Party and president of the local chapter of the West African Students’ Union – although in truth Aberdeen was never able to boast more than a handful of members.
In the years before full independence was finally granted Sierra Leone had moved slowly towards self-government, a wind of change that revealed schisms hidden under the sand of white rule. In Freetown the Creoles had fought for self-rule since the founding of the colony by the Nova Scotian blacks in 1792. They were former slaves who fought on the side of the British in the American War of Independence. After the American victory they were forced to emigrate to the British settlement of Nova Scotia in Canada and thence given passage to Sierra Leone with the promise of land and freedom. But Britain double-crossed them: Freetown was given first to the profiteering Sierra Leone Company and later turned into a crown colony. A hundred years on, during the scramble for Africa, the rest of the country was brought under British protection.
Freetown soon flourished. In the fifty years up to 1900 the city, holding onto the south-westerly curve of the continent, became known as the Athens of Africa. The Creole emphasis was on education and professional achievement, their aspirations essentially European. They looked outward, across the sea, rather than inward to the hinterland, sending their children to Britain to be educated. Freetown had a flourishing free press; the first university in Africa founded at Fourah Bay; and at that time there were more children in school in the colony than in England itself. When Britain became the dominant colonial power they looked to the Creoles, in their starched bibs and laced boots, to fill positions in civil service administrations throughout West Africa.
On the whole the Creoles did not view themselves as Africans. They opposed the creation of a single state of Sierra Leone and objected to the right of people from the protectorate to sit on a new post-war legislative council in Freetown. The Creoles already enjoyed separate status as British subjects and they wanted this fact to be acknowledged in any new constitution, a wish that was ignored by Britain. In 1957 Sir Milton Margai, an elderly doctor from the provinces, successfully led a broad-based coalition to become the country’s first prime minister; a year later all British officials relinquished their government posts.
During the university vacations most of the African students took the train to Norfolk and worked in the Smedley pea factory, filling and labelling cans. At night they slept together in long dormitories of bunk beds, up to a hundred young men side by side, above and below. The factory was some way out of town, and evenings were quiet. Among the gathered students from universities all over the country and as many different nations, talk turned frequently to the question of independence.
At that time most of the African students studying in Britain were still young men from privileged families, town dwellers. Mohamed Forna was the first Sierra Leonean from the provinces to be admitted to Aberdeen University. Sitting on a suitcase at the end of his bed, Mohamed described existence in rural Africa, the total absence of basic life-giving amenities, the yawning disparity between the city and the people of the provinces. He was convinced that Africa’s poorest were already being cut out of the future.
When the Congolese nationalist Patrice Lumumba was murdered, my father cried. At the time the popular leader’s death was blamed on Katangan secessionists led by Moise Tshombe; not until decades later was it actually revealed to be the work of the CIA and the Belgian government, who had a deal with Tshombe to exploit the vast mineral resources of Katanga. It was the only time anyone heard my father swear. ‘Moise Tshombe is a fucker!’ He shook his head in despair.
He joined the British Labour Party and began to attend student meetings regularly. Even among his peers he had a reputation as a firebrand. One evening Bernard Frazer, who took a more languid view, challenged Mohamed. If he thought all the politicians back home were doing such a poor job, why didn’t he run the country himself? I will, replied his friend, rising to the provocation, if I have to.
In 1960 a series of meetings began to be held in London to agree a new fully independent constitution for Sierra Leone. As a representative of one of the student unions, my father was invited to meet the Sierra Leonean delegates. They gathered in the tense and heady atmosphere of Lancaster House to weave a constitutional framework for the future.
‘Uncle Sam’ was a one-time church minister in Freetown who arrived in Britain in the 1930s to train as a doctor. He flunked and switched to law; flunked that too. With the last of his savings he managed to buy a four-storey house in Paddington and he set about restoring it in a haphazard manner. In the meantime he lived quite well renting out rooms to a tidal population of students. Uncle Sam’s house was where most young men from Sierra Leone who were short of cash but wanted to see the big city ended up staying.
What Sam made on the house he regularly lost on the horses and at those times he would go round the house emptying gas and electricity meters of shillings, and shrug soulfully at the bitter complaints of his young tenants.
Some years back Sam won the love of Dora Fossey, an English hospital matron who lived several doors down and regularly bailed him out of his financial straits. Dora and Sam never dared to marry or even to go out in public more than once in a while. Instead, when her shift at St Mary’s ended Dora spent every evening at Sam’s, watching television and cooking him English meals. Anyone who knew no better would imagine they had been married for years, but their relationship was conducted entirely within the narrow world of the crumbling West London terrace.
One afternoon Mohamed came back to Uncle Sam’s to find one of his many cousins standing in the kitchen. Brima Sesay, nephew of Chief Masamunta, was a nursing student making a tour of the country. Neither could believe the luck of the coincidence and they crossed the floor to embrace. Afterwards Brima took Mohamed to Shepherd’s Bush market, where they bought slippery okra, palm oil, tiny stinging scarlet peppers and blackened, smoked grouper. That night they stayed in with Uncle Sam and feasted on rice and plassas. They hadn’t seen each other since they used to play on the Fornas’ farm during the school holidays. They had lost touch when my father was eleven, at which point one of his teachers had asked the family permission to take him away to the south as a ward in order to complete his education. Soon afterwards Brima had been adopted into a group of missionaries who brought him to England.
Brima called my father Moses, explaining to a mystified Dora how the mission teachers went round the class on the first day of school changing the names of the children for their own convenience. Around the same time my father chose his birthday: November, which coincided with tarokans. The date, the 25th, he decided on himself. A name the bureaucrats could spell and a date of birth: these were the first essentials on the path to westernisation. My father dropped Moses the day he left the primary school; but Brima used both his names: Alfred Brima.
Days later my father caught the train from King’s Cross back north and Brima went on to Birmingham. When Alfred Brima was back at college in Portsmouth, a letter arrived. It was from Mohamed and contained bad news. ‘Remember Maureen, the girl I told you about?’ Mohamed wrote. ‘A terrible thing has happened. She is pregnant.’
Mohamed wanted advice from his cousin, someone who knew the family. He had thoughts of marriage but worried about Maureen’s father who, he supposed, would detest this solution as much as any other. His greatest fear was that Mr Christison would report him to the university authorities and try to have his scholarship revoked. Then there was the matter of the Fornas. He remembered the Conteh cousins who returned from Britain, one after the other, each with a white wife, and the indignation and upset that the women managed to provoke within the family.
Brima didn’t hesitate. Marry her, he said. The older members of the family aren’t going to live for ever. But, he warned, you must make sure the family never have reason to resent her. And if you take her from her own country, to a place where she is a stranger, you will have to be utterly loyal to her, too.
Maureen and Mohamed married at the register office in Union Street on 28 March 1961. She was
