A Wedding

I just came back to Toronto from a wedding in Winnipeg. This was not just an ordinary wedding but the wedding of my son. And although we were under an embargo not to talk up the event, it is an injunction that parental pride easily overrides.

The weekend was fabulous, the ceremony itself taking place on Saturday the 19^th.

At this time of the year, Winnipeg is just emerging from winter into spring, although it must be said that the winter had not been a typically severe one. Nevertheless, the forecasters found it difficult to predict what the weather was going to be like on the day of the wedding. We had arrived at Winnipeg International Airport in the middle of a windstorm that rocked the plane in the air and on the ground, but the day after, Tuesday, was the beginning of a most pleasant week, weather-wise and in other ways. But as the week progressed, the forecast for Saturday, whilst initially promising, albeit with a wide range of possibilities, depending on which forecaster you listened to, became direr and direr, so that by the morning of the day itself, the barometer had hit the floor.

The day dawned, overcast and drizzly with temperatures around average, that is, not comfy. But we piled, or rather, elegantly stepped into a warm, plush bus and we were on our way to the Winnipeg Evangelical Free Church. There, in a small chapel, Steve and Carla, in the presence of family and friends from across Canada, the United States and the UK, were made man and wife. The last time I was so close to a wedding ceremony was over forty years ago, but the thrill and excitement were as fresh now as then.

The afterwards was also quite enjoyable consisting of a picture- and portrait-taking session among tropical fragrances in a conservatory at the Assiniboine Park, followed by a reception and feast at the banquet hall in the Inn at the Forks Hotel, located at the place where the Assiniboine and the Red Rivers meet. The events were nicely choreographed by the couple and excellently compered by the brother of the bride and an uncle of the groom’s. Toasts and responses, brief and witty, aided digestion in no small measure. Music was provided by a six-piece band, “The Peacemakers,” fronted by Idrissa Turay, a Sierra Leonean émigré living in Winnipeg.

On the day after, the sun returned to shine on two more celebratory events. The first was a brunch, at an appropriately named “Sun Room,” followed later in the evening by a cookout at the home of the bride’s mother.

And as the sun set, it gave a rare celestial celebration of its own, a glorious partial solar eclipse.

Tell Fren Tru

A Place Fit To Live In

There has been a strange quiet following the Special Court for Sierra Leone’s verdict on Charles Taylor. I am not sure why that should be. After all, the crimes for which he had been tried were part of a bundle of grotesque atrocities that shocked the world all through the nineties and the early noughties. Why this apparent lack of interest? Is it because the trial chamber’s written judgement of 46 pages is too long for a generation whose attention span has been tailored to a maximum of 140 characters? Or is there a lack of belief in the quality of the justice that is in the process of being handed down in a trial that lasted for more than 2000 days?

          It is unbelievable that Charles Gbankay Taylor had enough nous to make patriotic Sierra Leoneans do the things that they did to their own during those awful years. Indeed, the trial chamber admitted as much, when they declared that Taylor had had no “command or control” ability over the perpetrators. Instead, what the honourable justices had to resort to was the rather flimsy “aiding and abetting” in the eleven counts of the various crimes for which they declared him guilty.

          In truth, malevolent African “leaders,” a description that should be used advisedly, bent on doing harm to their country and people have no need of either aiders or abettors. They can do and have done evil enough by themselves, thank you very much. The list of perpetrators is a long one extending from the west coast, through the continent’s central regions, to the east, and then to the south and the north. They have killed millions. And many more millions have died as a result of privations they fashioned and still do. Hundreds of millions of others are impoverished physically and spiritually, made so by the corruption and incompetence that are the inevitable partners of brutish tendencies. 

          So, what are we to take away from the trial and verdicts? We should consider ourselves lucky that the blood diamond sideshow has been largely kept out of the narrative this time. Thank God for that. Aiding and abetting is not enough to absolve Sierra Leoneans who initiated and perpetrated the attempted destruction of our country. Taylor is now claiming that what he did was designed to promote peace and reconciliation in Sierra Leone. To be sure, we need salvation, but not along the lines of Taylor’s prescription.

There are still men in Sierra Leone who think along the lines of the RUF and who claim that the conditions that precipitated the war still exist. These men must be isolated in their intellectual and political ghetto. And confined to barracks. Then the rest of us can go about the business of making Salone a place fit to live in.

Tell Fren Tru

The Russians are coming

Many posts ago I wrote about the downsides of being an oil-exporting African country. I looked at the countries on the continent out of which “black gold” flows and at the consequences for citizens in those countries. Poor countries, poor people. They have very little, if anything, to show or jubilate about.  Their environment has been laid waste and their economic condition is worse than dire. Compare their circumstances to those of oil-rich countries elsewhere in other continents and you will see what I mean.

However, for the time being, the news from Sierra Leone concerning the black stuff continues to be optimistic and, like Pavlov’s dogs, we salivate at the coming abundance. But, even in the best of circumstances, there are numerous steps, technical and managerial, between the drilling of a well and the flow of petro-dollars into the coffers. A more worrying prospect, though, and one even more difficult to manage, is the appearance on the scene of many players now positioning themselves between the anticipated bonanza and its rightful recipients. New best friends are popping up all over the place. A few weeks ago, we saw President Koroma visiting one of the off-shore platforms, accompanied by no less than the British ambassador to Sierra Leone, inducing one to wonder why the president needed the navigating skills of another landlubber to guide him around his own coastal waters.

And now, the Russians are coming. Oil Company, Lukoil, if reports are to be believed, has set up shop in Freetown, with promises to invest $100 million in the country. I leave you to work out the arithmetics of such an outlay. And while you calculate, it would be well to remember also that it is rare to come across a Russian who doesn’t travel with baggage of one sort or another, some rational and appealing, and others, well…

The Russian Federation may well have disavowed some of the bad habits of its parent, the USSR, but the blood-line remains true in other respects. The new breed of apparatchik are well-schooled in the techniques of sucking the substance out of a country’s economy. These are gentlemen who play very hard ball. They do not go gentle.

Can our own rascals match them? Probably not. So there is a need for our own Putinesque figure to keep everyone in check, teaching a few lessons here and there, and making sure that, at the end of the day, we are richer rather than poorer.

Who would be our Vladimir?

Tell Fren Tru

Taking it with You

I just read a piece by a woman describing how she coped with breast cancer, using mechanisms she knew best. She wrote that she could not really be convinced that God would be able to hear her voice buried within all the white noise rising up from earth. As an alternative, she went to places of worship instead, hoping that there, she would, somehow, connect: She went to churches of various orthodoxies, and to mosques and synagogues, but agnosticism always seemed to get in the way.

Reading, however, she said, was a more dependable bulwark against the demons of her illness. Which was odd, she thought. In her family’s experience, books were highly vulnerable. They burned when your house was torched or was hit by a mortar shell; they were bulky and were the first things you ditched when the going got tough and you had to abandon home in a hurry.  Still, it was the reading of books that saved her. It was her love for the reading of them that carried her through the trials of nausea and vomiting and of losing her hair, and of the terror of coming face to face with death.

Normally, she has books everywhere in the house, including under her bed, a place that became known as the Library of Congress. And when she became ill, she upped her purchase of books and dipped into as many of them as possible, leaving a trail of unfinished volumes that she could go back to whenever she felt like it.

In spite of the recent history of my own country, I’ve never had the kind of experience which, at some point, had forced this cancer patient’s family to flee. I seem to have been able to manage to be elsewhere when those kinds of troubles forced many to abandon home and leave all behind. But for a writer, there is always a palpable sense of loss whenever one leaves home to travel about. This kind of loss, obviously not of the same magnitude as when civil or natural disasters intrude, disturbs nevertheless. Separation anxiety becomes more acute when, during one’s travels one wants to write something. Writing, a complicated business, depends, not least, on having access to what others have written before. At the best of times my own mind is a vacant place, with meagre content that needs constant topping up.

How does one deal with this need when one moves from place to place during the course of the writing year? Public libraries are a great resource of course. But they are undergoing transformation in this new age that is disquieting. Some don’t even know what to call them anymore. However, the books are still there, objects that you can touch and feel, the pages of which you can turn and on which you can read the printed word. “Hard” is what comes to mind, although the term could be a turn off. The leap from virtual or “soft,” in this context, is not an easy one to make. 

Whatever you call it, I’m lucky enough to have one at the places where I spend good chunks of time. Content is of course limited, but when I am in Toronto or London there are many public places I can go to. Some are local and others some distance off, fully stacked and with lots of apps.  

Although well stocked libraries are harder to come by in other places, if internet speed is decent, Google is all too eager to send you in all directions, including blind alleys. Wiki too, is ready to instruct but sensibly attaches a health caution. Health warnings are routine when travelling to some destinations and a medicine chest packed with pills and potions is mandatory. But when I go, I now take another type of tablet as well. This one bears neither commandments nor active medicinal components. It carries instead as many as 1,000 volumes, each the size of a Bible, a ridiculous quantity, which one is unlikely to be able to handle. But a sensible selection of titles, delivered wirelessly to the amazing tablet, makes writing (and reading) a year-long pleasure.

Tell Fren Tru

Vagrant Valentine

The New Statesman cover story this week carries a cautionary tale about the dangers of being crowned too early. As object lesson, the writer, Simon Akam, cited the case of Captain Valentine Strasser, former military leader of Sierra Leone, who now is reduced to drinking gin by the roadside in front of his mother`s house: "The Vagabond King" http://www.newstatesman.com/africa/2012/01/sierra-leone-strasser-war

But I don’t think that the lesson to be learned lies in the danger of being crowned too early. That might be the case if kingship was a preferred mode of government. But it is not. Modern leadership is something else. I am sure the NS knows that leadership is earned through persuasion in a democratic process. It is irrelevant whether you do it by force of character or by virtue of being able to outspend everyone else, as is the case in America. But persuade you must. Ancillary props like AK47s and RPGs are not allowed. And once you are in, you are still expected to earn your keep and make sure voters would want you back for as many times as the constitution allows.

In the case of military leaders, the arrangements are somewhat different. Entry is usually precipitate and exit may be equally so. But frequently, the desire to stay entrenched is overpowering in every sense and, unless the rest of the civilized world raises a stink, they hang in for an extended occupancy. Strasser’s tragedy was that he was not ruthless enough to keep himself safe-and long enough- from the predatory instincts of those around him.

       The African landscape is littered with usurpers of the people’s power who have remained in situ (office, I nearly said) for periods of up to four decades. The difference between them and Strasser is that they know how to ensure that those around them dare not bite the hand that feeds. Sooner or later, however, go they must. The going is never pretty. That is an outcome that all dictators must have bad dreams about.

Strasser’s predicament looks even worse than it should be because, at 45, he has probably another 30 years or so to live, unless the gin gets him earlier. Had he been 60 or 50 or even 40 years when he and his band of unhappy warriors seized power, the arrangements for his exit would almost certainly not have involved retreat to a university campus where, we know, there is very little tolerance for ex-dictators...

…Picture the soon-to-be ex-dictator, Robert Mugabe being offered an opportunity to improve his mind, say, at Harvard or Oxford, as inducement to relinquishing power without the shedding of blood. First off, you can be sure that you wouldn’t be able to afford his monthly stipend. And then, the cries of ``Occupy Harvard” or ``Occupy Oxford,” would be enough to drown those from the occupiers of the epicentres of world finance. Moreover, pushing 90, Mugabe’s shelf-life is limited, anyway (we hope), so whatever small pension fund he might have managed to put together over the last four decades should ensure that his declining years are comfortable and that attractions such as the student life remain non-competitive. And even if, through some seismic event, circumstances were to force him to resort to gin drinking he would at least be able afford a splash of tonic water to take the edge off the liquor’s tartness as he drains a Tot-a-Pac.

Thus, the picture of a Mugabe type slowly decomposing by the roadside in an alcoholic fog is, somehow, improbable. His is not the type to worry about.

Strasser’s case, however, might be a special one. To be sure, he would not pass the Mo Ibrahim test, but his history could still warrant consideration for more generous state help. But the political fallout from that cannot bear thinking about. The alternative, already under consideration in some quarters, of raising a private subscription, might have legs, but the challenges could be enormous and would require much discussion and delicate handling behind closed doors.

Unpalatable as that might be, it would be a small vote of thanks to someone who intervened at a dangerous time in the nation’s history.

Tell Fren Tru

Eating Offal

Now that the indulgences of the festive season are behind us (for some, a literal truth), it might be appropriate to reflect on what we eat in general.

Nowadays of course, everyone who can afford to is an ardent ecologist. Depending on where in the world we are lucky enough to be living in; we demand to inspect the certificate of origin of what we consume and insist, when it suits us, to eat local. At the same time many can afford, as well, to congregate at eating places noted more for their style than for the substance or taste of the fare. Indeed, I have heard that some people willingly put down their name on a one-year waiting list in order to eat at a particular eatery in Copenhagen, Denmark. But why ordinary, common-sense people should pose in this ridiculous manner is beyond understanding. But these are the days of spectacle. Enough said.

It is interesting though, to learn that some trendy gourmets have been extending their culinary range beyond conventional margins to include most parts of a food animal. Still, for many, certain cuts remain off-limits. I find this rejection of perfectly tasty bits perplexing and can only attribute it to affectations cultivated over the decades by the well-to-do westerner whose pay packet has bloated beyond the capacity to reason.

For those of us of African descent, eating "offal", a pejorative if ever there was one, is only a step away from drinking mother's milk. We still eat as much of the animal as feasible, with the possible exception of the horns, hooves and eyes. Indeed, there are cultures where even the eyes of the animal, sheep, for instance, are not excluded from the plate. When I lived in the Middle-East, one trick that Arab hosts used to play was to offer us the eyes from a roast sheep or lamb, just for the entertainment value... But that aside, the rest of the animal is fair game for delighting the palate.

I still recall with longing the days of my youth, growing up in Sierra Leone, how lights, sweetbread, melt and tripe were such delicious elements in our diet. These, added to a sauce containing vegetable leaves, fermented sesame seed, palm oil and dried fish, all cooked in a pot standing on three stones with the smoke of a wood fire adding extra flavour, had ravished our taste buds. Occasionally, cow’s cheeks, ears or skin were the essential meat elements in these sauces. The cow's skin was and is, particularly delicious, and when properly cooked, melts in the mouth in a most alluring way.

I am not altogether sure how we Africans came to discover the delights of these other parts in addition to those of the more usual cuts. But I know Americans and West Indians of African descent also seemed to have retained the snout-to-tail efficiency in the use of a food animal. Perhaps they had brought the practice over in the slave ships that took them from their ancestral lands to the New World. Or perhaps, their slave-masters thought that they were not good enough to enjoy the more red-blooded parts of the animal, and flung the rejected bits to them.

Whatever the case, it was a devolution that the slaves made the most of and from which they prepared delights that sustained them throughout the terrible decades of their oppression. And today, whilst the western palate has lost its way into the blind alley of middle class pretentiousness, we still enjoy lip-smacking concoctions that contain the parts that other appetites can’t reach. I am certain that one of the best restaurants that I have ever visited in Toronto was "The Underground Railroad", a name that says all there needs to be said. Located on King Street West, it used to serve a delicious pig’s feet concoction to die for.

It is a relief that culinary tastes are returning to the basics, at least in some trendy capitals, albeit wrapped up in the new foodism that is sweeping up the idle affluent. Perhaps one day I might go and see how the fare at these new eating places measure up to my mum's cooking or to that at “The Underground Railroad”.

But being neither idle nor affluent, that seems unlikely.

Tell Fren Tru