By Lans Gberie
A number of accomplished Sierra Leoneans have emerged out of the generation that graduated from university or came of age in the immediate postwar period, as public figures, politicians, academics and writers. They have generally been more attracted to politics than the previous generation, perhaps because of the sense of immediacy of public affairs that was forced upon the national consciousness that the war triggered, but also because the political space was opened after the 1996 elections that ended military rule (which had terminated a one-party state) and ushered in plural democracy. Of this generation, Emmanuel Saffa Abdulai seems to me to be the most interesting and admirable, perhaps because, despite his deep interest in public affairs, he has shown himself to be the least politically ambitious.
Dr. Abdulai’s career has been, to use a charming bureaucratic term, multidimensional: lawyer, anti-corruption activist, publisher, newspaperman, and legal scholar. He is also, famously, a football enthusiast.
With the publication of A Global Village Boy (2024), he has now ventured into fiction.
This book comes after two scholarly studies, Freedom of Information Law and Good Governance: The Curse of Corruption in Sierra Leone (2021) and Electoral Politics, Laws and Ethnicity in Africa (2023), both of them issued by Palgrave. Placed against these two books, which grew out of Abdulai’s core anxieties, A Global Village Boy does not fare very well. But it is a very interesting read; and, because it appears to be a thinly veiled autobiography, of interest beyond its literary merit.
And it certainly does not lack literary merit. The story begins on the narrator’s seventh birthday in his village. Hindolo seems happy in his village; the novel describes him as a “happy-go-lucky youngster”. His mother had died immediately after giving birth to him; and as the only son of his father, he is adored and even spoilt. All this comes to an abrupt end on this birthday: what began as celebration ended as profound grief: the father dies. It is a wrenching beginning to a novel about a growing up, justified perhaps by verisimilitude: it seems to match the details of the author’s life.
This unhappy event ended Hindolo’s life in the village. He is taken to Freetown by his aunt, and it is a horror story almost right from their arrival there. The word ‘wicked’ is inadequate to describe the aunt: depriving Hindolo of food and a decent place to sleep, Hindolo becomes, as novel puts it, “a pauper surviving on the scraps and crumbs left for him.” The sense of deprivation is made more acute by the knowledge that Hindolo’s father had left a substantial amount of money for him: the money is taken over by the aunt on the pretext that it would be used for Hindolo’s upkeep and education. Instead, she uses it for everything but.
Bright, determined, Hindolo continues school, surviving by apprenticing himself to a cobbler. He gets himself into university, which could have been a place that would have provided him with some respite and happiness. But it is part of his bad luck that Hindolo becomes a victim of bullying by richer, better prepared students. And then the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) began its war. The narrative then becomes a historical account, with names like Foday Sankoh and Valentine Strasser and Johnny Paul Koroma all appearing. But it is here also that the autobiographical impression shades into pure fiction, which is artistically correct: Sankoh started his war in 1991, at which point the author surely must have been in primary or secondary school, certainly too young to have been in university. The narrator learns at university that his beloved village had been destroyed by the RUF, who killed most of its inhabitants. Then the rebels get to Freetown – in reality, this happened six years after the war started, at which point Hindolo would surely have finished university. But the novel gives the impression he is still there, and the description of the depredations caused by the rebels have a sense of immediacy. Hindolo, despite his apparent vulnerabilities, seems to be a brave and determined young man. During the RUF’s ravages in Freetown, Hindolo offers himself as a spy for the soldiers defending the capital against the rebels – and offers valuable information to them.
Hindolo’s emergence as an energetic, globetrotting lawyer and activist is a truly inspirational story: it is an improbable story of determination and sheer grit. But it is hard at this point not to cavil about the title: Hindolo might be described as global, but he surely is no longer a village boy.
The book from this point matches, for those of us who came to know the author only as an admirable legal practitioner, scholar, publisher and activist, his biography: the geographical and historical contexts are recognizable and largely accurately reflected; and the views expressed by the narrator – the anxieties about social justice, human rights, and good governance – are certainly the author’s. The book’s persistence as fiction therefore leads to some tensions and even errors. L The wonderfully kind teacher Hindolo meets at school is, when first encountered on page 36, Miss Jasmine; but she then becomes, on page 46, Miss Viola.
Hindolo’s first foreign trip, he says, is South Africa (page 83), but the description rendered of the place – including “the peaks of the Andes” – suggests that he meant to say South America. Hindolo does not state why the hell he goes off to Colombia, but then complains of being arrested on suspicion that he works for the CIA. His ordeal is described to elicit sympathy, but the mysterious circumstance of this trip suggests that the Colombian authorities acted upon reasonable suspicion.
But perhaps this is carping: the fault is mainly that of the editor and publisher.
A Global Village Boy is the best account to date of the success the war generation has made out of the opportunities that opened up during the immediate postwar period in Sierra Leone, an era of unprecedented global interest and support for the country. It is a very valuable addition to our literature.
