The City was once Freetown’s most storied hotel. It burned down in the early 2000s, a few weeks after British paratroopers fought off Revolutionary United Front rebels in a battle which helped bring an end to Sierra Leone’s decade-long civil war. But the hotel had been on its uppers for a while before then. The Ferraris, a family of Swiss hoteliers, had long since abandoned it, and the City had become a brothel, where clients were serviced in dingy, candle-lit rooms. One correspondent who visited the site shortly after its destruction found a pile of rubble and a sign warning in Krio: “No piss ya.”

Nowadays, there’s a scruffy Leonco gas station where the City once stood. On one side is Philton Guesthouse; on the other is Paty’s Beauty Salon. In fact, it looks almost exactly like another anonymous junction in Sierra Leone’s litter-strewn, chaotic and intoxicating capital.

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Graham Greene found Freetown “a place of unreality… an exhausted shabby enchanted town of bougainvillea and balconies, tin roofs and funeral parlors.” He stayed at the City several times – there’s a photo of him on its entrance steps – and drank there more often. And he set the famous opening scene of his 1948 novel The Heart of the Matter there. The book finds Wilson, a man so newly arrived in the then-British colony that his knees are still pale, observing from his balcony the book’s conflicted hero, Scobie, a morally upright policeman: the last good man in Freetown. It’s a superb, cinematic moment of the kind Greene excelled at,........

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