"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.

"A professional opportunity"- Poda -Poda Stories Fellow Sulaiman Bonnie's reflection

The Poda-Poda Stories Fellowship is a year-long program that is designed to support young Sierra Leonean writers to grow in the literary industry and manage an independent creative project.

The goal of the fellowship is to inspire and train the next generation of young writers in Sierra Leone. Through access to resources, coaching, training, and support for their independent projects, we hope that fellows will enhance their creative skills, while gaining exposure to the literary world of publishing, writing and editing.

Poda -Poda Stories Inaugural Fellow Sulaiman Bonnie reflects on his work over the past year and talks about his independent project— an anthology of poems from students.

"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.

Isatu Harrison on Building Creative Spaces in Sierra Leone

Creative Hub Africa is a space in Freetown where creatives learn and connect with each other and explore potential markets for their creative businesses. The founder says their goal is to unlock the creative potential and build an entrepreneurial mindset in Sierra Leone's growing youthful population, which is almost 80% of the country's population. The hub also hosts creative events like open mic nights, which bring together poets and writers. Poda-Poda Stories Fellow Josephine Kamara interviewed the founder and CEO, Isatu Harrison, about the importance of creating such a space in Sierra Leone and how it all started.

Isatu Harrison: I was invited to a creative space in the UK. I was so inspired by it as it was such a bold space and I imagined having something like that in Sierra Leone. When I moved back home, I started off with the Izelia factory, a fashion company, and the impact we had on young people was huge. More young people kept approaching me and my team to come to the factory to work. So, we started working with creatives in the Izelia factory and that was because we have a little bit of space that we could play with. And that's how the Creative Hub started.

Josephine Kamara: What gap in the creative ecosystem were you aiming to address?

Harrison: I thought it was important to have a space sharing and creating opportunities for people that want to pursue creative careers. This is a hub for ceatives with ideas who are looking for a space where they can go and flourish and flesh out their ideas out work on them. And this is the gap the Creative Hub is trying to fill – providing a home for all of them.

Kamara: You mentioned something about infrastructure, when you stated that systems for creative people work in the UK and in Sierra Leone, it's almost non-existent or even if it's there, we're not well-structured. Please comment on the creative infrastructure in Sierra Leone.

Harrison: Because most of the population are young people in this country, there is dire need for nurturing ecosystem for them to birth their dreams. When I came back home, the only space that I found was Ballanta Academy. Ballanta has been around for 24 years, so I won’t say nothing exists, but the infrastructure is small. For the Creative Hub, we got a grant from the World Bank and the Government of Sierra Leone. We had a $50,000 grant and I matched that with personal funds. I have no regret in doing it because every day people go into that space to dream, to do creative work, to share their work. I don't have the words to explain how it makes me feel.

Kamara: As you emphasise the importance of providing infrastructure for growth, could you elaborate on the specific resources and support that the hub offers to young creatives in Sierra Leone?

Harrison: So when you go into the space, we have what we call the design space, and that design space is really the space for creatives to get their work done. So we have all the graphic design software loaded on computers so you can do, you know, practice your graphic design. Whether you are an aspiring entrepreneur or just at the ideation stage, we have expert advisors that work with you to develop that idea and turn it into an actual business. 

Kamara: We always say that as Sierra Leoneans, we need to tell our stories more. I've attended some of your events, and I've seen great storytellers and poets there. Can you comment more on specific support for young people who use this art form to express themselves.

Harrison: What we want to do next is connect is connect young writers to writers’ programs and workshops. We have a few people interested in working with writers, and we're planning our first MasterClass. On that note, we have some visitors coming this month. I don't know if you've heard of Fela, the play? They have Broadway shows in New York, and the writers have some connection to Sierra Leone. They are really interested in meeting young writers, poets, young people in that sector. They're having a master class possibly on the 21st or 22nd of December. I feel like we have a lot of wealth in terms of writers and directors in the diaspora, and if we connect them with local talent, it could be amazing.

Creative Hub Africa offers a space for young people in the creative sector to network and learn.

Kamara: Oh, that sounds exciting! Are there more initiatives like this within the hub to mentor and give visibility to the creatives that makes use of the Hub?

Harrison: Every last Friday of the month we organise an open mic nigh and we select three people from each performance night. We then connect them to mentors at Ballanta Academy. We also want to get more people involved in the process. Starting this month, people in the audience can vote, and we'll select our top three. Once we have those three people, we're making contacts in Nigeria with CC Hub in Nigeria. CC Hub stands for Co-Creation Hub. It's a creative hub based in Nigeria and present in Kenya. They've been in the space for over 10 years and understand how the creative space operates. They have many opportunities that we don't have access to here. The creative sector is still very young in Sierra Leone, and it's at a stage where we all need to come together to establish it. So, we are collaborating with organisations like CC Hub to help us nurture creatives from Sierra Leone, starting with those from the open mic sessions.

Poda-Poda Stories Fellow Josephine Kamara(L) and Founder of Creative Hub Africa Isatu Harrison at her home.

Kamara: Why is it important for a Hub like this to exist in a country?

Harrison: The trend happening globally is that the creative sector is the fastest-growing economically. In Sierra Leone, either due to lack of awareness or conscious decisions, we haven't prioritised or focused on developing the creative sector. There's so much that can be gained from it, and the space we're creating has a fundamental purpose. It's not just about creating a safe space for creativity but also about formalising it. There's tremendous potential in the creative sector, and we are working and hoping to collaborate with the government and partners to make them realise the significant impact it can have on our country.

Creative Hub Africa offers a space for young people in the creative sector to network and learn.

Kamara: Everything sounds so peachy, but I’m sure challenges exist. Do you want to share some for the people who are interested in learning more about what it takes to build this creative infrastructure in Sierra Leone?

Harrison: I’ll start with the most recent event. So, for Christmas, what we decided to do was bring female entrepreneurs to showcase their products. So, I thought, why not bring these women together and try a digital market where we only accept cashless transactions.

This way, we can introduce them to different technologies available that they can use in running their day-to-day business. We also brought the idea of reducing single-use plastics. Instead of using plastic bags, we encouraged them to use fabric bags. We even created cost-effective fabric bags for them to use for their customers. It's an eco-friendly approach and encourages the use of reusable bags.

Yesterday was the launch of that market (referring to 7th Dec.), and it wasn't without challenges because people aren't used to going anywhere without cash. The shift to mobile money or card payments was very challenging. I think it's the first market of its kind here, that was completely cashless and plastic free.

It was so challenging. People were complaining that the mobile money was not working, but by 6:00 PM, most people were making payments by mobile. I realised what we need in Sierra Leone is to guide people through change. Internet connectivity is another thing we as creatives are gravely challenged with in Sierra Leone.

Kamara: Looking ahead, what are your dreams and aspirations for the creative hub?

Harrison: If we make this a priority, within the next two years we would see so many changes within the creative ecosystem and we would see a lot of creative careers thriving in Sierra Leone.

Josephine Kamara is a Poda Poda Fellow, Feminist Activist and Storyteller who writes to know and share her well-rounded human experience. She is currently a MA candidate at the Institute of Development Studies – University of Sussex, UK.