Summary

French met with Kelvin Lewis, a local reporter in Freetown, Sierra Leone. He had met Lewis in the 1990s during the insurrection led by rebel leader Foday Sankoh. Since those days, Lewis had acquired his own newspaper. Sankoh had been sponsored by Charles Taylor, president of neighboring Liberia. Lewis filled French in on the final days of the war. The Chinese began coming in near the end of the war. They fixed the plundered city, and when the war ended they were ready for business.

The Lebanese had been the highest profile foreign influence in Sierra Leone since the 1890s. After the conflict in the 1990s, the Chinese came in with earth moving machinery and began winning contracts for road building. The goal of the Chinese was to recapture the collapsed mining industry with voluminous lodes of iron, rutile, titanium and...