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—Joylon Leslie grew up on a diet of human rights in Cape Town, before reading architecture at Cambridge University, which could explain his English accent. He arrived in Kabul in 1989 with the United Nations as an aid worker – just as the Soviets were leaving – having already worked in Yemen, then North Yemen, with Oxfam for almost six years.
He greets me in the 16th Century Babur Gardens which the Aga Khan Trust for Culture (AKT), a conservation organisation, has renovated, and which he oversees as chief executive. Dressed casually in jeans and a short-sleeve blue Ralph Lauren shirt, he seems to speak impressive Dari and converses with his workers and colleagues fluently.
His views on Afghanistan are informed and his knowledge deep, although he is not the easiest or most charming of men. He wanders round the country and the capital freely but with caution, aware that foreigners are targets; his blond hair and piercing blue eyes are not typically Afghan.
Regrettably, he thinks, Afghans also live in fear, saying that the peace-keepers, the international forces here since 2001, have not brought peace, but in fact more insecurity.
Despite their reputation, “Life was a lot less scary under the Taliban,” he says as we overlook the gardens getting into full bloom in the Kabul spring. “Then, you could go to the Taliban and get redress if you had a problem. I hear people talk about the Taliban now and am amused by the amount of embroidery of what life was like.”
Occasionally he is afraid. When the suicide bomb went off near his office recently, all the windows shattered. Most of his fear comes from foreigners waving their weapons around, something he bans at the gardens. On the several reconstruction and urban development projects across the city, the AKT employs about 100 professional Afghan staff, a handful of foreigners and about 1 000 people per day. Income generation is one of the goals of the scheme.
In his book Afghanistan, The Mirage of Peace, written in 2004, one of his chapters deals with the complicity of the government in poppy growing.
“People didn’t like that we said that publicly. The scope for debate has closed,” he concludes.
He still has a “little shack” near Cape Point where he imagines he will return one day, but not now. After almost 20 years living in Afghanistan, including under the Taliban, he has friends as close as family around the country, people who he has survived the war with, which creates a bond of enduring friendship.
“It’s absolutely God-given work,” he says. “I couldn’t do this in South Africa. It’s an interesting society, and an interesting time to be here politically, and physically a fantastic landscape. I climb and one continues to go out despite the awful security situation.”
Ismailimail 