In the past two weeks a cultural music video titled Adorable Sierra Leone has gone viral. Although the TV stations might not have been bothered with it, it actually is top of the chat…
well may be street chart especially Garrison Street. I have noticed that in Sierra Leone when life gets very tough, many people fall back on the past and get some solace that it had not always been tough anyway.Why the adorable Sierra Leone needs viewing is because of its very deep socio-political and economic messages; the first one which shows the Goboi and Nafali dancing laments on the deteriorating path that our country has taken. The music gives the image of a journey, saying others have gone ahead and we are trying to catch up with them. The singing Duo of Amie Kallon and Jerry B. get you lost in Mende parables and sayings that could have so many interpretations. She says corruption is the society for embezzlement. People are crying over there and crying over here. Amie says you cannot send a greedy man to be in charge of a rice barn. His gluttony will not allow sharing with others. Those having riches have hidden their riches.
Amie says you cannot send a greedy man to be in charge of a rice barn. His gluttony will not allow sharing with others. Those having riches have hidden their riches.
In the second song on the video the artiste dedicates his song to the struggles of Chief Sam Hingha Norman who was War Time Minister of Defense in The Kabbah Administration. He pleads that Sierra Leoneans to pray for Hingha Norman for the selfless contributions to the security of Sierra Leone. At the beginning of the song Hingha Norman is seeing saying that the term Sobels emanated from the fact that Soldiers turned themselves into rebels. We all know the strange circumstances in which Hingha Norman died. Many Sierra Leoneans smelt some kind of conspiracy. The music which I suspect was done by the young man at Moyamba Junction called Some Man Dem. He uses a jerry can and a tomato can to provide the instrumentals.
Not on this Video but a late and foremost folk singer in the Mende land, is the Great Salia Koroma. It is too clear that as a country we have for long got a lot of things wrong and indeed a lot of things have gone contrary with us that are still posing a lot of challenges. This is not really what is worrying me right now. I am worried about the heroes we have in that book with the title Sierra Leone heroes. What disturbs me is that almost 95 percent of the heroes there became heroes because they fought, vanquished others and occupied their lands. This heroic siege mentality is what beats me to nuts. The main reason is that the descendants of those heroes are today the paramount chiefs and land owners who virtually control that asset. If you do not know why I am saying all of these, then know that I met the Mende cultural legend good old Salia Koroma. Oh don’t get me wrong Pa Salia Koroma died some years back, may his should rest in Peace. You know I was browsing through a friends’ Facebook page and I was scrolling down one of their timeline and came across Pa Salia Koroma. I clicked and Salia Koroma started playing one of his legendary songs.
For those of you who do not know who Pa Salia Koroma was, I’ll put you in the picture. Pa Salia Koroma was perhaps the foremost Mende cultural/traditional folk singer who was born in 1903 by a father who himself was a singer also using the accordion. In the area of traditional folk songs since the colonial days, Salia Koroma can be put in the same class as Ebenezer Calendar and Bassey Kondi. People like these are the real heroes whose songs and messages created peaceful atmospheres through their entertainment and simplicity with which they lived their lives.
One thing I gathered from Salia Koroma is that our country has had a short time of peace and progress. He tells us there was famine in the year 1929. There was hunger for one year. There was no food, even bush yams got finished and people were eating the palm tree foliages even that got in short supply and it intoxicated people because what they ate was the part of the palm foliage that produced palm wine. So those who did not normally drink alcohol, it got them sick when they drank. Pa Salia Koroma revealed something very interesting things about that period. This famine was called Gendered. You know what? This name belongs to a very prominent Family in the Kenema District. The foremost ancestor of the Gendemeh’s was born around this time, so he was named after the famine that was at the time killing so many people. Well it is not strange in the Mende tradition to name children according to the circumstances in which they are born. You can ask women who are called Manjia. They definitely will tell you that the parents were quarrelling at the time of the mother’s pregnancy or birth that is if they cared to ask their parents.
Credited to Awoko
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