By Lansana Gberie
Fatmatta Rawdatu Kanu, Through the Calabash: Memoirs and Reflections growing up in Sierra Leone (DaySprings Publishing, Canada)
In this affecting family memoir, Fatmatta Rawdatu Kanu focuses on her larger-than-life father, a successful trader in a rapidly changing Sierra Leone of the post-Second World War period, and her own near-idyllic childhood in the east-end Freetown. It ends with her marriage to a young Sheka Kanu, who went on become a literary scholar and later foreign minister of Sierra Leone.
The calabash in Sierra Leone is a large gourd made from a long melon harvested when mature, hollowed out and dried, and is used as water container or, in its smaller form, as bowl from which palm wine is drank. It can also be fashioned into musical instruments like shegureh (used by dancers associated with the female secret societybondo or sande.) The calabash is said to be among the first cultivated plant on the world, and this antiquity has meant that it is also a totemic or emblematic item.
It is a testament to the power of the calabash in the popular imagination in her country that Fatmatta Rawdatu Kanu uses it as title of her memoir about growing up in a Sierra Leone experiencing profound transition in the latter years of British colonial rule without actually explaining its symbolism. In fact, the word calabash appears only about halfway through the book, and, perhaps as one would expect, it is to evoke mystery. The author visits her paternal hometown of Port Loko as a city girl, and her curiosity leads her to wander around a stream nearby. “The story was that devils always visited this stream, disguised in a human form, to make their catch or make friends with people” she writes. “The devil would pretend to be a traveller, carrying a piece of luggage, a calabash or some kind of bundle.” While at the stream, the author sees a presumably epileptic girl fall into the water after a seizure. She is rescued by “someone brave enough to plunge into the river” – brave because the others all around are frightened of the ‘devil’ that, they fear, had gotten the poor girl. In fact, one of the craven onlookers later helpfully recalled that just before the girl fell into the stream, she had seen “a beautiful woman with long black hair on the banks” of the stream “carrying a calabash on her head and holding the hand of the child.” Prompted by this necromantic revelation, the author, too, “recalled” seeing the same woman with the child carrying “a beautiful, almost white calabash.”
The incident remained a mystery; the author does not probe. It is one of the charms of this book: the celebratory tone, the joyous mode, the cherishing of heritage and culture, the bucolic tone. Mrs. Kanu is merely interested in recording what she saw growing up; what she did, and what people she knew and love said and did. An anthropologist would probe further: what significance does the stream and devil – evoking, but not quite, tropes of the water-mermaid – have in this context? Is it a mental throwback to the great uncertainties of the Atlantic slave trade period, when kidnappings and disappearances through the medium of rivers and seas were so common in that region, as one scholar has suggested?
Through the Calabash is, much more than a childhood or growing-up story, a paean to Mrs. Kanu’s family, particularly her pioneering, larger-than-life father. Its wider appeal lay in its celebration of familial love, the salience and acuity of its observations on the growth of non-Creole Freetown society, and the purity and beauty of the author’s openness and love for others.
Her father, Sorie, was born, she writes, “between 1883 and 1886”, the uncertainty because the family was unlettered. Port Loko district, where he was born, was immediately adjacent to Freetown, which had been a British colony (formerly settlement) since the beginning of the 19th century. This colony was previously Temne territory which the British had “bought” from King Naimbana and now, by the time Sorie was born, dominated by the Creoles. Within a decade after Sorie’s birth, the British extended their authority, in the form of a Protectorate, to the rest of the adjacent territories, including Port Loko. This had profound consequences: it formalized the trade relations, already important, between places like Port Loko and Freetown, and it eased migration into Freetown. (By 1955, Michael Banton informs us in a penetrating study of Freetown which appeared in 1957, there were 17,000 Creoles as against 19,000 Temnes and 11,000 Mendes in Freetown. The city’s population also included 650 Europeans, 850 Lebanese and Indians, and thousands of other non-Creole Africans. The 2004 census cast this demographic shift in an altogether jarring light: those who identified themselves as Creoles now constituted only 5.8% of Freetown’s population.)
External trade was crucial to the survival of Freetown. The land was unpromising agriculturally, and the settlers had to establish trade links with the Temne and beyond, helping to ensure a viable economic community which was never threatened with starvation. Sorie’s father was a participant in this lucrative trade, and this was what Sorie inherited, taking a crucial step further. Sorie moved permanently to Freetown where, though illiterate, he established a very profitable business bringing in goods from Port Loko into Freetown for sale and then buying manufactured products and selling them in Port Loko. He builds a house, and starts a family which grew very large, and very successful.
Mrs. Kanu’s discussion of her father’s business is the most illuminating section of the book: it shows Sorie as a true pioneer: a deeply intelligent and sensitive man with the foresight to know what would be shaping the future of the country – the European institutions he was encountering in Freetown, the schools, City Council, Government Wharf. He is himself a Muslim who had learnt the Quran by rote in Port Loko. He had now made Freetown home; he built his house close to Annie Walsh Memorial School for girls, which is where he sent her daughter, the sons to the other elite schools in the city.
The author paints a rather idyllic picture of her childhood: the jumble of Freetown appears here as friendly, without tension, with the author, a Muslim, passing a mosque on her way to a Catholic school where the teachers have names like Mrs Hope and Mrs Johnson. This was an ethnically innocent age – or, rather, the author, of an ambitious immigrant household, is more concerned about acquiring every one of the great things that Freetown offered, Western education especially. The family remained Temne, though from this account the author could well have passed for that very interesting sub-set: Aku Creole. The picture of bucolic calm in this stew is realistic.
This calm is toppled, but only briefly in this account, as independence approached: politics had intruded. The author, now in secondary school, records the disturbances of 1955: riots by unemployed youth targeting the property of two local politicians already notorious for extravagance, and both of whom would have a profound influence on the country’s future: Albert Margai and Siaka Stevens. But the mention of this event is tangential: though the author’s elder brother was very active in politics, serving at one time as Secretary of the Sierra Leone Peoples Party (SLPP) and as aide to Kandeh Bureh (one of the party’s grandees); and though she would marry a man who would become a very prominent member of the rival All Peoples Congress (APC), Mrs. Kanu doesn’t at all seem interested in politics. In fact, she ends the book shortly after marrying Sheka Kanu, and long before Kanu became an active politician. One gets only perfunctory glimpses of the important political events going on at the time the author was in college: preparations for independence, new constitutions, elections, emergence of Milton Margai as Prime Minister, and Stevens as brand new opposition leader.
The most gripping part of this book, as a result, is the account of how the author was wooed by a very persistent Sheka Kanu. One great deformity of social life these days is the ease with which certain kinds of women react to advances from men they are not immediately taken to with knee-jerk words like ‘stalking’ or ‘sexual harassment’ thrown about very glibly. Reading Mrs Kanu’s affectionate account of Sheka’s prolonged wooing of her – as indeed reading Barack Obama’s spirited account of how long it took him to “wear down” Michele – some may well take comfort in the fact that almost every serious relationship begin as unwanted advances.
The book contains a number of memorable pictures, and ends with very useful appendixes that document the history of the abolition of the slave trade, colonial Sierra Leone, and an account of the Sierra Leonean educational system.
I recommend this book highly – as something from which our now-badly fractured political culture can benefit, the sense that not so long ago the country was one big family.
