Alpha Kanu may have a point

My attention was drawn to the main front page headline in yesterday’s Tuesday October 12 edition of the Democrat newspaper which read,”Kailahun Attacked Minister mad!” The unfolding story was a statement which honourable Alpha Kanu the Minister of mineral resources and Presidential spokesman was alleged to have made on Universal radio, that the former rebel leader Foday Saybana Sankoh was born in Kailahun district where he had settled after his discharge from the army. (Photo: Dr. Sama Banya)

He is further quoted as saying that it was the normal practice for people to settle in the place of their birth which was the reason that the RUF man had settled in the district. Alpha Kanu was right about Sankoh coming from Kailahun but for the wrong reasons. The people of the south and east are known for their kindness and hospitality to strangers. They are also well known for absorbing strangers into their communities, giving them their daughters in marriage and a piece of farmland to cultivate. It is also very common for people particularly of northern origin to become chiefdom councilors in those communities with the same right and privileges as indigenes. Evidence of such abounds all over the region and let’s face it, Foday Sankoh had settled very cozily into the Segbwema community where he ran a successful photography business.

I was to learn of this in of all places, Yamoussoukro the political capital Ivory Coast. I witnessed this kind of hospitality to strangers in Diang chiefdom Koinadugu district in the 1980s. A man from the east who had served for many years in the court messenger force in Kabala but had retired, settled in that chiefdom in the time of chief Sheku Magba 11. At the time of my visit to the chiefdom he was the local court chairman.

But back to Foday Sankoh; I find it strange that minister Alpha Kanu would state that Foday Sankoh was born in Kailahun district and was buried there. After the Presidential runoff election of 1996 in which President Kabbah emerged as the winner, he nominated me to join the NPRC leader Julius Maada Bio’s delegation to the first face to face meeting between the government of Sierra Leone and the RUF. I was NOT a delegate but merely an observer for the President elect.

It was at the preliminary meeting that I met Foday Sankoh for the first time. After shaking hands with Maada Bio and the rest of our delegation, he walked across to where I stood with outstretched hands and demanded his Le500 which he said I owed him from way back in 1977. He was the unknown photographer that took a series of photographs of me as I lay swathed in bandages in the Nixon hospital following the 1977 Parliamentary election campaign in which my brother and my cousin were killed and I escaped through God’s grace with gunshot wounds to my head and shoulders. He had taken photographs of me as I was being loaded into the ambulance and again as I was loaded into the helicopter that had been sent to evacuate me to Freetown.

On my return from medical treatment in the United Kingdom, the photographer joined the crowd that had gathered at the Nixon hospital when I called there on my return from the UK to thank the staff for their initial care. He handed me a packet of photographs for which he had demanded Le1, 000; I gave him Le 500 and asked him to collect the balance of Le500 at my hospital in Kenema. I didn’t set eyes on him again until he introduced himself in that peculiar way.

At the plenary session he spent about four minutes telling me off including that I had been APC and that he was not the devil that I had made him out to be on the BBC over the years. At the end of his tirade, to the surprise of President Konan Bedie and everyone he requested a one on one meeting with President Kabbah’s representative.

At our meeting he spent more forty minutes blasting Dr. John Karefa-Smart including my having to listen to an audio cassette recording of the language he had used on the doctor. He ended up by revealing that he came from a small village about four miles to Magburaka in the Tonkolili district and that Paramount chief Bai Yossor Kholifa was his maternal uncle.

President Kabbah included the chief on the Abidjan Peace mission in November of that year. Sankoh even promised to take me to the village when the war was over and when I asked how he could be sure that his men had not destroyed the village, he retorted that he was serious. He said that he was angry with Karefa-Smart because his father was one of the staunch supporters the doctor in the SLPP but that he and his father were angry when he invited them to join him in the APC which his father bluntly refused to do.

I asked Sankoh why he had not started his rebellion in his native Tonkolili rather than in Kailahun which had played host to him. His answer was that the Mende people were not only friendly and hospitable, but that they were very reliable. Kailahun district was adjacent to Liberia’s Loafer County and therefore very ideal to train his men and to launch his attack on Koindu, far from Daru and Freetown. Yes, Sankoh was from Kailahun but of Tonkolili and not of Kailahun stock.

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