Sierra Leone emerging as tourist destination

By Zack O'Malley Greenburg

updated 10:12 a.m. ET March 18, 2009

Sporting a rumpled button-down shirt and something a little scruffier than a five o'clock shadow, restaurateur Faysal Debeis has an air of weariness about him. And well he should — he's from Sierra Leone.

Debeis and his countrymen are seven years removed from a decade-long civil war that claimed at least 50,000 lives, permanently injured half a million people and turned 2 million more into refugees. The conflict left the world aghast with images of dismembered corpses and inspired the gut-churning 2006 film "Blood Diamond," starring Leonardo DiCaprio.

But with the country relatively stable for the first time in decades, Debeis is also one of many Sierra Leoneans cheering the emergence of an unlikely industry: tourism.

Sierra Leone, a tiny West African nation of 6 million, would have joined Somalia atop of Forbes' list of the world's most dangerous countries as recently as 2002. Today the nation is safer, but thanks to a lofty inflation rate of 8 percent, a microscopic gross domestic product of $2 billion, an abysmal life expectancy of 41 and widespread human rights violations, Sierra Leone ranks last in the United Nations' Human Development index.

"I still love this country," says Debeis, the 40-something owner of the beach-side restaurant Chez Nous in Freetown, the country's capital.

Sierra Leone has its share of foreign boosters as well. In 2006, Lonely Planet declared, "It won't be long before Sierra Leone takes its place in Europe's packaged beach-holiday scene."

Three years later, it seems the travel guide was right.

"Recently, small groups have started to come," says Fatmata Abe-Osagie of Sierra Leone's National Tourist Board. "We intend to rebrand Sierra Leone as a tourist destination."

A slow but steady start
Drawn by vast white-sand beaches, lush jungles and, perhaps, an overdeveloped sense of adventure, 3,842 foreigners vacationed in Sierra Leone last year, up 27 percent. That's still a paltry 10.5 visitors per day (the tiny Caribbean island of St. Barth's gets 550), but it's a start. Last year's figure is more than three times the number of sightseers that came to the country a decade ago.

Zack O'Malley Greenburg for Forbes.com With the country relatively stable for the first time in decades, many Sierra Leoneans are cheering the emergence of an unlikely industry: tourism.

"Sierra Leone definitely has the potential to become a tourist destination," says Erica Bonanno, 24, a New Jersey native who works in Freetown at a nonprofit called Search for Common Ground. "Of course there are precautions you have to take, like not going out alone at night or leaving valuables unlocked, but I have never felt like I was in danger."

The relative peace of the past few years is something of an aberration in Sierra Leone's history.

In 1787 the British brought 400 freed slaves to the "Province of Freedom" with intentions of establishing a Utopian colony. Many of the first settlers were quickly decimated by disease and hostile natives. The remainder clashed constantly with both the British and indigenous tribes until the U.K. granted Sierra Leone independence in 1961.

By then, miners had already begun to find the seeds of madness buried in the country's warm dirt: diamonds. From their discovery in the 1930s well up through the '70s, one could scoop gems from the moist earth after a hard rain.

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As diamonds grew more difficult to retrieve, however, Sierra Leone became synonymous with bloodshed. In the early 1990s, Liberian strongman Charles Taylor trained and bankrolled militias to take the diamond fields by force, culminating in a vicious civil war with an average day involving everything from rebel child soldiers to rape to amputation of limbs.

The rebels eventually were repelled and disarmed by U.N. forces. By 2002, most of the ringleaders had been apprehended, and Taylor is currently awaiting trial for war crimes in The Hague.

The September 2007 election of President Ernest Bai Koroma marked the first time in Sierra Leone's history that the victory of an opposition party didn't spark armed conflict. Koroma has since launched task forces to combat everything from governmental corruption to public urination.

Legal diamond exports, which had dwindled to $1.2 million in 1999 when rebels controlled most of the country, are up to $200 million. Sierra Leone has finally been removed from the U.S. State Department's Travel Advisory list.

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