By Sallieu T. Kamara
Jesus Christ once told the Pharisees and Sadducees in Nazareth that prophets were honoured everywhere, except in their own country. This could be an apt description of how successive administrations in Sierra Leone have failed to honour someone many around the world view as the greatest man to have come out of the country. Born in 1840 at Rogballan in what is today known as Kasseh in the Bureh Kasseh Makonteh chiefdom in Port Loko district, Bai Bureh waged a war against the British in 1898 for instituting a hut tax in Sierra Leone and throughout British-controlled Africa. His action was driven by his Pan-Africanist conviction that Sierra Leoneans or Africans generally should not and must not pay taxes to foreigners. In fact, he wanted all British to pack out of the country immediately and allow Sierra Leoneans to solve their own problems. He fought doggedly and cultivated a folk hero status locally and globally. He is so far, arguably, the most read about Sierra Leonean. I am neither a historian nor a student of history, but I consider the heroic exploits of Bai Bureh to be at par with some of Africa’s most progressive thinkers and revolutionaries such as Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King, Kwame Nkrumah, Sekou Toure, Julius Nyerere, Patrice Lumumba, Nelson Mandela and many others. But if there is any hero who has not been honoured deservedly enough by his own people, it has to be Bai Bureh. I know there are people inside and outside the country that may contest this assertion. They may argue that there is a popular street in Freetown and a district football team named after him and that even one of our banknotes (Le 1,000) bears his photo. This is Fine. But is it enough for someone who, through great bravery and strenuous personal accomplishments, made Sierra Leone to be known throughout the world, even in those dark days? Today, I am sure Sierra Leoneans are proud for having their own Bai Bureh as one of the great people that helped to shape the history of Africa in particular, and the black race in general. The former president of Ghana, John Kuffour, whilst still in office expressed the need for developing the birth places of past presidents and other important people that had contributed immensely to making Ghana the nation it is. One of the reasons he proffered was that by developing the hometowns of past presidents and other great national heroes, tourists would be attracted to them and the histories of these people and their birth places would be in the public domain. The truth of this cannot be overemphasized. The hero of the apartheid struggle in South Africa, Nelson Mandela, spent 27 years on Robben Island as a political prisoner. Even though he is still alive, the island is today a highly attractive destination for tourists and even historians from all over the world. We all know what this means for the economy of South Africa. Also, students from different schools across the country and from all levels make regular study visits. All of this is made possible by the fact that the government of South Africa put the appropriate infrastructure in place for visitors to feel safe and to move about without let or hindrance. In Italy, the Colosseum in Rome, a place where the Romans used to go to and watch the gladiators and animals fight to death, has today become a centre of attraction for tourists from across the world. They are not only making big money from this, it also enables them to bring their rich history and culture closer to the peoples of the world. Just two days ago, the Municipality of Rome made the vicinity of the Colosseum a vehicle-free zone. But not so with Bai Bureh’s birth place of Rogballan. I recently visited Kasseh, about 15 miles from Port Loko, and what I saw was tragically pathetic. The road leading to Bai Bureh’s home town is awful and horrendous. The town itself is lacking in basic facilities. Survival is a serious challenge for the people. It is astoundingly surprising how the people have been coping in the face of such severe impoverishment. The only school that caters for the high population of children in the township and its environs is a death trap, to say the least. Such is how badly rickety the school building looks that I had to advise the village elders not to allow their children to sit in it to avoid a potential disaster. The residents were equally perturbed. They told me of how they had become fed up with and tired of the numerous unfulfilled promises politicians and other visitors to their community had been making. Several years ago, when the Port Loko district football team was named after Bai Bureh Warriors, officials and fans headed by their then team manager Bai Marrow Sesay, visited Bai Bureh’s tomb and performed traditional rites there for his “approval and support” to the team. The resultant effect of this was felt throughout the length and breadth of Sierra Leone. The low and the mighty in Sierra Leone football including East End Lions and Mighty Blackpool, all fell prey to Bai Bureh Warriors FC. Other important people had also paid homage and obeisance to the tomb site to seek mystical and political powers, and a good number of them are today in positions of authority in the country. Even the RUF leader, Corporal Foday Sankoh, was very desperate to get to Bai Bureh’s grave at the height of the war. But, thank goodness, he never did. There is nothing wrong in people visiting Kasseh to see and learn more about Bai Bureh from oral history, or to seek mystical and political powers. But there is everything wrong for the government and other bodies that know the real importance of this place to continue to place it on the margins of national development. What have all of these visits and the mouth-watering promises amounted to? Nothing! So the wheels of sufferings of the people of Kasseh continue to spin hopelessly. Perhaps, what caused me a throbbing headache was the failure of the authorities to give respect and dignity to the burial site of Bai Bureh and some of his war time heroes. One would have expected to see a cleaner environment with a well designed tomb on which real facts about those buried there were engraved, as well as well-equipped public structures named after him. Apart from the graves, there are other important monumental sites that can be of interest to visitors from within the country and from abroad. There is the rock with the imprint of the soles of Bai Bureh’s feet. There is a myth surrounding this imprint, and they all make very interesting stories to hear. Can you imagine how much Sierra Leone could have derived from these communities alone in terms of bolstering the economy and tourism? With proper management and some amount of investments, these monumental sites can be turned into national assets. But no! In fact, there is a serious threat to the continuing existence of these very important historical sites. Already, the Sierra Leone Agriculture, which acquired a massive plot of land for which they paid far less than the US$ 12 (twelve) per hectare per year as established by the Ministry of Agriculture, have embarked on large-scale oil palm plantation that could soon render these sites extinct. They have planted the first set of oil palm and are now moving ever closer to the sacred sites. And the affected communities are clueless as to where the operations of this not know where they will stop. This suggests that the people have little or no knowledge about how the company acquired their property. If these sites are destroyed as a result of the operations of the company and our neglect to preserve them, then we would have succeeded in forcefully moving people out of their traditional and ancestral homes. And when this happens, a very important chapter in the history of Sierra Leone would have been completely wiped out. It is also important to note that these are predominantly farming communities, and by taking away their land from them, they are simply being their only means of livelihood, thereby exacerbating their plight. This is not unique to Kasseh. It is happening elsewhere. It only shows that Sierra Leone has a culture of neglecting their past heroes. Bai Bureh stoutly resisted the imposition of foreign rule in Sierra Leone by declaring war against the British when they introduced the hut tax. Today, his children in Kasseh do not only face a gloomy future, but also stand the threat of being thrown away from their ancestral homes to make way for foreign investors to take over the land. What an irony! If Bai Bureh were alive today…
