An African Rigmarole - An Excerpt:

The month of March, two thousand and two in Sierra Leone was a dry season of splendid and temperate weather. In football, it was the season when the legendary footballer, Mohamed Kallon, of Internazionale and AEK Athens FC fame bought Sierra Fisheries football club for US$30,000. It was the period of colossal gluttony, an audacity of gluttony, when peace, which had supplanted war as the predominant menace to Sierra Leone’s economic viability, was ousted by He-goat-like office sugar daddies and reckless, infatuated young girls hungry for profit and pleasure; a season prodigal of hustlers and hypocrites. In the civil service, in the private sector, the conscientious egocentrics, scoundrels, anxious to criticize, sing the blues, and incarcerate, were omnipresent. They sermonized to the greatest possible extent: the whole clique in a planned hysteria with what Ngugi wa Thiong’o referred to as “Draculan”; meaning the cabal who persecuted their own people in order to join the class of golfing, hunting, country-clubbing British settlers. Truly, if you haven’t lived through 2002, you wouldn’t know how it felt to be persecuted. The Westside Boys might propose that the infidelity of the sugar daddies might best be mitigated with nothing so murderous as forced resignation but, rather, by publicly beating Adama Gbankoro-Ashawo to death for sleeping with a dozen men. Unlike ECOMOG Major General Dogonyaro’s hunt for Maskita, the Westside Boys’ proposal for retributive justice carried with it no career promotion for any likely wrongdoer. It was motivated by an attitude no less demanding than the Major General’s, however, and in the interest of no less scared moral beliefs. It was the dry season in Sierra Leone when the abomination returned, when the jesting didn’t discontinue, when the uncertainty, the conjecturing, and the exaggeration didn’t discontinue. It was the period when the responsibility to teach sexual education in secondary schools was rescinded to the advantage of cultivating in pupils every misconception about sex, and when the pettiness of Sierra Leoneans was clearly disturbing.