Diary 
Maya Jasanoff
The helicopter service to Freetown from the airport at Lungi was suspended; it had crashed one too many times. That meant I would have to take the ferry, across the neck of one of the world’s largest natural harbours. After a jolting truck ride, I found myself at the edge of a concrete pier, watching the sun-set through the haze, waiting for the boat. Fishermen poled their pirogues onto the brown strip of beach. A couple of women slouched over baskets of mangos. A boy wandered by to ask for money, then posed for a photo, droop-lidded and smirking, his dog-tags glinting in the twilight. Shiny SUVs with corporate insignia piled up along the loading ramp behind me, glamorous, outsized and out of place.
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Maya Jasanoff teaches British and Imperial history at Harvard. Edge of Empire: Conquest and Collecting in the East is out in paperback.
Other articles by this contributor:
Secret Signals in Lotus Flowers · Myths of the Mutiny
Before and After Said · A Reappraisal of Orientalism
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