The Mixed Blessings Of Freetown
Titus Boye-Thompson,
London
On picking up the collection of stories intending to usher in “Freetown Echoes: Takes from Along the Odokoko,” the first thing that you notice is how flowery and conspicuously poetic the writer’s style comes across. This is not strange to those who know that the writer of this compendium is indeed a poet with prior published works of poetry under his belt. Having said this, the subject matter that the stories tackle are not soft prose at all. The writer goes to his childhood to draw from memories of growing up in a part of Freetown that he has come to eulogize so often and so well. To the innocent bystander, Freetown Echoes is easily a recollection of halcyon days, a childhood spent in innocence and recollections of an integrated community where religion or social status were less important than the sense of belonging and an imbibed identity that anchors its relationship to a shrinking waterway – the Odokoko “river!”.
In “The Night The Star Fell,” the author moved easily from describing preparation for “a degradation of Judas,” a memorable enactment of teenage flagellation to unleash the sufferings of Christ on his betrayer, Judas, to the Friday Jummah prayers at his local mosque, and in this, with an ease of transformation between the two religious contexts, one is exposed to the mutuality of existence and tolerance that the author enjoyed growing up in such a fused neighbourhood melting pot along the Odokoko.
In this recollections, Koroma moves with such dexterity between the celebrations of the rites of passage for any youth of the day who would have been expected to sail within these two religious environments. He was able to evoke the sense of how the fusion of such inter-operable engagements has been one of the most potent reasons for Freetown’s cultural understanding and acceptance of its diversity, multi-culture, religious and social acceptability. Freetown has been a melting pot of such experiences to the extent that this is aptly described by Koroma in the recollections throughout his tome. This tends to confirm the credibility of his experiences as a youth moulded from these environments.
It is interesting how many Sierra Leoneans fail to grasp the multiplicity of Freetown and how that part of the country has evolved. Having come from the notion of “out of many, one nation” understanding Freetown’s mixed blessings requires an understanding of how the people of Freetown have lived over the years.
Historians have observed that Freetown became a metropolis by accident because the descendants of the freed slaves who built that city had always harboured a hope that it would have become a home for themselves, not a city to be shared. Their own disparate origins became a model for accepting diversity as a way of life. Mutualism and the acceptance of other peoples and cultures was a defence mechanism, because it created the opportunity for the people to become safe in the growing numbers. The fact that all cultures seem to become assimilated to the Krio language made things easier for the integration of each newcomer community, to the extent that Freetown took on its own identity, built out of the disparateness of its diverse populations, but strengthened by the wholesome respect for the Creoles as a people and for the lingua franca of Krio as the means of communication. Koroma has shown that he is indeed a product of this melting pot!
