The storm is clearing now, though the occasional bolt of lightning illuminates our passage. As my eyes slowly adapt, the world around me reveals itself in flickers and bursts: slender palms bent in prayer over the silent water; the villager to my left clutching a brace of pucker-mouthed catfish; fireflies darting like embers through the gloom.

We’re bound for Tiwai, a remote river island of 4sq miles situated in one of the last portions of ancient rainforest in West Africa. We set off from Freetown that morning, leaving the capital’s blue-green shores to follow increasingly non-existent roads east into Sierra Leone’s Southern Province. It hasn’t been an easy journey to this point, but with the first stars glimmering on the water’s surface, and the distant howls of primates all around, I feel sure I’d travel to the moon if it sounded even half as beautiful as nighttime on the Moa.

It’s a reminder that some of the most euphoric moments Sierra Leone has to offer can’t truly be appreciated without first enduring a bit of discomfort — hardly surprising given this is a nation where prehistoric forests, former slaving stations, abolitionist utopias and world-class surf all coexist within an area that’s around three times smaller than the UK.

The plan is this: after searching for Tiwai’s 11 primate species, my guide Peter Momoh Bassie and I will cross back over the river to Kambama village and return to Freetown. Occupying the seaward nib of a forested peninsula, the port city will serve as our base as we explore the islands of the Sierra Leone River and the coastal communities of the wider Western Area, visiting people and landscapes whose stories remain largely unknown to outsiders.

“I think it’s just us,” says Peter when we reach our camp: a circle of netted huts set around a jungle clearing, each furnished with several frisbee-sized spiders. This is accommodation for wildlife-lovers who regard the term ‘luxury safari’ as an oxymoron. There’ll be no sunset gin and tonics tonight. In fact, there may not even be any dinner, the freshly caught fish I had my eye on during our crossing currently bound for the wildlife research station downriver. Peter, furrowed brow framed by a military-grade crop, has gone in search of food, leaving me to quell my hunger with one of the sweet-scented oranges we were smart enough to buy from one of Freetown’s wandering street hawkers.

Sierra Leone is full of surprises. The first is that its oranges aren’t orange at all — they’re green, the peel so thick it takes a good 15 minutes to excavate the sweet flesh within. It’s an apt symbol for a nation that, from the outside, can often seem impenetrable, its charms long overshadowed by the civil war that tore through the country between 1991 and 2002.

When Peter finally returns, having convinced Tiwai’s research scientists to part with a few portions of flame-charred river fish, we huddle around the camp’s dining table to eat and talk long into the night. The guide was just 11 when he was captured by rebel soldiers in his hometown of Makeni, Northern Province. Tasked with carrying ammunition, he was fortunate enough never to fire a shot, though it took years of counselling to come to terms with the violence he witnessed. “I was very angry at that time,” he says, spooning purple-flecked wild rice onto my plate. “When I came home, even my brothers were afraid of me.”

After the war, Peter began working as a guide for the NGO workers and missionaries who poured into the country in the early 2000s. But in a nation grappling with the transition to peace, the past had a way of haunting the present. While guiding some visitors around Makeni, he spotted his old army captain sitting by the side of the road. “It’s not easy seeing someone who’s caused you suffering, but it’s the future that matters,” Peter tells me. “I have daughters at home. I want them to know my story, because, if they do, I know that angry boy will not live on in them.”

The healing forest

The following morning, I find myself in the shadow of a giant. The skin around her trunk is barbed with spines, her upper reaches cloaked in wisps of cloud. Some 40 feet in height, she looms over the forest floor, dwarfing bamboo canes the height of church spires. She’s a 200-year-old Piptadeniastrum africanum, a deciduous species that Tiwai forest guide Mohamed Koroma tells me is known to the local Mende — one of the largest ethnic groups in Sierra Leone — as the bélé tree.

Mende is one of several Sierra Leonean languages spoken by Mohamed — ironic given he’s a man of so few words. His reticence, it occurs to me, isn’t shyness but the result of a lifetime listening to the language of the forest. It’s left him able not only to identify — and occasionally imitate — Tiwai’s every bird and primate, but also given him an encyclopaedic knowledge of its plant life. “The bark of the bélé is a powerful medicine,” he tells me, reeling off a list of uses that includes everything from alleviating insanity to curing scabies — a reminder that traditional medicines remain a key line of defence in rural communities. “The leaves provide food for red colobus monkeys and, if you’re lost in the forest, you can hammer the wood and the sound will be heard in the closest village.” He gives the tree’s cavernous roots a swift thump and the beat skims across the landscape like a pebble over still water. “Tiwai is a gift.”

Just a few centuries ago, the canopy formed by such giants would have been near continuous, covering much of West Africa in a tangle of red ironwood, lianas vines and yellow-lipped orchids. By 1975, 84% of the Upper Guinea Rainforest had been lost to deforestation, and today, Tiwai’s 31-mile trail network winds through one of the ancient habitat’s last remaining fragments.

We walk in silence, hands brushing against ruby-red hyacinths wet with dew. Mohamed’s elder brother, a senior forest guide, taught him to navigate these emerald corridors, and he seems to move without thinking, deep-set eyes drinking in the forest’s every detail. “Pygmy hippos,” he whispers, crouching low to inspect a trail of prints in the mud. “They were grazing here last night.”

Though we’re unlikely to see one now, their mere presence on Tiwai is enough to make my skin prick. By 1993, widespread habitat loss meant there were fewer than 2,000 pygmy hippos left in West Africa, to which they are endemic.

The civil war did nothing to aid their survival here either, with rebel soldiers relentlessly poaching the island’s mammals for bushmeat, virtually eradicating its diana, red colobus and sooty mangabey monkeys. It’s little wonder Mohamed seems so keen to savour the silence here. This forest once crackled with gunfire. Now, it’s filled by the mellifluous cooing of hornbills. Protected by eight host communities from the locally governed Koya and Barri chiefdoms, it’s one of the best places to spot pygmy hippos in the wild, and home to one of the highest concentrations of primates anywhere in the world. “This isn’t a zoo,” Mohamed assures me. “The monkeys move quickly, so you must be quiet. Don’t step on the twigs.” I keep my eyes fixed on his footfall, hyper-aware of the world at my feet: the fluid trickle of ants pouring in and out of their nests; foot-long black millipedes shimmering like onyx.

Then, a rustle from above; pale leaves falling like jade confetti. Mohamed stabs a hole in the air with his machete, and there they are — the rust-red backs of a dozen red colobus monkeys leaping from tree to tree. Using his hands to form a cone around his mouth, he imitates their cry: a high-pitched ‘chow’ that flies like a boomerang into the highest branches. A moment later, the troop returns the call. As they leap and chatter, I turn to see Mohamed with his eyes closed, basking in their language.

The hungry earth

We cross back over the Moa River to find hearth smoke rising over Kambama. Everywhere I look, something is being reaped or readied, the red earth laden with piles of rice and cocoa beans. Kind-eyed farmer Lihias Lukalay spots me admiring the fruits of his labour and guides me down to a dappled grove where, between leaves as thick as elephant’s ears, his cocoa pods are slowly ripening in the midday sun. “Sometimes, you can get 150 from one tree,” he says proudly. “They start off green then turn gold — that’s when I know they’re ready to open.” He brings his machete down and splits a pod into two mirrored halves, digging out a bean and offering it to me on his upturned palm.

The flavour stays with me, bitterness dissolving into an earthy sweetness, as Peter and I bump our way back to Freetown in a battered people carrier. Such roads once made driving between the capital and the provinces a near impossible feat, but improvements in infrastructure over the past few years mean that this stretch is now the exception to the rule. “They call this the African massage,” Peter says, his laughter rising and falling in pitch as we trundle from pothole to pothole.

We watch rice paddies fade to cashew groves until the hills above Freetown come into view. When the Portuguese first saw this hilly peninsula in the 15th century, they thought its peaks resembled a lion. With the wind roaring, they named it Serra Lyoa, or ‘Lion Mountains’. They didn’t stay long, soon setting sail to chart the routes that would shape the Atlantic slave trade. The arrival of the capital’s founding settlers in 1792, mostly formerly enslaved people from North America who had sided with the British during the American War of Independence, reversed the trade’s flow of human cargo. Aided by British abolitionists looking to establish a free Black settlement in Sierra Leone, they laid the foundation for a ‘Province of Freedom’ that, following the abolition of slavery, would welcome peoples from across the African diaspora and come to be known as Freetown.

But forging such a utopia wasn’t easy when one of the largest British slaving forts in West Africa lay just 20 miles upriver, as I discover when we take a boat to Bunce Island the following morning. From a distance it seems a haven: a deep thicket of tamarind and baobab trees where fisherfolk from Freetown pause for shade. It’s only when we trek to the ruin at its heart that I realise I’m on an island of ghosts.

“Bunce Island was the centre of slavery for the whole of West Africa,” Peter explains as we wander beneath shattered watchtowers and crumbling archways, occasionally finding rusted cannons and nameless graves in the hungry grass. “Around 30,000 West Africans passed through here before they were taken to places like Georgia and South Carolina, and today many Americans come to Bunce as a sort of pilgrimage.”

A sapphire-blue butterfly pauses to rest on Peter’s arm and I’m struck by the dissonance in my surroundings, the landscape’s tranquillity so at odds with the violence it’s witnessed. But as Peter recounts the tale of Sengbe Pieh, a Mende farmer who won his right to return to Sierra Leone after leading a revolt aboard a Spanish slave ship in 1839, I begin to understand that reading such places only for their dark histories is to overlook the tales of strength that have emerged from them.

The dancing tide

That afternoon, Peter and I take a boat back to Freetown to meet Mary-Ann Kai Kai, a local fashion designer for whom Sierra Leone’s heritage has long been a source of inspiration. We find the city thick with heat and life, its streets filled with market vendors dressed in cloth so vibrant they seem to leave a trail of colour as they wander kerb to kerb, great baskets of oysters, oranges and plantain balanced on their heads. “You’ll see a lot of Sierra Leonean women wearing their traditional fabrics on Fridays,” says Mary-Ann as we amble across town, her flowing, tie-dyed gown a beacon amid the city’s sea of tin roofs and timber-framed colonial buildings. “Sierra Leonean style is a blend of new ideas and old customs.”

Descended from one of the country’s few female paramount chiefs — a term used by the British in place of king or queen when referring to local rulers — Mary-Ann is the force behind fashion label Madam Wokie, which has helped to create jobs for some 3,000 young female tailors over the past three years. Its outfits are crafted using gara, a type of hand-dyed cloth historically coloured with indigo leaf or kola nuts. “Gara patterns change as you go around the country,” Mary-Ann says, cowrie shell earrings glinting in the afternoon sun. “But all Sierra Leoneans love bright colours,” she adds with a smile. “The stress of living here means you need something to brighten your mood.”

The mood could hardly be brighter at her studio, where some local musicians have gathered with slender wooden drums, their rippled beats and half-chanted vocals setting the pace as 100 busy hands craft fresh lengths of gara and batik. While the eldest workers thread needles through milk-white fabric, the youngest, many sporting their own designs, douse crumpled sheets with iridescent blue-green dye or use candlewax to decorate them with trippy galaxies of colour, their easy laughter filling any space the music doesn’t. “For me, Sierra Leone is one of the happiest places to be in the world, but it can also be unpredictable,” Mary-Ann shouts above the hubbub. “When you live in a place like this, you have to find a way of empowering others — and that means working with what you find within your surroundings.”

The following day, we drive south to Bureh Town to meet someone for whom that came instinctively: local surfer John Small. Born and raised here, the muscular 24-year-old is one of the founding members of Bureh Beach Surf Club, the wellspring of Sierra Leone’s burgeoning surf scene.

I meet him for a beginner’s lesson on the club’s thatch-roofed verandah, beyond which sage-green waves slide onto a crescent of ochre sand. “As a child, I spent months watching expats surf here,” he recalls as we pad out onto the beach. “When I finally got a board, I already knew how to stand up.”

For me, it’s not coming so easily. Thankfully, John’s a safe pair of hands, though he does fail to contain his laughter when I attempt to push myself into a standing position only to faceplant the sand. “You look like a professional,” he says. He may be a liar, but he’s also something of a local legend, having taught almost all of Bureh’s instructors. One of them joins us in the wash: steely-eyed Kadiatu Kamara, Sierra Leone’s only professional female surfer. “I’m trying to encourage other girls to take up surfing, but it’s not easy,” she says as we follow John into the bay’s waters. “We have the beaches but not the resources to make it accessible. That’s what we’re trying to do with Bureh.”

I carry that determination with me as I kick myself shoreward, managing to stand just long enough to glide, not so elegantly, into the wash. The ensuing buzz drives me straight back into the water. “My dream is to have a surf shop here,” John tells me, gazing shoreward. “All our boards, including the one you’re using, were donated by friends from outside Sierra Leone. Every other professional surfer has their own board, so why not me? Why not us?”

My trunks are still dripping when we say goodbye. Peter’s anxious to make the 4pm ferry set to take me from Freetown back to the airport, though he still finds the time to make a pit stop for fruit and roasted corn on the way. We make it to the quay just in time, where my guide — all relieved smiles and weary eyes — presses a green-skinned orange into my hands just as I’m swept up by a shoal of boarding passengers.

The clouds have been thickening all day, but a change in the wind soon rakes them threadbare, leaving swallows dogfighting in a cornflower sky, and me, never so content, eating sunny mouthfuls of honey-sweet fruit.