"I'm deeply enamored of Sierra Leone "-Syl Cheney-Coker on Writing through Exile

Syl Cheney-Coker is a Sierra Leonean poet, novelist, and journalist. Born in Freetown in 1945, he was educated at the University of California, Los Angeles, the University of Oregon, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He returned to Sierra Leone but went into exile in the 90s after he was targeted by the government. Cheney-Coker is the author of several novels and anthologies including The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar, which won the Africa region of the 1991 Commonwealth Writers' Prize. He now spends his time between the US and Sierra Leone. In this interview, he talks to the Poda-Poda Stories team about how literature shaped his work and writing through exile.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Ngozi: Your memoir, Jollof Boy: The Early Years, was released this year. It is a rich account of Sierra Leone during the colonial era when you were a child. Why now? Why have you decided to share these stories with us in your memoir at this time? 

Cheney Coker:  I never really thought about writing my memoir. The best way to get to know anybody is through an account of what we see about our society and whatever contribution we may have made. And in my case, being a writer, I felt that I have been doing that through my books. 

However, last year, Mallam O, the publisher of the Sierra Leone Writers Series, said to me “have you started writing your memoir?” So I thought about it and said, why not? Especially as Sierra Leone is not the Sierra Leone it was before. So seeing where we are at the moment- an incredibly bankrupt society-I just felt that perhaps I should go ahead and write this memoir and reflect on a period of glory. It was not perfect, but I think it was better.

Ngozi: You've gone into exile because of your work as a writer in Sierra Leone. Can you talk about how being in exile changed your relationship with Sierra Leone over time?

Cheney Coker:  I always tell people that I never left the country, because it is Sierra Leone that gives validation to my being a writer. Without Sierra Leone as a stimulus, I wouldn't be a writer and I don't want to be a writer that is not tied to my heritage. I'm sure you've been reading African literature quite a lot. The current scope of African writers, mainly those under 50, delight in bashing the African continent. They're all writing about an escape from their various problems and the problems of society into which they were born. They’re coming to the West and saying “take me, give me a new name.Things are so bad in my country!”

But it's the madness of escapism.

My relationship with Sierra Leone has not changed and it will never ever change because as I speak to you right now, we are putting the finishing touches to my house on Leicester Hill. I don't know how many more days I have left on this planet so I'm looking forward to going home to reconnect with what is still there. 

Of course, I'm not unaware of the fact that a lot has changed. For a start, the landscape has changed. In addition to destroying all moral values, we’ve also destroyed the ecology and the environment of our society. Everything has been chopped out while we delight in being a barren landscape. And we have all of these ugly metallic buildings, concrete buildings going up. So Freetown has become, in my view, a concrete jungle and it's not what I expected Freetown to be like because I've been to other African capital cities and it's not like that.

Having said that, I'm going home hopefully sometime this year. For good. 

Charmaine: I recently graduated from an MFA program in creative writing from Texas State University and a conversation that kept coming up among us African students was how much someone's writing changes based on geography. One Nigerian classmate in particular, felt that being in America stifled his writing which is usually set at home in Nigeria. Could you speak to this: do you think wherever the writer is geographically affects the quality and the content of their work? 

Cheney Coker:  Congratulations on doing your MFA! Having said that, I don't believe that an MFA makes someone a writer. I think an MFA allows you to teach, particularly.

To be a writer is to be consumed by passion that no other expressive cultural form does to you because writing is a lonely vocation, as opposed to being a composer, a musician, or a painter. A painter has a palette and she begins to draw to paint images and colors. A composer or musician has an instrument, and the instrument talks back to you, right? But a writer, you wake up in the morning and all you have is a blank screen, or in my day before computers came to be, you have a blank piece of paper, which you've got to fill with words, and those words must be extremely very close to you. One thing the writer does not want to do is to lie to himself or herself because literature can be extremely vindictive and very treacherous. So writers who think that they can lie about their heritage or their experience just to fulfill a publisher's request are making a mistake. It's always going to be terrible when it comes out. 

“My soul is that of a poet’s.”

Syl Cheney-Coker

So my response to that is that it depends on what background the writer is coming from. Nigerian writers of my generation came from a very rich background and it didn't matter where they were. Take Wole Soyinka for instance, who spent many years in exile and still wrote some of the greatest plays like Death and The King’s Horseman, which are about his Nigerian heritage and his perception of what Nigeria was going through at various periods. No one could draw a line between whether they were written in Nigeria or written abroad. I have been in exile for a good many years and I have still been able to write about Sierra Leone. Emotionally and culturally, I'm very deeply enamored of Sierra Leone and I'm very deeply enamored of the background that I inherited.

So, it all depends on whether you bring your country or your heritage with you when you leave, or whether as soon as you get out and step into the so-called melting pot, you feel like you must become someone else.

Charmaine:  What authors, poets and novelists shaped your journey as a writer when you were growing up? 

Cheney-Coker: African literature was not taught in schools during my time. We went through the grinding machine of colonial education. So strictly speaking, the two people who shaped my perception into being a writer, were writer and physician, Raymond Sarif Easmon, and then the journalist Ibrahim Taqi, who was sent to the gallows by (then president) Siaka Stevens. 

I never really fancied myself becoming a writer. I actually wanted to be a journalist. I came to the United States during the sixties, and it was the period the Harlem Renaissance was being brought back into being, and all the writers, like James Baldwin were being taught. Of course David Diop and Leopold Senghor had all become part of the Negritude Movement and we were all being swept up into consciousness by what was going on at that time. That’s when I realised there was something in me that was empty.

I also felt that my Krio identity was not any different compared to the Harlem Renaissance or the Negritude school. I had been fed a lot of crap by colonial education and there was a subterranean journey that I had to undertake to find myself. That journey could only be achieved by becoming a writer.  

Charmaine: What were some taproot texts that inspired you to became a writer? And you’ve written poetry, creative nonfiction and novels. Which form have you most enjoyed writing in?

Cheney-Coker: I’ll answer the second question first. My soul is that of a poet’s. I think anyone reading my work would realize that. Even in my memoir you can see that it's of a poet writing. I express myself much more passionately in my poetry, because it's personal to me. Fiction gives me an opportunity to write about the collective in a wider and more dramatic format. 

To the first question, when I started writing poetry, I discovered Leopold Senghor and other negritude poets and my favorite for a long time was the great Congolese poet Tchicaya U Tam'si. He's probably the most famous French writing poet at that time from Africa. Then there was the great Peruvian poet César Vallejo whose poems I really love. The English speaking writer I admired the most because of his approach to landscape and someone's existential crisis, is the Australian writer Patrick White, particularly his books Voss and The Tree of Man. It was Patrick White who showed me that it's possible to look at a vast landscape that has not been populated before and to try to make sense of it.

I also like One Hundred Years of Solitude. When I read the first page I thought “oh my God, this is an African book!”And what Gabriel García Márquez taught me was that it is possible to write a political novel and infuse it with magic and culture.It is possible to write a political novel that is not boring.

Ngozi: I remember reading your poem, the Colour of Stones, and just marveling at the beautiful imagery that you used to describe our culture. Can you just comment on how you've examined the interiority of Sierra Leonean lives in your work?

Cheney-Coker: Culture becomes extremely central when I write about Sierra Leone. It isn't just my own immediate culture, but the general culture as a whole. I'm deeply enamored of all the cultures of my country and I may not speak the other languages, but I recognize their beauty and validity because this is what makes Africa as a continent extremely very important and different from other societies.

We are truly in the real sense of the word, a melting pot, but we don't destroy the individual ingredients that contribute to that melting pot. It's like in Sierra Leone, we have plasas, but you would taste the efo nyori, or cassava leaves or egusi. 

And so I recognize the nature of our cultural dynamics. For example, when I visit a place like Port Loko, I'm not looking for the influence of Freetown in Port Loko. I'm looking for Port Loko in Port Loko. I'm also very particular about expressing the culture which I was raised in. I try my best to recollect, to re-narrate and to express as best as possible the chapters and the passages that, my mother especially, passed down to me. And I hope she'll be very proud of me. Infact she was the inspiration behind the character, Jeanette Cromantine in The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar.

Ngozi:  What a beautiful tribute to her! And that’s a great segue to the next question. The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar recently went into reprint and Charmaine and I have our copies! The book tackles a lot of themes like the effects of the Trans Atlantic Slave trade and nation building. What does it mean for you for this book to go into reprint?

Cheney-Coker: I'll tell you a story about Alusine Dunbar. In 2012 or thereabouts, I was at the University of West Virginia in Morgantown. I was the keynote speaker at this conference and a woman came up to me and said “do you know how much I paid for this copy when I realized you were going to be the keynote speaker because I wanted you to autograph this book for me?” The book was selling for anything between five hundred and a thousand dollars! And not one penny came to me. I don't know how this happened. 

Ngozi: Yeah, I was looking for a copy on eBay and it was around that price, so I had just given up.

Cheney-Coker: Yeah, and not one penny came to me. I would get so mad I would say, how is it possible that my book is being reproduced and people were selling it online. But anyway, The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar is back. It never should have gone out of print. And so it was this new publishing house at Bloomsbury who bought some of the rights of the Heineman books.They reached out to me and said they would like to republish it. So I am glad Alusine Dunbar is back in publication and circulation and I plan to bring some copies to Sierra Leone later this year.

Anyway, how do I see some of the things related to Sierra Leone today? When you get towards the end of Alusine Dunbar, about 30 years ago, I started predicting that what is happening now, was going to happen. I saw the collapse of all moral values. I saw the greed and hunger in our intellectuals who were always sitting by their telephones waiting for calls. In those days there were only landlines. They were sitting by their telephones waiting for a call from Siaka Stevens or Saidu Momoh, so they could abandon teaching, and become ministers, et cetera, et cetera, so they could line up their pockets.

But I'm happy to see that your generation is changing everything. I'm happy there are so many writers in Sierra Leone right now, especially the poets, writers and editors like you and that is the greatest reward to me as a writer. It is not in the many books I’ve written or the dissertations on my work. What brings me the greatest joy, and I mean that sincerely, is to see that in my lifetime, there are so many promising young writers in Sierra Leone, especially women. I would not have thought this possible, given the destructive influence that my generation and the generation immediately after mine imposed on Sierra Leone. Because what is going on now is toxic. Not even the worst days of Albert Margai were like this. 

Now people are afraid. I get letters from people who say they are afraid. Since when did we become a society where people are afraid to communicate? We are supposed to be a society where regardless of where we are from, we are one nation, one country, one people, and that is what makes Sierra Leone unique.

 Charmaine: What is your advice to young Sierra Leonean writers?

Cheney-Coker: The epochs are different. By which I mean, I came into writing at a different epoch, and so my narrative is different. And you're writing during a completely disorganized and dysfunctional period where all the threads that held our society together - and this applies to Nigeria, to Kenya, Cameroon or Senegal - have disappeared. But in those other societies, they have not disappeared as they have been allowed to in Sierra Leone. There is still some semblance of cultural preservation and societal responsibilities that we no longer have in Sierra Leone. Sierra Leone is a complete collapse of anything pertaining to the maintenance and the integrity of the state, and that is what frightens me.

So, your generation has a much more difficult task than my generation did. We had a lot to feed on. Ours was an expressive period. We were expressing the norms and the passions and the traditions of society. You are now singularly charged with rebuilding society.

The other problem you have to contend with is publication. There's only a small publishing house in Sierra Leone. So, we need more publishing houses but also we need a couple of good bookshops. There's not a single good bookshop in Freetown, which is a shame! I hope other Sierra Leoneans will invest and support publishing in Sierra Leone.

Ngozi: Something we always ask writers we talk to is how has writing saved your life? 

Cheney-Coker: Without writing, I probably would be dead. I could not become a doctor because the only branches of medicine that I like are pediatrics and veterinary medicine and I can’t stand seeing children and animals suffer. I hate the legal profession. I've not balanced my checkbook in the last twenty years, so I could not have become an accountant. 

So, writing saved my life in the sense that it gave me a dimension to express myself about my society and my role, without my drinking myself to death if I had done something else. And it’s also saved my life in the sense that it has exposed me to the validity of other societies, to other people and other traditions which have made me much more humane.

I cannot tell you how grateful I am that I can write and express myself in that way. Writing imposed itself on me in the sense that I never set out to be a poet or a novelist. It is just that I found that when faced with a particular situation to express myself, I picked up my pen and I started writing. 

The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar is available to purchase from Bloomsbury. Sacred River is available to purchase from Barnes and Noble. Jollof Boy and other books by Cheney-Coker are available to purchase from the Sierra Leone Writers Series.

"Writing is the way I work out what I think about the world", Aminatta Forna Reflects on Craft and Country.

Aminatta Forna is an award-winning British-Sierra Leonean author who has published several books including The Hired Man and The Memory of Love. Her memoir, The Devil that Danced on the Water, is an account of her investigation into her father’s execution in 1975. In this email interview, Poda-Poda Stories asked Aminatta Forna about understanding Sierra Leone through fiction and non-fiction.

Poda-Poda: It’s been over 20 years since the publication of The Devil that Danced on the Water. In what ways have you changed as a writer since the book first came out? Is your writing/creative process still the same?

AF: The 20th anniversary edition of The Devil that Danced on the Water came out in November 2023 and I reread the book for the first time in many years. I was still happy with what I had written, so I guess that answers the question. However, that book is a work of non-fiction. The story is fixed, it's really only the way a writer chooses to structure and narrate that can really change.

Fiction is a little more complicated. Over the years I've learned a lot as a writer of fiction and gained a great deal more experience. Unlike many young writers nowadays, the opportunity to study creative writing wasn't readily available when I began to write. I taught myself and learned at the coal face. There are some choices I made then that I would have the wisdom not to make now - for example, I would not have written Ancestor Stones in four first person narratives. That was overambitious at that stage in my career. If I'd had anyone around me to tell my why - as I do my students - I'd have changed to third person.

These days I give my finished work to other people to read, I have a chosen group of careful readers. Sometimes they are experts in the field, say, of psychiatry or wildlife biology, which is a theme of the work.  Another reader runs a book club. Another is an actor and is always great on character and motive, can tell me if something feels out of place. Beyond that not much else has changed overall. I always do a huge amount of research and fact checking, whether a story is fiction or non-fiction. I enjoy it.

Poda-Poda: The Devil That Danced on the Water wasn’t just a story about your father, Dr. Mohamed Forna, but it was also about the political history of Sierra Leone at the time and events leading up to the tragic Civil War. What was it like to go through the investigative process of trying to find out what had happened, considering it was a personal story for you? Was it ever possible to have emotional distance when trying to piece together the story?

AF: It was important for me to create a certain amount of distance when I was researching the book, because otherwise I would not have managed to persuade people to talk to me, or indeed, keep going through some very difficult moments. I learned, as a reporter for BBC TV, to distance myself from the story and it came in useful. When I was interviewing people, for example, I took care to refer to my father as 'Dr. Forna,' and not 'my father.' I am of mixed heritage and many people in Sierra Leone take me as a foreigner. This could have been a disadvantage, but I used it to my advantage. The less certain people though they were confiding to his daughter, the better. At one point, I travelled into rebel territory, to the HQ of the RUF in Makeni. So, there were many reasons I needed to keep my head. I kept a tight check on my emotions throughout the research phase.

Writing the book required a different approach. There is a balance to be struck. Some of the emotion has to be allowed onto the page or the work becomes dry. So, it's important to let go a little. Too much and reading the book would become tiresome. Only when I had finished the book did I realise how emotionally draining it had been. Then I had to go on the road with it, touring the US, back to Sierra Leone to give talks, so many interviews. I'd say it took me two years to put it behind me.

Poda-Poda: How do you balance writing both fiction and non-fiction about Sierra Leone?

AF: “Nonfiction reveals the lies, but only metaphor can reveal the truth.” That's a pretty good rule of thumb for writing about Sierra Leone. Fiction describes a different kind of truth to non-fiction, an internal, existential truth. That's definitely a useful definition and one I would say lay behind the The Devil that Danced on the Water and subsequent novels. Now I'd add to that and say that I also think of non-fiction as a 'found story,' by which I mean that a story that already exist in all its parts. A recent essay collection, The Window Seat, contains the story of Bruno, the ape who lived at Tacugama Sanctuary and escaped.  It seemed to me that all the narrative elements and emotional resonance were all there. I just had to capture it in writing.

Poda-Poda: Sierra Leone has gone through her share of suffering. There was so much trauma because of the war. Then came the Ebola epidemic in 2014, the 2017 mudslides etc. Those stories matter, because they significantly shaped the country. But how can we carry that trauma, but also transcend that trauma narrative, especially as Sierra Leonean artists?

AF: There is nothing inevitable about trauma. Suffering, yes. But trauma is different. Trauma is the wound that will not heal. Unfortunately, we too often use the words interchangeably. The late Dr Edward Nahim, who ran the mental health facility in Kissy for many years, was immensely helpful in guiding me towards understanding trauma and subsequently it was a central theme in my novels The Memory of Love and Happiness.

Additionally, I have published various essays on trauma, most recently in the Yale Review. Art soothes suffering and has the power to heal trauma. That's why art is so important. Anyone who is interested might read Boris Cyrulnik's Resilience. He was a Jewish survivor of Nazi occupied France, who lost his parents to the Holocaust. He became a psychiatrist and worked with many child death camp survivors as well as American prisoners of war in Vietnam. He writes about how, among the latter group, it was the poets rather than the athletes who survived the deprivations best, because they possessed a powerful inner life and imagination. This allowed them to transcend their circumstances, to refuse to be defined by them and to envision a future beyond the present in a way that gave them strength and ultimately saved their lives.

Poda-Poda: What do you love about Sierra Leone? What are some of your favorite memories?

AF: I love the dogs. I love the way people in Sierra Leone are so tolerant of the street dogs. Over the years since childhood, I have adopted many dogs, and my essay about Dr. Jalloh and the street dogs of Sierra Leone (which was first published in Granta and also appears in my anthology The Window Seat) won him and me many fans and readers the world over. How a society treats animals tells you a great deal about that society's humanity.

As Milan Kundera said: “True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power. Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test... consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals.”

I also love swimming off Lumley Beach on Sundays, where my father loved to take us kids in the 1970's. The beach then was pristine.

Poda-Poda: How did writing save your life?

AF: Writing is the way I work out what I think about the world. I've lived many lives through the characters I have created, and I understand what makes people human in a way that would otherwise be impossible. Even if I create a character I dislike, I still have to understand why they do the things they do.

Writing makes me happy. Once I began to write, I knew that I had found what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. Those days when I have no other pressing tasks except to write are days, I wake up filled with contentment.

30 Years Later: Joseph Kaifala on Remembrance and Healing.

Joseph Kaifala is an author, lawyer, human rights activist, and founder of the Jeneba Project. He is also the founder and principal of the Center for Memory and Reparations, an organization which facilitates remembrance and common narratives around the Sierra Leonean Civil War (1991 - 2002).

March 23rd, 2021 marks the 30th anniversary of the start of the 11 year civil war in Sierra Leone. In this interview, Joseph Kaifala talks about the importance of narrative for collective healing, the work of the center, and why it is so important for all Sierra Leoneans to learn from our history.

Poda-Poda Stories: Thank you Joseph for joining the Poda-Poda.  Tell us about yourself and your work as a writer, scholar and lawyer.

 Joseph Kaifala( JK) :  I was born in Pendembu, Sierra Leone. I was trained as a lawyer. I am currently working as a writer and a historian, focusing on Sierra Leone history. I am the Principal of the Center for Memory and Reparations. Our work at the center is to facilitate remembrance and common narratives around the Sierra Leonean civil war.

Poda-Poda: Your memoir AdamaLui  is a book about resilience, surviving trauma and finding hope. What inspired you to write that book? And what was the writing process like?

 JK: As a survivor of the Sierra Leonean civil war, people wanted to hear my story, especially when I lived in the United States, but my experiences in the Sierra Leonean and Liberian civil wars were so complicated that it is often difficult to tell people the entire story in one sitting. So over the years, I decided that the best way to tell the story is to write a memoir, because I wanted my American friends to hear about my experiences. I lived in the United States where many young people had never been through such violence. I also believed that young Sierra Leoneans needed to hear a story of resilience and  hope. I realized that a story like mine - coming from this same country after a decade of civil war, going to Norway and the United States to pursue my education - could inspire the next generation of Sierra Leoneans to keep working hard and become resilient in pursuing their dreams.

 Poda-Poda: What was it like reliving some of those experiences?

JK: Many people who've read the memoir have called me to talk about its authenticity. And for me, that was very important to the storytelling. I decided that I was not going to sugarcoat anything. I was going to tell the raw stories as I experienced them. And that also meant reliving some of those experiences. It went two ways:  It's painful to remember the past, but also remembering the past and reliving some of those experiences can help the individual healing process. It provided a lot of healing for me.  I also believe that when other people read the memoir, they will be confident enough to share their stories because story-sharing has always been part of our culture, and it could help us relieve pain, because if we don't share our stories, we internalize them. And when we internalize them, the trauma remains.

Poda-Poda: I was at the premiere of your documentary Retracing Jeneba, and it's a film that shows some of the many atrocities that took place during the war. In many ways, we are still dealing with the trauma of the civil war. How can we as citizens collectively heal and rebuild?

JK: What we have to do is create an atmosphere in which people feel confident enough to share their story, and the rest of the society is willing to listen to them. Again, we cannot force people to recover from their trauma because the effect of a traumatic experience is different for every individual. But what we can do as citizens is to create a collective atmosphere in which people can share their story and victims are honored and respected. As of now in Sierra Leone, we don't have that atmosphere because people are preoccupied with other things, and talking about the war, the victims and the trauma, has been put behind us. Some people are unwilling to openly confront these issues because we don’t have an enabling environment.

What we are doing at the center is to compel this country to create moments of listening and sharing, to realize that if we are not bringing out our traumatic experiences, we are internalizing them and internalizing them doesn't make them go away. Pretending we don't remember the civil war is not going to eliminate its consequences.

 And I think for instance, in my case, I have decided that it is important to use my traumatic past to help create a country in which other generations of children would not have to go through the kind of experiences we went through as children in this country. Citizenship requires that I take that obligation seriously, because we are often talking about leadership and the requirements of leadership. I believe that leaders are obliged to create a better country, to inspire people, to provide spaces for people to pursue their dreams. And my own way of doing that is to make sure I use this center to provide people with the confidence to share their experiences.

One of the reasons I created this center is that young people were making fun of amputees and victims of the civil war, because there was this lack of understanding between the younger generation and those who survived the brunt of our civil war. I launched the Sierra Leone Memory project back then to allow victims to tell their stories so that I could bring the conversation to a public space where we could all listen and hear what our fellow Sierra Leoneans were going through. That is one of the reasons I am persistently behind the Government of Sierra Leone to officially declare National Reconciliation Day and promote healing in Sierra Leone, because with their official declaration, we can come together as a country to engage in various methods of transitional justice and reconciliation.

Poda-Poda: You’ve mentioned a bit about your work with the Center for Memory and Reconciliation. What is your mission and what does the center hope to achieve?

JK: Our primary aim is to facilitate remembrance and common narratives around the Sierra Leonean civil war, which lasted between 1991 and 2002. What we're doing primarily is to lobby the government to declare National Reconciliation Day as recommended by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). When that happens, the government of Sierra Leone can facilitate reconciliation activities and promote transitional justice to honor victims. As a center, we often promote what we call #DusomtinfoSalone on January 18 (which is supposed to be national reconciliation day), encouraging Sierra Leoneans to take 60 minutes of their day to do community service, because we want people to use the trauma of our past to do community good.

 Moreover, the TRC identified about 99 mass graves and other sites around the country. Other sites simply means places like torture houses and other places of massacre like the Kailahun Slaughterhouse. What we are doing is to re-identify these mass graves and protect them, because ever since the TRC completed its work, nothing has been done about them, and many of these places have been abandoned. What we are doing is going to communities, identifying these mass graves, and protecting them so that they can become sites of conscience and remembrance. We also organize traditional burial rites, bringing communities together to conduct prayers for those they lost in the conflict, because many of us lost our relatives in the conflict without the opportunity to bury them and conduct traditional burial rites. Some of us don’t even know where our relatives were killed.

 We are also currently planning a commemoration of March 23, 2021 - the 30th anniversary of the start of a decade-long civil war in this country. The aim is to really get Sierra Leoneans to pause and remember the issues surrounding the decade-long civil war, and to commit to building a better country.

 Poda-Poda: I can't believe it's been 30 years. I don't think many people realize that.

JK: People forget that the civil war in this country started in 1991 and not in 1999. We are using this 30 year anniversary to dispel some of the myths surrounding the conflict itself. We have a podcast, Memba, which we use to present significant information about the conflict, because we have realized that people are also telling stories about the war that are not really fact-based. One of the issues that we have had to dispel is the idea that the attack on Bomaru on March 23, 1991 was conducted by Foday Sankoh. That is not true. Foday Sankoh attacked Sierra Leone a couple of weeks after the attack on March 23rd, which was really a criminal attack on Sierra Leone by National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) rebels from Liberia, on a raid authorized by Anthony Mekunagbe to retrieve a looted vehicle commandeered by Major Emmanuel Foday of the Sierra Leone Army. After that incident, Foday Sankoh and Charles Taylor agreed that it would be easy to invade Sierra Leone at that moment.

Poda-Poda: You have a podcast called Memba which is the storytelling platform for the Center, and you seem to merge advocacy and storytelling very well.

JK:Well, I think if you want to bring society along, you cannot work without certain elements of activism. And for me, that means primarily beginning with myself. This is why I started by telling my own story, so people can identify with me, and others can gain the confidence to share their own stories. Sometimes there are victims or perpetrators who think that their experiences are shameful for society, and one of the things I try to tell victims is that what they went through is not shameful. You are a victim, you are a survivor, and we want to hear your stories because we are all responsible for what happened to you. In Sierra Leone, for instance, the TRC has said that many perpetrators did not get to give their testimonies to the commission because they were afraid. So what ensued is that many of these perpetrators, like child soldiers, who were also victims, are now living with their trauma because they were never able to testify.

 So activism is very important to the work we do, because we want to make sure that victims have what they need to survive by calling on the Government of Sierra Leone to implement the TRC recommendations. The TRC made specific recommendations to take care of certain categories of victims that have not been fully realized. Many amputees are still suffering in this country and I cannot do this work without having to plead on their behalf. That is why we combine activism with the transitional justice work that we do.

Poda-Poda: You have a span in your career as a writer. You’ve written a memoir, a children’s book, a history book and you are also a legal scholar. How do you navigate these different genres?

JK: Driven by my experiences in the Sierra Leonean and Liberian civil wars, I wanted to write a memoir. However, I realized I couldn't write a memoir without fully understanding the history of my country. So I decided to put that aside and spend four years researching the history of Sierra Leone. At the end of that, I wrote a history book, Free Slaves, Freetown, and the Sierra Leonean Civil War. In the beginning, I simply wanted to write about the civil war, but then I realized in the middle of it that I couldn't write about the civil war without providing a clear history of this country. So it ended up becoming a full history book of Sierra Leone.

There were also a lot of emotions I couldn’t describe in both books, so I decided to turn to poetry to make sense of my experiences. And that is what the poetry book is about. It is called Tutu's Rainbow World, because one of the individuals in our world who inspires me more than any other is Archbishop Desmond Tutu. He has a way of describing South Africa as a rainbow nation of diversity, and that is the theme of that poetry book. When Nelson Mandela was in prison Wole Soyinka wrote a poetry book he called Mandela’s Earth - I wanted to give Desmond Tutu the world. So, all of these books are intertwined in the sense that they are all geared towards making sense of Sierra Leone, making sense of my life as a Sierra Leonean, and surviving a decade of civil wars.

Poda-Poda: I always ask writers this question: How has writing saved your life?

JK: I think it was Shakespeare who said that “I write because there is a lot in me I cannot talk about.” When I'm able to express these things on paper, I can convey exactly how I'm feeling. One thing many people do not know about me is that I am an introvert. So, it is often better for me to write than to talk. But really, writing for me has been a way of healing. It gives me the opportunity to express my feelings, to share my  hopes and dreams, and to make sure other people are inspired by it.

Memba Podcast

centerformemoryandreparations.org

josephkaifala.com

For any enquiries about this interview, email editor@poda-poda.com.

Aminata Conteh-Biger on Healing Through Memoir

In 1999, Aminata Conteh-Biger was kidnapped from her family, and held captive by rebels during the civil war. Years later, she wrote a memoir Rising Heart, a memoir in which she shares the story of how she was rescued by UNHCR, found a new life in Australia, and giving back to Sierra Leone through her maternal health foundation. For Aminata Conteh-Biger, writing the memoir was a path to healing and a way to come to terms with what she faced during Sierra Leone’s civil war. Now, Aminata gives back to her country through the Aminata Maternal Foundation, to support maternal health in Sierra Leone. In this interview, Aminata Conteh-Biger shares how she rebuilt her life as a refugee, and wrote through trauma.

Poda-Poda:Thank you for granting us this interview. Tell us about yourself, your background, and your journey as a writer.

Aminata Conteh-Biger: I was born in Freetown and grew up in Kissy. I was raised by my father Pa Conteh, along with my 3 siblings. In 1999, I was kidnapped by the rebels, torn from my father’s hand. I was held by the rebels for months and released as part of an exchange for supplies. In 2020, I released my memoir, Rising Heart, with Pan Macmillan Australia. I wrote Rising Heart with my ghost writer Juliet Rieden, a highly respected journalist and author.  I always wanted to write a book, and had many offers to do so over the years, but I did not want to do it until I had given something back to my home country Sierra Leone.

Poda-Poda: Tells us about your memoir, Rising Heart. What inspired you to write it and share your story?

ACB: I had always wanted to tell my story. I wanted to write it for the women of Sierra Leone who experienced the same as what I went through, and for the men who committed the atrocities against us to understand what they took from us. I also wanted to write it to show the world the realities of war and conflict – and the ongoing experience - of African nations. I feel very strongly there is not nearly enough general awareness of the challenges endured by African people, both now and in recent and past history.

Poda-Poda: We recently commemorated the National Day of Reconciliation in Sierra Leone on January 18th. You have shared your story through your memoir. For many survivors of the war, sharing the story of what happened to them is a difficult process. We do not have adequate psychosocial services in Sierra Leone to fully deal with the trauma of war amputees, victims of sexual violence, and refugees. What can we do, as a society, to help heal through our trauma, even when we lack those professional resources?

ACB: The answer to this is in the government. It is the duty and responsibility of our leaders to look after the wellbeing of their people. People in a position of power must create and make available safe spaces for the vulnerable, in order to allow them to live their best life.

In a country like Sierra Leone, where there is such recent national trauma, there must be assistance and services for them. Current services in Sierra Leone are not strong and there is one major reason why. There is a lack of acknowledgement and awareness of the war and its impact, not just from the government, but from the population as a whole.  

Poda-Poda: There was so much unimaginable trauma because of the war, and so many of us still carry that and walk with that. How can we carry that trauma, and still try to change the story of our country for good?

ACB: This is difficult to answer, as we Sierra Leoneans can’t even face the truth of what happened to us. I have witnessed for myself the lack of knowledge young people have of recent events.

This lack of knowledge is because the previous generation, the people who lived through it, do not discuss the realities of what happened. So, how can younger people learn their own country’s history? As a nation, we cannot heal from trauma when the events and actions that caused the trauma are not acknowledged, let alone discussed amongst families or taught in schools.

Africans are so strong, and have faced so much adversity.  I feel this inner strength needs to be applied to having uncomfortable, upsetting conversations in order to change the story of our country for good. Even here in Australia, where Sierra Leoneans support my foundation work, I promise you, maybe only two Sierra Leoneans would have bought my book, Rising Heart. They are scared to face my story because it will remind them of theirs.

Poda-Poda: Tell us about your work with maternal and child health in Sierra Leone. How did that come about and what are your plans for your organization?

ACB: The Aminata Maternal Foundation came about following my near-death experience while giving birth to my daughter Sarafina in 2012. Sarafina suffered from shoulder dystocia at the time.

During my pregnancy and Sarafina’s birth, I had access to high-quality healthcare here in Australia, like all women do. This compelled me to give back to the women and girls of Sierra Leone and help to improve the unacceptable maternal health and infant mortality rates. I immediately felt a sense of responsibility. My papa always taught us, “we get, we must give back”. He showed his children that it is more of a blessing to give than to receive. I do not have any family in Sierra Leone and this actually inspired me to go back home to contribute, especially because of my two children, Sarafina and Matisse. I want them to know where their mama comes from because I incredibly proud of my homeland Sierra Leone.

My vision now is to buy the hotel in Freetown my father owned and make it a hospital. But before then, my goal is to get as many midwives as possible trained, and hopefully open a children’s ward in the Aberdeen Women’s Centre so the staff can increase their capacity for check-ups and vaccines. My foundation has been working with the Aberdeen Women’s Centre since 2014, but I need the government to help us get this land. The funds are ready but we need land.

Poda-Poda: How did writing your story save your life?

ACB: It didn’t save my life. However, writing my book was a very important process, as it allowed me to establish the fact that I own my story – my story does not own me. I am not ashamed of what happened to me. I am proud of my scars because they have shaped and continue to shape the human being that I am. I always knew I was born to do something good and greater. My grandpa and my older brother, Alieu, always spoke so powerfully on my life ever since I was a baby. So despite my story, I was born for something greater, and I’ve always believed it is as a humanitarian.

Find out more about the Aminata Maternal Foundation at aminatamaternalfoundation.org