IT'S AN idyllic beach that wouldn't look out of place in a brochure for the Caribbean. Golden sands backed by luxuriantly-verdant forest run down to warm blue seas. The air is clear and baking enough for the most demanding of sunbathers and, best of all, there is not a building, or a person, in sight.
But this is not the West Indies or the Far East. This is Kent Beach on the coast of Sierra Leone, the West African country that tourism forgot.
Not for much longer.
Kent Beach - named by the British who ruled the former colony until 1961 - is expected to be at the forefront of a new tourism boom. And the battle for the spoils has just begun.
Villagers in nearby poor fishing communities are angry that senior Anglican church officials are attempting to annex the beach for their own use.
Concrete posts that will support a fence have already appeared on the access road and the suspicion is that a land-grab is taking place in advance of interest from foreign developers of exclusive resorts for wealthy western tourists.
One prominent Sierra Leonean, who did not wish to be identified in a country still recovering from a bitter 10-year civil war, said villagers in the nearby fishing communities had claimed church officials had persuaded village elders that the church had always owned the beach and its surroundings.
"There is a lot of anger in the villages because they make their living from the beach and they are worried that they will no longer be able to go there," he said.
"One day the tourism industry will come and whoever owns the beach will benefit."
That Sierra Leone is about to be reinvented as one of global tourism's new hotspots is not in doubt. In the 1970s, following the handover by the British, who established the colony in the 18th-century to resettle freed slaves from the Americas, French entrepreneurs built a series of small resorts on the pristine string of white, black and golden sand beaches that stretch down the Freetown peninsular.
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