Excerpt: An African Rigmarole

The year 2002 was one when some sort of monster had been released in the country and, on either side, Sierra Leoneans pondered “Why are we so nonsensical?” when Homo sapiens, on waking up at dawn, found out that in the nighttime, while in deep slumber that carried them beyond the bounds of prejudice or hatred, they had fantasized of the “no sex, no food” effrontery of NGO aid workers and international agencies’ peacekeepers. I personally fantasized of a monumental banderole, sprawled irrationally across the UN building in Freetown and carrying the inscription What an African Rigmarole! It was the dry season when, time and again, the garbage, the confusion, the disorder confirmed itself more sophisticatedly than the rebel Front’s dogma and the peacekeepers so-called integrity. It was the dry season when female and male prostitution was on the minds of us all, and existence, in all its corrupt adulteration, repeatedly embarrassed the country. Occasionally on weekend evenings, and as neighbours, I and Bamewole, my husband, would invite Salakoh over to our house at Hill Cot Road for a drink of Martell Cognac brandy, a chat, and to listen to Dr. Oloh and his Milo Jazz Band. By the dry season of 2002, I had been lonely for a while since Bamewole was diagnosed with hemorrhagic stroke and admitted at the Hill Station Choithram Memorial Hospital. Practically lonesome, as a widow, in a sizable old-fashioned brick-gated house where I’d brought up three children with Bamewole. By then, I was in the middle of a fight with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on a charge of tribalism filed against me by three male employees in my department. At that time, I had been at Foreign Affairs for the main part of my civil service career, a distinguished, permanent secretary, who founded the nonconformist Diplomat’s Social Circle. My superb FM 98.1 radio talk show in diplomacy, called NWP, for Negotiate, World, and Peace, was trendy with civil servants just because of the all-embracing, sincerity in my presentation.