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Visas were no problem – they could be obtained at Keke airport itself. I was not officially accredited as a correspondent in Keke then. All that came later. Since no one would officially admit that there was any chance of a coup, and since according to the government the rebels were retreating in disarray, I couldn’t exactly go to the office of the ministry of the interior and get myself accredited as a foreign correspondent. In any case, I had no idea how long I would be there. If you’d asked, I would have said maybe a fortnight at the outside. In reality, it turned out to be more than a year.

I checked into a hotel and that night went for a walk along the river. Whether the government wanted to admit it or not, the man on the street could not but have known that things were far from normal. The streets were almost empty – empty but for speeding trucks full of soldiers. They stared at me, but nobody asked me questions.

That evening I met a couple of journalists from other news services also staying at the same hotel. No one really knew anything except that the government was trying to hide how serious the situation actually was. We sat around drinking beer and speculating, and then we went to bed.

I was woken by what I first took to be thunder; it made the walls tremble and the sky through the window showed flashes of light. I had just about rolled myself securely into my blanket and begun to feel good at not being out in a thunderstorm when I belatedly realised that it wasn’t thunder. It was artillery fire.

In an instant I was off the bed and rolling under it, my arms clasped round my torso to protect it. You may laugh, but none of you has ever seen the results of artillery fire. None of you has seen living, breathing human beings with their bowels torn out of them by shrapnel…oh, forget it. You wouldn’t understand.

After some time I decided that the shells weren’t falling close enough to the hotel for any danger, so I crawled over to the window and looked out. Against the darkened skyline of the city I could see the flashes of exploding ordnance; most of it was obviously falling across the river, in the vicinity of the Presidential Palace, but some of it was on this side too. It was impossible to locate from where the shells were being fired. They seemed to be coming in from all directions.

When the firing subsided a little I went over to the door and peeked into the corridor. Everything was quite dark and on clicking a switch I found the power had been shut off. There were matches flaring here and there though, and feet hurrying to and fro in the darkness. I called out, asking what was going on, but I never got any reply. Finally I went back to the room and sat at my window, awaiting events. The shelling had stopped, but I could hear more distant explosions and could see some flashes from tracer fire on the other side of the city. Once a convoy of vehicles drove by the hotel, but nothing else happened till dawn.

I managed to get some sort of breakfast from the hotel cafeteria, but nobody there could – or would tell me anything. The power wasn’t back, and no one knew what was going on, whether it was a coup or if the rebels had attacked the city. There was a transistor radio, but apparently all it was playing was music on all local stations. I tried to place an international call from the hotel’s phone, to my bureau, but the line was dead. My laptop could not access the net. My cell phone said it had no coverage. We were truly cut off.

Sometime during the morning the two other journalists and I went out to have a look at things. At first we saw nobody around and no sign of the shelling from last night. There was just a faint smudge of blackish smoke in the sky across the river. We thought we would try and get across by means of one of the bridges and see what was happening. You must understand that this wasn’t heroism; we thought we should be safe as foreigners and in any case all fighting seemed to have stopped. We couldn’t hear a shot.

Then, as we walked towards the river, we turned a corner and found the road blocked by a huge truck parked diagonally across it. Some soldiers in dark green uniforms stood near it, and as we came up one stepped out and held his hand up for us to stop.

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