Reading this week:

• Fifth Sun by Camilla Townsend

By now as readers will have realized we have left Sierra Leone. We have been back in DC for a few months, having arrived right before the city was plunged into its entirely frigid depths. I feel the need here to wrap up our time in Freetown and say whatever goodbye is appropriate.

The entire time I was living there I found Sierra Leone to be a wonderful place. The city of Freetown is beautiful, draped over the mountains of the peninsula. People want to live there and consequently the city has been forced up the hills. It is already a tough place to balance both the immediate material concerns of the people and the long-term sustainability of the land itself, but I am excited to see how they work through those challenges in the next decade or so. In the meantime, the cascade of homes and lives from the mountains down to the sea was something to behold every time we rounded the right bend on the road.

I have lamented it in so many of my posts already, but I do really wish I could have travelled more in Sierra Leone. It is a tough place to travel if you don’t know it but I think that shouldn’t be so much of a hurdle to overcome. It is my fault for not doing better. And furthermore I think that because you have to work a little harder to dig up the history of the various towns you may visit it becomes all the more rewarding in the discovery. I never got to visit Sherbro Island or Plantain Island or fully trace the railroad up country. I would have liked to have hiked right into the border and the sources of the Niger river. Tiwai Island is my most glaring oversight and if I had only two more weeks or so I would have seen it. So many islands! And mountain peaks and valleys and forests. And even more broadly it would have been so great to see more of Sierra Leone’s neighbors and beyond in West Africa. But I suppose the world is so large and you could spend a lifetime studying just your own corner. There’s still time to see more.

The biggest joy in any act of learning is seeing from then on the connections to all the other things you come across. Sierra Leone has such a close connection to much of the history of the American southeast. We saw those connections before without understanding them, but now we are connected in a way we weren’t. Since our departure from Sierra Leone I’ve already gotten to see an explanation of Bunce Island at a National Park and now that is a personal connection for us. These understandings will only unfold and expand as time goes on.

Looking through some of the photos I don’t think I otherwise ever uploaded, Sierra Leone is a country of beautiful places and friendly people working hard to get by. And of cool-looking bugs, photos of which I liked to send to my one friend. Like all places I suppose its history has been shaped by the people coming to it, inland from the Sahara and forests and from the sea to its shores and up its rivers. Those people have sought their fortune by taking Sierra Leone’s resources in both soil or people. Others have come to Sierra Leone seeking freedom or just their place in the world and found it via hard work and toil. Sierra Leone has in turn shaped the world by the people coming from it, spreading those connections in ways hard to see until you’ve been there. It has long been on the map, with visits by the Queen and a place in pop culture, even if it takes a long time for people’s more dire perceptions to catch up to the modern day. Research and publications to that effect continue. And like all countries, it has more work to do to make the material conditions of many people’s lives better but that is a pursuit we can all help with through judicious acts of interest and learning. Until next time, Sierra Leone.

One of the very last spots I went to while we were in Sierra Leone was the Peace Museum.

I think the primacy of this connection is fading, but I would guess that if someone knew one thing about Sierra Leone, it would be that there was a civil war. The civil war ended in 2002 and in its wake the government of Sierra Leone asked the UN for help in setting up the Special Court for Sierra Leone. The Special Court was replaced in 2013 by the Residual Special Court for Sierra Leone. The Peace Museum is associated with the Residual Special Court and housed on its grounds (there is also downtown the “Sierra Leone Peace and Cultural Monument” which is related but different; the Peace Museum is here).

I visited on a weekday morning. I took a few pictures before seeing a sign asking one not to though I think the photo at the top is okay. If you won’t be able to go to Sierra Leone soon there is a virtual tour on the Residual Court’s website as well. When I first arrived I was alone but eventually a person running the place realized I was there and began to take me on a tour.

I learned a lot. When we first moved to Sierra Leone I sort of avoided learning about the war. I didn’t actively avoid it, but focused instead on other parts of history. Colonial-era history is more my specialty anyway but this was also my way of avoiding stereotyping Sierra Leone as merely a place where a civil war happened. If you look up Sierra Leone it seems as though all the recent scholarship is about the war. There is also of course Blood Diamond. But it is a wide and beautiful place where more happens than a war.

I was especially interested in the efforts towards justice. Besides the court there was also the Truth and Reconciliation commission, documenting what the people went through. During the tour we saw the archives which are well cared for and I believe in the process of being digitized. Much of the museum focuses on these efforts along with those of the Special Court, since the museum is on the premises. The bulk of the tour was about the function of the Court and its workings. The most surprising thing I learned is that the Special Court “only” ever indicted 13 people for war crimes and convicted 9 (of the other four, three died before their conviction and one was or still is a fugitive). The Court focused only on “those who bear the greatest responsibility” for the war, which is why they focused on so few. But still I was stunned that all the work of the court, and all the pains of the war, and yet it took only these few convictions for justice to be served. That is a result I am still considering.

For what else the museum comprises of, the largest physical collection (besides the archives) were a lot of samples of the “juju” (as it was labelled) that the fighters thought would protect them. These are all carefully catalogued and on display, some with more explanation than others. Some you can see on the virtual tour. These were interesting to see for all the influences they contain, and illuminating as to one way that people can come to do the things they do in war. There was also a room dedicated to mass graves, which thankfully only had pictures of the memorials, and another room about the Mongolian contingent of the peacekeeping force who had guarded the court facility. Furthermore on the walls are the testimonies of the victims of the war, with what they went through and how they are surviving now.

And after about an hour the tour was over and I departed the museum. Achieving a sense of justice after such a cataclysmic event is hard. In Sierra Leone it seems, as far as I could tell, to have been successful. The scars of war are still evident but where Sierra Leone could rebuild they have rebuilt and where they couldn’t they have remembered. I suppose the evidence of the Special Court is that it isn’t the number of convictions which make for justice but the care with which those convictions were reached and the opportunity for people to be heard.

Reading this week:

• Steve Martin Writes the Written Word by Steve Martin

As promised, here I am writing about the book Vistas of the Heritage of Sierra Leone. It is surprisingly hard to get one’s hands on and it was a veritable obsession of mine for a while. Being hard to get one’s hands on is not a universal trait of Sierra Leonean books, for example I found a copy of the (I think) relatively obscure Sierra Leonean Heroes: Fifty Great Men and Women Who Helped Build Our Nation for sale as soon as I looked for it. Though for Vistas large chunks of it are actually not that hard to get your hands on. For example there are many pages on SierraLeoneHeritage.com have excerpts from Vistas, like here’s the page for Old City Boundary Guns. That website is where I first found out about the book, but the taste of the excerpted morsels just left me hungry for more.

There are places I wish I looked more carefully but just never got around to, like the Sierra Leone Library Board. I have been led to believe that they should have a copy, but I only managed to get there once as they were about to close and I just never made it back. At one point I paid a guy on Craigslist $20 to go to the University of Indiana library and scan their copy of the book for me, which worked pretty great except he didn’t get all the pages leaving me thoroughly unsatisfied. Google Books refused to help. Where did I eventually find it? That’s right, the good ole’ Library of Congress. Which, you know, is sad, the lengths I had to go to find the book while I was sitting in the country where it was written and which it is about.

But why were those lengths worth going? Because it is a pretty remarkable book. First off, its really the only convenient source of information for a lot of the sites therein described (that’s why Sierra Leone Heritage is running around excerpting it). You just wish they described more of them. Many of the sites are the national monuments of Sierra Leone, though the book has more than just the monuments, and there are several monuments that aren’t in the book.

For the second off, it is a very particular snapshot. The book was written in 2002 as Sierra Leone was coming out of the civil war. Some of the buildings described in the book as burned-out husks are back in business today, though likewise some of the sites show their age even more than then. The book was written to preserve the history of these sites and to preserve the sites themselves, both as a textual exercise and in reality by promoting them as places to go and places worthy of the effort of conservation. Also worthy is to ponder though how much the list reflects the list of sites that were declared monuments in 1948 under a colonial regime, and then enshrined in a book written in the wake of an even bloodier struggle. A new edition would surely be a good thing in this day and age; there is so much more history to write about.

This is another post where I ponder some historical mysteries of Sierra Leone. Mysteries to me, anyway, I am sure someone out there could figure this all out immediately.

There are two sort of related things in this post. The first is the piece of artillery pictured right above. I noticed it pretty quickly in our time in Sierra Leone, as it is located right out front of the Freetown city offices. That also puts it out right in front of the The View restaurant, which is what we were visiting, so maybe you can get lunch while you’re checking it out. Unfortunately the gun does not come with an explanatory plaque, at least as far I saw, which leaves us with a bit of a mystery of why and how it wound up in the middle of the street and cared for enough at least to be painted.

Thanks to Reddit we can identify the gun as a British mid-1800’s Armstrong RML gun. That initial identification surprised me as I had guessed was that it would have been brought to Freetown during World War I, but Christopher Fyfe in A History of Sierra Leone reminds us that Sierra Leone was the United Kingdom’s only non-foreign coaling station on the Atlantic coast until South Africa, and worth protecting in case the French ever decided to capture it. I wasn’t able to ever measure the muzzle diameter of the gun directly (it would have been weird for me to be standing in the middle of the street with a tape measure), but based on the carriage looking exactly like the carriage for this gun, I am inclined to think that it is specifically a RML 10-inch 18-ton gun. Wikipedia tells us that the guns were in service from 1868-1904? [sic] (note it isn’t listed on Wikipedia’s list of surviving examples, so we may have made a discovery here).

The other mystery I wanted to solve was the origin of some gun emplacements at Fourah Bay College. These are here. These too I spotted early in our time and they too remained somewhat mysterious. I say only “somewhat” because I knew early on that the location of Fourah Bay College on top of Mount Aureal was originally a military barracks and/or military hospital. It is definitely a great location for defensive artillery, with a commanding view over the harbor.

Despite the clear connection between the base on Mount Aureol and the gun emplacements, I wanted more detail though, like when they were built, and for what threat, and if the gun downtown was related. Some more clues came from Vistas of the Heritage of Sierra Leone (published in 2002, and I will write more about it, probably in the next post):

Again, until recently, the topography of Mount Aureol had physical evidence of a strong military presence, which was inaugurated in 1879 when the War Office acquired the property. Before the Colonial military forces left Mount Aureol in 1945, making way for students of Fourah Bay College returning to Freetown from Mabang, to which place they had been evacuated during World War II, to occupy this beautiful location, it had variously been a rifle range, a sanatorium, a garrison for soldiers with a gun emplacement at a strategic spot, below which an underground passage wended its way into the city, some say, right under State House. The Nissen Huts, where, as students at Fourah Bay College in the 1960s, we had our first residence, have disappeared. In their places were erected modern blocs for students’ hostels, science laboratories, functional buildings like the Administrative building, and the 9 storied “sky scraper,” the Kennedy building, easily the tallest building in Sierra Leone, constructed with money received from the United States of America during the Presidency of John F. Kennedy.

At the risk of pulling a Herodotus, that bit about the underground I can’t really believe. That would be a remarkable engineering feat, and I’m not sure of the tactical necessity. However, once I finally managed to actually take some pictures of the emplacements, I can see why you would think that maybe they led to a tunnel:

This expedition at least cleared up when exactly the emplacements were built: 1903. That plaque says specifically “E.H. 1903,” and what the E.H. could stand for I have no clue, though I am sure specialists will know immediately.

Going back to Fyfe, it turns out that in 1879 the British authorities were looking at how to beef up Freetown’s defensives, which included replacing the unusable guns at Falconbridge battery, which at that point was Freetown’s main defensive work. Those replacements happened apparently in 1884, which I think clears up the mystery of the gun downtown. That year is squarely in the middle of the RML 10-inch 18-ton gun years of operation, and Falconbridge battery is only 1000 feet from the gun’s current location. You can see on this map (page with other maps here) that Falconbridge point was the eastern edge of downtown Freetown. So I bet that the gun downtown originally came from Falconbridge battery and was moved to its current location at some point as a monument, maybe the next time the defenses needed beefing up I assume during WWI. This does open up a whole new mystery I won’t be able to solve, namely that this is the first time I have read about Falconbridge battery. I wonder if anything is left? I can’t find a picture of what it would have looked like, but I wonder if there are old plans somewhere in the British archives.

Back to the Mount Aureol gun emplacements. No definitive answers there, beyond our 1903 date, but what I would hazard to guess is that they were put up as part of the British solidifying their control over the Protectorate of Sierra Leone. Although Freetown had been a colony for a century, the British only laid firm claim to the hinterlands in 1896, extending a protectorate and a tax that broke out into the Hut Tax War of 1898. The British used their military might to crush the rebellion, and then their industrial might to extend control. They built Hill Station starting in 1902, and the railway reached Rotifunk in 1900 before making it to Liberia in 1908. I would hazard a guess that improvements to the military defenses of Freetown were wrapped up in that project of cementing imperial control, and included the building of new and improved gun emplacements.

In conclusion, we started off this post with two mysteries: where the gun downtown came from, and where the gun emplacements on Mount Aureol came from. And at the end of this blog post, I think we are left with something like three mysteries: what did Falconbridge battery look like (and relatedly, what did the other defenses of Freetown look like), was there a previous version of the Mount Aureol battery before the 1903 version was built, and what guns were used at the Mount Aureol battery (and when)? And maybe: did the underground tunnel from the Mount Aureol battery ever actually exist? Perhaps someone out there will know.

Our adventure to and from Kenema continues from last week…

The next morning I woke up early mostly to get back home, but while I was out and about early I cruised around the streets of Kenema devoid of most of the crowds. The most surprising thing I saw was a no joke blacksmith shop, annoyingly just past where I had walked the previous day. Annoying because taking a picture would have been more plausible on foot, but I saw that man standing there pounding on his anvil, phenomenal. After that I cruised on by Kenema’s most notable tourist attraction, the Palm Tree Park, and then through the outskirts of town and broad rice fields spilling out from either side of the road.

Having completed my early-morning tour, I left Kenema where the next stop was Bo so I could take a picture of that clocktower as well. Among the other sights I wrote down to mention were toilets cast of concrete instead of porcelain, and more strikingly a woman walking back from her bath at the stream, wrapped in a lappa as though she was returning from an onsen.

The next stop was a surprise. I had spotted an older bridge from the newer one passing by Taiama, and decided to see what was on the other side. I was very surprised to find a historical marker! It was right on the side of the road, but low down, and hopping out of the car to take a look it read “On this rock the American Missionaries Rev. L.A. McGrew & His Wife Clara McGrew were massacred May 9, 1898.” There are not, on the whole, a lot of historical markers in Sierra Leone, and this one didn’t really give an indication of who put it up. As I was standing there a nice man came up to discuss it, and told me that the rock where the missionaries had been killed was actually a different one he pointed at down the hill and slightly upstream.

Later investigation (just today) has provided more detail than the plaque did. This is mostly from Mission Work in Sierra Leone, West Africa by the Rev. J.S. Mills, but Rev. Lowery Allen McGrew and his wife Clara B. (née McCoy) landed in Sierra Leone in 1896. They were sent by the Woman’s Missionary Board, which as far as I can tell was a Methodist missionary organization. Both Lowery and Clara were from Ohio. They wound up settling in Taiama, which seems to have been a bit of an outpost from their organization’s main station at Rotifunk. Trouble came in 1898 during the Hut Tax War. The rebels against the recent British colonial imposition killed the McGrews along with most of the other missionaries in the Sierra Leone Protectorate, the local evangelists, and their followers. A few more details are here and here.

But I didn’t know that yet. Having taken some photos of the monument I head back to the car and kept on going back to Freetown. Knowing it was my last trip I tried to take as many pictures of the landscape as I felt reasonably appropriate. I am just such a sucker for a rice field, which is why I have mentioned it three times now, but there were also some entertaining signs, and the local traffic was always a hoot. Over glade and dale, through palm tree and elephant grass, across rivers and up hills eventually brought me back on home to Freetown. In the end driving to Kenema and back was a great weekend trip, for me, though do consult your guidebook before heading out to figure out where the waterfall hike starts.