Contestants of the pageant for the disabled
By Umaru Fofana
It was a beauty pageant. Even if it lacked pageantry. It had fun and frolic. Albeit no glitz, no glamour. There were sparks. But chandeliers there were none to brighten the stage. Its carpets were not red. But the atmosphere was anything but grey.
Smiles from jaw to jaw as those paralysed waist down rode their wheelchairs from wall to wall. Animated! Usually exasperated because of society's attitude towards them, they were exhilarated on the night. So much so that some of them would lift the two front wheels of their wheelchairs as they kicked in the air and rode on the back wheels. The clattering sounds of crutches and prosthetics were in no short supply either. As some of them knocked their artificial arms and limbs together to celebrate the arrival on stage of the contestants.
Among the contestants were cripples and blind people. There were also albinos and people who had speech or mental impairment. Sierra Leone's estimated 900,000 handicapped or disabled community - according to the President of the Sierra Leone Union on Disability Issues, Kabbah Franklyn Bangura - had something to smile about, if only for one night. This was a beauty contest for persons living with disabilities. So dozens of wheelchairs, crutches and walking sticks filled the Atlantic Hall of Sierra Leone's National Stadium.
The usually hungry and abandoned and marginalised people were well fed on the night. Le 10,000 (US$ 2) was the entrance fee for non-disabled persons. Those whose night it was were allowed free entrance. Effectively it was free for all as very sumptuous meal of chicken and snacks was served, with a Coke to wash it down. This is a life usually dreamed of by people living with disabilities in Sierra Leone. Their numbers have soared in the recent past thanks to a weak health care delivery system that meant some children suffered poliomyelitis, paralysing them waist down. A rebel war brutal by its barbarity and infamous by its savagery that left arms and limbs hacked off. And the fact the country has only one psychiatrist which has worsened the state of mental health.
It is common to see disabled people begging on the streets of Freetown in their wheelchairs, on crotches, with prosthetics and walking sticks or guides. Some of the guides are their children or other relatives of school-going age which confines them to perpetual illiteracy. In a country where the uneducated amount to around 70% of the population this effectively means killing a dead man.
The women disabled beggars do so from their wheelchairs with their babies on their lap in sometimes 30-degree heat or heavy downpour - from morn till eve. They breastfeed them in the open. The babies defecate on the begging streets and they are not well cleaned up. A few splashes of water and a seldom change of old cloth - not diapers - would suffice. You want to see babies being raised rough?
This is a situation not lost in Mayeni Sesay aka Malisha Da Queen. The London- based showbiz organiser spent her personal resources to organise this pageant, the first in the history of the country perhaps in the entire West Africa sub-region. "The disabled in Sierra Leone have been relegated to the backburner" she tells me. "This is why I want to give them a life which society has denied them".
That may be a long way away and perhaps a pipe dream but it has been a very good start. Margaret Jones, the albino who would later be crowned Queen on the night, looked beautiful and proud of herself. And bold and articulate too. "We are here to show that we can also do it" she had said as she introduced herself at the start of the pageant.
Back home at night tired. Reality sets in again for Sierra Leone's disabled. The pageant is over, and it will take a very long time before they hobnob again with their more illustrious colleagues in positions of trust. They include the country's first blind deputy minister of social welfare, gender and children's affairs, Mustapha Bai Atilla and the head of the Disabilities Commission, Frederick Kamara, a retired civil servant in the ministry of social welfare who is also blind.
Many of the pageant contestants and disabled attendants hardly have a fixed abode. Hundreds of disabled men and women and their children are crammed in either unfinished or abandoned houses in Freetown or sleep on the city's streets. Some of them come all the way from Rogbangba - some 18 kilometres from Freetown. They sleep in mud houses literally built by them through standing on their crutches or wheelchairs and splattering the mounds of mud to hold. When it rains, they sleep almost in the open. To say they are healthy would be akin to finding an Arctic explorer who has never had a frostbite?
Smouldering heat suffocates them when it is in the dry season. Leaky shelters when the rains are here means cold and pneumonia. 12 months in a year it is hell or purgatory for them. Food and toilets are a luxury. Education is a privilege. Clothing is a symbol of gentry. Without such basic things as education, shelter, food, clothing, recreation it is safe to say that the rights of the disabled are being violated in Sierra Leone without consequence. Forgotten for years, cosmetically thought of only during the quinquennial electoral cycle. All simply for votes. Because they are mostly uneducated, they cannot hold the leaders to account. And the broader society has let them down.
As the contestants took their catwalk all of that agony was forgotten. Well dressed in fashion clothes provided by Malisha Da Queen. But all the clothes and food would soon disappear. And they would be left to themselves to fend for themselves. At the end of the show, Mabinty, paralysed waist down, looked at me and wiped her face, apparently with some paper tissues she had been served with the chicken meal. They sucked in all the beads of sweat, but also some icicles of tears. She was distraught. "Why doesn't anyone care about us?" she asked rhetorically in a local language. Then she broke down more tearily after some sobs. A few colleagues came around her and wiped her back as a sign of consolation.
They all wheeled away to wild the night away. Fed, happy, and hopeful that one day their lot will improve and disabilities will no longer mean inability, and stigmatisation of them will be a thing of the past. For that night at least their disability went away albeit just for that one night. A beauty pageant to exhibit their beauty is surely one such way to wipe away stigma. But more needs to be done to address their situation and wipe away their tears. Forever.
(C) Politico 06/05/14
