By Umaru Fofana
One by one they came. Ten of them. Well dressed. Each walking like a cat. Accompanied by music. First dressed as casual. Then in their national dress. And then in their dinner wear. They were resplendent.
On each occasion they walked up to an elevated podium drenched in a thick AFRICELL brand, with nice chairs for them to sit on in the end. You do not expect this to happen to prisoners. But yes it did.
It was a pageant like none other! There were not the usual red carpets. A thin one about 10 meters was rolled out on a walkway. There was no glitz. There was no glamour. But there was fun. And there was frolic. There was a lot of tonic. Women locked up in jail were dancing with their warders.
It looked and felt more like a boarding home of students and wardens. But this was a prison! The prison inmates all looked well fed, happy and excited. Ten contestants were selected from prisons across the country. Most of them jailed for some of the most serious crimes. Others held on ridiculous grounds, shining the light yet again on our justice system.
Eight of the contestants have either been convicted of or are standing trial for murder or manslaughter. At least one of them is serving life in prison. Another, a commercial sex worker, was held for allegedly stealing a mobile phone from her client. That client has never shown up in court to testify. Yet the poor woman, in her late 20s, has been in jail for months leaving her six children starving with no one to look after them. Two of them – the eldest who is in high school and the youngest who is a toddler – were at the pageant. In one instance, during her catwalk, she stopped to talk to them. It was emotional.
More than 70 other inmates inside the Female Correctional Centre were allowed outside their cells to join in the entertainment – after all life is boring behind bars. For a moment they must all have forgotten where they were or what they had come to do there. Perhaps often pinching themselves to see if it was all real or just a wishful dream.
In the end 20-year-old Sia Kemba, a young Kono woman from the Bo Prison, emerged the winner. Probably undisputable. The medium-heighted black-complexioned slim-bodied prisoner wowed her audience from the start. Two days after her victory, I met her for an interview inside the prison. The place was very clean even if overcrowded. There is a computer lab for them. There is also a living room where prisoners watch television. The inmates were still sucked in the excitement of the pageant. They were still cracking jokes with each other – even imitating and ridiculing the losing contestants and how they had cat-walked on stage. They all laughed over it. They truly enjoyed it!
Miss Correctional 2019 seemed overwhelmed in her newfound status. They’d probably told her I was coming so she had her crown on, blushing and laughing so much that you could count all her teeth. Her reaction to the win: “I am very happy for winning. Now I know society considers us even though we are in jail” she told me. Her eyes rolled and her face glowed as she went on: “It gives me hope. The crown makes me feel like I am out of prison. We know that when we eventually walk free we will become better people”.
Sia said she was never in doubt that she would win. “I was confident. Now I want to go and show off with the crown”, she said. Then reality dawned on her: “But I am in prison, so I can’t do that” she told me.
Jailed for five years for killing her partner with whom she has a child, Sia said something emotional: “When I leave prison, I want to return to school. Having won this crown I would like to return to school. I would like to make peace with the family whose son I killed. It was a mistake. But I know I have wronged them”. That sounds contrite. I hope it is a real sign of contrition.
Her high school sweetheart had brought home another woman, she said. When she questioned him it led to an altercation and he hit her and she fell. Then she took whatever she could lay hands on and hit him, according to her. He dropped dead. She would later be convicted of manslaughter.
Now $300 richer, the cash prize from the pageant, the beauty queen has 15 months of her jail term remaining. She is grateful to the pageant organisers. Entertainment journalist, Mohamed Murtala Kamara who owns and runs the Salone Jamboree entertainment magazine is the brains behind the contest.
There have been criticisms that the pageant glorifies criminals and criminality. Others say streaming and screening it took away the privacy of the prisoners. The prison authorities say they all gave their written consent that they did not mind being screened or photographed. In fact one of the inmates who was due to be granted bail in court in the week of the pageant, malingered so she would not go to court and be able to take part in the contest. She had to be forced to leave. How bizarre!
Amid those criticisms, Murtala says the critics are missing the point. He believes the pageant is a healing and empowering mechanism. “This is very good for their psychosocial wellbeing and we are using entertainment to reduce crime,” he told me. Society, continued Murtala, should start looking at female prisoners differently. “Women can be empowered behind bars with such, and it can raise their self esteem,” he insisted.
If all goes well and the prison authorities have their way, the pageant will henceforth be an annual event. Aminata Turay who is head of gender and equal opportunity in the country’s prisons, says they want to “change the perception people have about criminals. Some of them committed murder and some are serving life imprisonment [but] we want to make them feel they are not left out [and that] they belong somewhere”. She went on: “If the society left them out, we at the Correctional Centre especially the gender unit will not leave them out”.
As I write this piece, there are 4,530 prisoners throughout Sierra Leone. While 4,404 of them are male only 126 are female. With more women than men in the country, this speaks positively about women and crime. And it raises issues around why some of the women are even behind bars for months and years on trial. A non-contestant, Alakeh Olive Johnson, 49, has been in jail since 18 December 2012 on allegations of conspiring to murder her brother-in-law. Her son, who had a few months to his master’s degree graduation in that year, has also been in jail since then, as have six other people. I am told all arguments have now been made with the jury retiring soon. But one wonders why it has had to take this long to deal with such a matter.
The beauty contest was attended by people from all walks of life – government officials, businesspeople, artists, private citizens and family members of some of the inmates some of whom cried for the most part. It shone light on some of the goings-on behind bars. The inmates, who are now housed at the facility of the former UN-backed war crimes court, were very chatty when I visited.
During my visit to the prison, I saw what lay beneath the veneer. Six inmates are psychiatric cases. Four of them were jailed despite their mental health condition that probably influenced their commission of the offence in the first place, while two others were said to have developed their condition in prison. The Psychiatric Home in Kissy says there is no space for them. But I cannot stop wondering how someone in that state can be punished for their action.
While the pageant brought out the beauty in the contestants, the ugliness that still characterises our prisons as a result of the action and inaction of the judiciary, needs to be addressed, and urgently. Congrats, Sia!
Copyright © 2019 Politico Online
