by the disease, according to the World Health Organization. In the same year, a total of 1.25 million people died as a result, making it the world's deadliest disease. From 2020 through 2022, it was second only to COVID-19. Everything Is Tuberculosis doesn't so much tell you the story of tuberculosis, as much as it gently holds your hand and parts the curtains into one of the darkest, most bizarre, and frustrating series of decisions in world history with the other. After all, Green often reminds us, that's what tuberculosis is: a decision. Even with drug-resistant TB, the disease is highly treatable—so it's a decision to let people die when we know how to cure their infection. It's a decision to allow the disease to spread and flourish when we cut funding. It's a decision to let TB feed and grow on human lives and communities, the way a fire might devour a forest. It's a decision to let people go untreated when pharmaceutical companies charge exorbitant premiums for lifesaving medicine for the sake of the bottom line. And it was a decision to let Henry Reider nearly die of tuberculosis. Tuberculosis kills you in different ways. Contracted via airborne particles, it can cause respiratory failure, damaging and scarring your lungs to the point where breathing can be like trying to suck air through a plastic coffee stirrer. It can also cause major bleeding in your lungs to the point where you cough up and, eventually, drown to death in your own blood. It takes a while for the disease to get to this point. In fact, some become infected with TB for years before they start developing symptoms. The standard treatment is intensive, requiring patients to take a regimen of around six to nine pills a day (sometimes more) for about six months. However, it's very effective, with success rates ranging around 90 percent. Of course, it can be expensive, with treatments costing upwards of $20,000 for a full course. International aid programs like USAID often provide the medicine free of charge, but those efforts aren't enough. Tuberculosis can develop quickly and viciously with the right conditions like those most often faced in communities throughout the 'Global South' such as poverty, malnutrition, and lack of access to medicine—conditions that Reider was and is regularly exposed to. This causes a domino effect, one that can exacerbate and worsen an already nightmarish situation. 'If the drugs are not available to those people who need them, it can lead to death,' Reider explained. 'People won't be able to handle it when funding is cut off. When you are funding something, and you cut off that funding, it can lead to unnecessary death.' In the book, Green talks about the concept of a 'good death,' noting that our concept of good and bad ways of dying have constantly shifted over the years. In the past, Western society romanticized tuberculosis (colloquially known as 'consumption'). It was the way great poets, artists, and philosophers died. People thought it even made you more beautiful the way it made one's skin glow with fever and the body waifish and willowy as it starved. Today, we would never consider dying of TB to be a 'good death.' The reality is it's painful and exhausting. Often, in places like Sierra Leone, there's so much stigma attached to TB that those infected are treated as social outcasts by even their family members. As such, patients often die alone in underfunded and under-resourced hospitals like the one Reider was in when Green met him. Yet every day we allow people like him to die of tuberculosis even though countries like the U.S. have nearly unfettered access to lifesaving treatments and vaccines. 'When the resources are available for treatment, it can prevent everything,' Reider said. 'It can also lead to awareness. More people will understand that the disease is dangerous, and that treatment is available.' It's a terrible bind: TB isn't hard to treat; we decide to let it go untreated. When I call John Green, he talks like words just aren't enough anymore—which is ironic for a man who has made his living writing novels. Sitting in the basement of his Indianapolis home in the room where he films the majority of his videos for his and his brother Hank Green's popular and long-running YouTube channel Vlogbrothers, he looks and sounds like the embodiment of the phrase 'I'm getting too old for this shit.' 'I am discouraged,' is what he tells me when I ask him how he's doing. Reider, he says, 'loves to use the words 'encouraged' and 'discouraged,' and the way that he uses them reminds me that courage is a verb. Courage is something we rouse ourselves and each other into, or courage is something that we pull away from. And right now, I feel pretty discouraged.' Green has plenty of reasons to feel discouraged—the U.S. government seems outright hostile to any efforts to support global health. President Donald Trump, along with his unelected billionaire hatchet man Elon Musk, has announced they would shut down USAID, which is also the largest bilateral donor in the fight against tuberculosis. On March 10, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio—who is also the acting director of the agency—announced that the White House cut 83 percent of programs under USAID. Musk also took an ax to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. His Department of Government Efficiency team has fired roughly 1,300 employees at the agency (or 10 percent of the CDC overall), including 135 members of the Epidemic Intelligence Service. As many as 1,500 employees at the National Institutes of Health were also laid off by DOGE in February. Meanwhile, tuberculosis is spreading in America. After 30 years of decline, TB infections in the U.S. have risen every year since the pandemic. This is not a coincidence. As Green notes in his book, TB is a crisis that flourishes when there are other crises, including malnutrition, poor health care infrastructure, stigma surrounding the disease, poverty, and other infectious diseases such as HIV, Ebola, or COVID-19. A recent outbreak of the disease in Kansas City, Kansas, resulted in the deaths of two people with 67 being treated for active infections and 79 people with latent infections. For good and ill, all of these reasons have made Everything Is Tuberculosis perhaps the most relevant of the nine books Green has written or co-written—a fact that doesn't escape him. 'The defunding of USAID and other human health programs by the United States government in such a chaotic way has been absolutely devastating to human health,' Green said. 'The choices that are being made right now are going to send us backwards as a species, and that's devastating.' He added, 'The story of humanity should be a slow but persistent march toward more just and equitable human-built systems, and right now we're making the opposite choice.' Everything Is Tuberculosis is his way of grappling with this choice, and what happens when we do not, collectively, make the correct choice. A passage early on in the book sums it up well: 'But we cannot save those we love from suffering. This is the story of human history as I understand it—the story of an organism that can do so much, but cannot do what it most wants.' We as humans are organisms helpless against our worst qualities. That's part of what Green wants most out of this book: to bring awareness to something that society has ignored for reasons that are all at once human and frustrating. If there's anything that we've learned from the COVID-19 pandemic and the way that people brush it aside and ignore it even though it's still happening, it's that we don't like to think about disease. 'I think we solve the problems we pay attention to, and for too long we haven't paid attention to the global tuberculosis crisis,' Green said. 'That's the reason we haven't solved it.' Henry Reider talks like someone who escaped death. He spent nearly all of his formative years in hospital beds throughout Sierra Leone before finally being treated and cured. Now, having escaped his death, he's determined to live a full, rich, and good life. That means completing his university studies, growing his YouTube channel, and taking care of his mom. He told me he wants to become a 'great journalist and philanthropist' so he too can tell stories and change lives the way that Green did for him. 'I want to advocate,' Reider said. 'My connection with my friend John has created an atmosphere for me to advocate for those who have been in the same situation as me but have much less connections or support. So, I want to advocate for and motivate any individual who's sick and needs help out there, because I know when someone is in that same situation, they need support.' As I read Everything Is Tuberculosis, a line from another book kept echoing in my head: 'So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.' Humanity has a boundless capacity for so much joy and pain. Yet we nearly always find ourselves repeating the mistakes of our past over and over again. This is the story of us. This is the story of our relationship with this disease. Tuberculosis has been with humans for at least 9,000 years. We have an older relationship with TB microbes than we do with writing, horses, and the Great Pyramids of Egypt. We only learned how to cure the disease much more recently, in 1943, but in 2023 we still allowed 1.25 million people to die of it. Green notes in the book, it would take $25 billion dollars on comprehensive care a year to 'drive tuberculosis toward elimination.' This is money easily accessible and available to some people in the United States. There is zero excuse to allow people to die the same way today that they have for 9,000 years. And yet, no matter how hard we row the boat, we can't escape the past. We get dragged back into it, endlessly and ceaselessly. But we keep going. We wake up. We eat. We take care of our parents. We go to school. We make YouTube videos about our lives and dream of becoming journalists and advocates. We meet wonderful and interesting people, and we write books about them. We get sick. We get better. We fight to make sure that others don't get sick ever again, even if the very country we live in is working against us. We do everything we can—because we believe that people deserve nothing less than everything we have.
Yahoo
05-02-2025
- Yahoo
A Solo Packraft Descent of Sierra Leone's Largest River
It was partway through Thomas Mariee's 17-day solo packrafting descent of Sierra Leone's Rokel River, and he was hiding in the jungle. Mariee had set up camp at dusk, hoping to conceal his presence from the illegal gold miners operating on the river. As he huddled in his tent, he listened to their voices as they conducted their work in the dark. Eventually, he slept. Sierra Leone's military officials had repeatedly warned Mariee to stay away from the miners. But this 60km stretch of river between Bumbuna and Magburaka was full of them. Their mining machines stretched out into the water, sometimes as many as five on one section of the Rokel. That meant Mariee had to paddle closer to the miners than he'd like, and earlier that day, some of them had thrown stones at him. By paddling until dark and then setting up a stealth camp, Mariee hoped to avoid another uncomfortable confrontation. But the discomfort, when it came, arrived in the form of wildlife rather than humans. Waking up at 2:00 am, Mariee felt a stinging sensation. Sitting up, he flipped on his headlamp and looked at his arms. They were covered in biting red ants. He directed his light at the floor of his tent to find it was swarming with insects. In the dark, he'd set up his tent directly on an ant mound, and they'd wasted no time in chewing through the fabric and making their way into Mariee's domain. "It was a carpet of ants. Hundreds and hundreds of ants," he remembered. "It was a nightmare. I was feeling pain everywhere over my body. I had to go out of my tent, clean everything. It was very cold. At this moment, I have to be honest with you, I was wondering, 'Why am I not chilling with my friends in Côte d'Ivoire right now?'" This moment of Mariee's 365km packraft journey down Sierra Leone's largest river stands out to the adventurer because of its contrast. In hiding from humans, he'd placed himself at nature's mercurial mercy instead. A Frenchman with four years of experience living in West Africa, Mariee had been looking for a way to get further outside his adventuring comfort zone. Before the Rokel descent, he'd been experimenting with longer and longer paddling journeys on some of Africa's smaller rivers and taken some whitewater classes in France. Pouring over maps and satellite imagery, he chose the Rokel in the dry season as his target. In Mariee's eyes, it was perfect. Sierra Leone is a non-French-speaking country, which would force him to get by in English and whatever Krio (the country's dominant ethnic language) he could pick up. The whitewater would be intense enough to stretch his relatively fresh skills and widely dispersed enough that he could portage around anything he couldn't handle. And it would be a chance to experience a culture of hospitality and kindness often obscured behind the very real threat of violence in some African countries. Mariee slipped his Mekong George All Well packraft into the Rokel at the first navigable stretch near the Guinean border. His goal was the Sierra Leone River Estuary on the Atlantic Ocean. His only food supply was a large bag of rice, which chose specifically because of its status as a staple food along the waterway. In the expedition's early days along the more isolated section of the river, he mostly slept in his tent. The river's upper section was swift and roiling with more rapids than Mariee's satellite research had suggested. In the first few days, the rafter did more portaging than boating. "That was when I realized how arduous the trip was going to be," he said. Mariee's solo adventuring style is cautious and well-informed by his multi-year residency in Côte d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast). He probably could have run many of the rapids he chose to portage around, but he knew that a capsize would be real trouble along the remote stretch he was paddling. So he gutted it out, sweating heavily in the humid days and then shivering as the night air turned cold. After the Rokel flattened out, he paddled more. And as a bonus, as the river progressed, he was able to spend more evenings in villages, occasionally supplementing his rice diet with fruit or cans of sardines he bought from village residents. "The concept of tourists does not exist. So I had to justify my presence. The village elders would ask me, 'Are you a missionary? Are you a gold miner?' So I had to show them photos, videos that I was truly a tourist. And once I had convinced them, they were most welcoming," he said. It wasn't until Mariee reached the portion between Bumbuna and Magburaka, with its illegal gold mining operations, that he felt any real danger. Despite his caution in other areas, Mariee neglected to bring a satellite phone or messaging device, a decision he regrets. He'll definitely bring one along on his next expedition, he told ExplorersWeb. The only other significant gear issue he encountered was his water filter, which clogged and became non-functional halfway through the expedition. He boiled his water from then on, and was happy to report he ended his expedition with no notable gastrointestinal issues. However, going to the doctor a few weeks after completion, he discovered he had a staph infection on his leg, the result of a small scrape he'd been unable to tend carefully enough. So on his next adventure, he's also going to seriously upgrade his first aid supplies. Mariee isn't too concerned about making first descents or setting records. He adventures for its own sake and also, he says, to shed light on the hospitality and kindness of the people he meets along the way. "There are huge issues in Sierra Leone, we have to be honest about it. But still at the end, we're talking about welcoming someone who is traveling. I didn't have any issues, people were very, very welcoming. They were not in a good situation, but they were still helping me." Mariee secretly left cash behind when he stayed in a village — tucked under something because people often wouldn't accept it if he offered. He also got in the habit of giving away his gear in thanks for kindness, finishing his trip with neither shoes nor headlamp. Two days after completing his descent of the Rokel, he was still happy not to be paddling. But by day three, he was daydreaming about his next expedition. He's planning something that features more balanced quantities of packrafting and trekking. "I would love to cross Madagascar from east to west or west to east. That would require maybe 25 days. You have the Mangoky River, which is the largest river in the country. And that would allow me to packraft in the western section, but I would still have to walk to get there." And in the next four or five years, he has his sights set on the Congo River. "In terms of exploration, it's the most fascinating one, the most mysterious one, maybe also the most dangerous one. I know only one crazy guy has paddled it from source to sea," he said. "So I'm not talking about a performance, being the first one. No. It's just about living the adventure I've always dreamed of."
