By Lans Gberie
My friend Kalilu Totangi recently drew my attention to a frantic post by Sylvia Blyden reporting the arrest of five people supposedly in the process of kidnapping, for the purpose of ritual murder, someone somewhere near Freetown. Of course it was nothing of the sort: it turned out that the five had been arrested in connection to a fairly routine traffic issue which quickly metastasised into a lurid political tale evoking an old blood libel. The reason: one of those in the car was a newly-elected opposition councillor in Freetown.
Totangie writes: “The concocted story 'attempts' by SLPP people to 'kidnap' a 36-year-old man for ritual murder brings to mind those sad days in history when Siaka Stevens was beginning to build his kleptocracy. We were told that he would kill animals and bloody whole neighbourhoods under cover of dark, and get some other surrogates to be yelling that they were taking them away. In the mornings, his propagandists will go on the rampage telling the gullible people of Freetown that SLPP was practicing cannibalism. To a point, we are told, the people of Freetown did believe some of that nonsense and held on to it.”
The roguish Stevens, indeed, used this strategy to some effect during elections in the late 1960s and early 1970s. And the people who took it all to heart were his own supporters, as the trial of APC strongman Alimamy Khazali and three others in 1973 showed. Khazali had been Minister of Information under Stevens, replacing the more famous Ibrahim Bash Taqi (who was the principal purveyor of Stevens’ nasty propaganda about opposition ritual killings).
Taqi had met a sad but predictable fate – he was accused, probably falsely, of treason, and was hanged by Stevens. Predictable in a Machiavellian sense, of course: the great master of power politics wrote that anyone who is responsible for making another powerful has ruined himself, “for that power is produced by him either through craft/cunning or force, and both of these are suspected by the one who has been raised to power.”
So there was something already portentous around Khazali once he occupied Taqi’s former office. Perhaps it was Taqi’s ghost, but in November 1973, Khazali was arrested along with three others and arraigned in Freetown High Court on a two–count indictment charging them with “Dealing in person, to wit, the sale of one Marie Dumbuya, contrary to section 7(1) of the Provinces Act (Cap 60), and (2) Murder of the said Marie Dumbuya” for the purpose of ritual sacrifice. The case was chilling even in the very sedate legal language of the court: Khazali and the others had “entered into an agreement with one Sunday Kargbo to sell his (Kargbo’s) wife” to [Khazali]. “Subsequently Sunday Kargbo took his wife to a village, where she and her child were murdered…while her husband and Khazali stood by.”
Kahazali and two others, including the depraved husband, were unanimously found guilty of the crime of kidnapping and dealing in a human being, for which they were sentenced to five years in prison. Justice Okoro Idogu then sentenced all four for the capital offence of murder and sentenced each to death by a firing squad. All of them appealed the case, but it was a doomed effort.
The appeal proceedings went on until 1974, but the judge’s decision merely confirmed the verdicts but with a delicious caveat: it was illegal to execute the ritual murderers by firing squad, the appeal court judges wrote, since “The provisions… of Section 1 of the Criminal Procedure (Amendment) (No 3) Act 1973 relating to the execution of sentence of death by shooting in a public place by a firing squad, which only came into force on first November 1973, do not apply, since the offence for which the three appellants have been convicted was committed on 14th April 1972.”
Accordingly, “we vary the mode of the execution of sentence of death passed on each of the first, second and third appellants to the extent that each shall be hanged by the neck until he is dead.” Since Stevens wanted this outcome, Khazali and the others were promptly hanged, yes, by the neck till…
Splitting hairs: no, as the case showed, the method was as important as the madness. So dear Kalilu, in so many political instances in Sierra Leone, the Vice often comes way after the Versa…
