By Oswald Hanciles, Guest Writer, Freetown, Sierra Leone.
Are people born and bred in Sierra Leone whose skin color are ‘white’ ….citizens of Sierra Leone?
I met several of such people recently who hold Sierra Leonean passports, national ID cards, voter cards, driving licenses, etc. They voted in the 2002 and 2007 general elections. But, alas, they cannot be voted for – as parliamentarians, as president. In other words, these ‘white people’, mainly of Lebanese descent, have a ‘ba nya fakie citizenship’; or, ‘half citizenship’, if you like. This is unique in the world. I spoke with some of this people recently.
Nicolas Solomon – ‘Bonthe Lebanese’
At Old Railway Line, opposite the mosque, close to the APC headquarters in Freetown, I met Nicolas Abraham Solomon on the ground floor of a two storey building. Nicolas was born in the Bonthe Government Hospital on Bonthe Island, December 27, 1942. Nicolas’ father, Abraham Solomon, had also been born in Bonthe, in 1910. For almost a thirty years period, Nicolas who started work as a teenager, served two of his uncles, Samuel Solomon, and Zeid Solomon, in the piassava trade (piassava is a broom-like crop that was harvested mainly in the mangrove environment of Bonthe, and processed on Bonthe Island, and put on barges, and ships, for export to Europe – to be used for industrial cleaning).
From his Creole-looking house at 49 Victoria Road on Bonthe Island, Nicolas got married in 1973 to Alyah Khalil, the daughter of a full-blooded man of Lebanese descent, Abdul Khalil. They have two children – one, Diana, now resident in Canada; and Abraham, a labour consultant in the United Kingdom. Nicolas brags that he knows more Mende language than most Mendes, and can tongue-twist Mende proverbs and sayings that only Mende sages would understand. Naturally, Nicolas started having children with a Negroid Mende-speaking lady, Patricia Lamin, in the 1980s. They had three children: a) Eddie Solomon – now a hulking half-caste who is a successful businessman in Freetown; b) Michael Solomon– the Assistant Principal of the Bonthe Secondary School on Bonthe Island; and c) Phillip Solomon – working with a Lebanese in Freetown. Nearly all Nicolas’ life was spent in Bonthe – where he would drink palm wine, and occasionally beer with everyone, including labourers of his uncle’s businesses; where he would smoke an average of 20 cigarettes a day; where he would play lawn tennis with the likes of Sir Milton Margai and Sir. Albert Margai, and veteran teacher, Solomon Caulker, Sr., now based in Bo Town.
In 1997, as the AFRC junta grabbed power and the outcry threatened to plunge the country into complete anarchy. He had to join the thousands of citizens who fled the country to Guinea. The Guinean authorities refused to register him as a citizen of Sierra Leone because he had no identity papers. He was repatriated to Lebanon. In Lebanon, the home of his forefathers, he knew no one. He showed me his UNHCR refugee card, with the photograph of himself and his mother embossed on it. He returned back home as soon as Tejan Kabbah’s SLPP government was restored in 1998.
Fiaz Antar Speaks Fullah with Fullah Accent
In his shop on Kissy Road – selling mainly mattresses; cement; shovels, etc. - I met 59 year old Fiaz Antar.
Only his skin color was ‘white’; Faiz Antar’s Krio and Fullah accents were flawless. He bragged that he can speak fluent Koranko and Mandingo as well. Antar was born in Kabala, Koinadugu District, in the North East of Sierra Leone. He started work at an early age selling in his father’s shop on No 5 Amadu Street in the main business district of Kabala Town. Before he migrated to Freetown in 1984, Antar operated a cinema hall and a dance hall in Kabala. Antar is proud of being a citizen of Sierra Leone – and he showed me his national ID card (No SL-001833 88) to prove it. He said he was in Sierra Leone during the worst of the war years; and was one of those citizens grabbed and jailed at Pademba Road maximum security prisons in 1998 for being a ‘rebel collaborator’. Fiaz Antar’s son, Emad, who manages one of his father’s shops on Sanni Abacha Street, close to the Clock Tower, proudly displayed to me his national ID card, and his Sierra Leonean passport, too.
Emad Antar is Married to a Negroid Creole Woman
Emad Antar, 35, who attended the Albert Academy between 1998 and 1992, did his primary schooling in Holy Trinity Primary School for Boys in the Fourah Bay area of the East End of Freetown. All his friends have always been normal Negroid Sierra Leoneans with whom he would attend parties, dances, picnics, etc. He is married to a Negroid Sierra Leonean, Gloria John, a Creole. They have two boys, Bassim, 9, and Jihad. He rankles with the injustice of the selective citizenship right for non-Negroid in the laws of Sierra Leone: “I should have the FULL RIGHT of any black man or white man as a citizen of Sierra Leone”.
Racist Provision in Sierra Leone’s Law
There is a racist provision in the Constitution of Sierra Leone which limits citizenship in the Republic to those whose paternal parents are of ‘Negroid African Descent’. That is, those who have ‘white’ fathers would never enjoy the full rights and privileges of citizenship of this country, even if they have been born and bred in Sierra Leone.
The 1961 Constitution stipulated that all those who were citizens of Sierra Leone in 1961 and those British subject who chose to be, would be citizens of Sierra Leone. However, the amendment to the Constitution stated that only those whose father or father’s father was a Sierra Leonean of black origin (African Negro descent) have the status of citizen of Sierra Leone by birth. This situation was not removed in the Sierra Leone Citizenship Act 1974 and has remained so till date. The 1991 Constitution as stated earlier is silent on this issue, and so did not amend the restriction on citizenship. So, what we have today in Sierra Leone are ‘white people’ (mainly of Lebanese descent), born and bred right here, who can speak the local language as any other Negroid citizen, know no other culture, and carry citizenship papers, vote in national elections, but have ‘limited citizen rights’ – because they cannot contest elections, and be voted for.
Negroid Fear of the ‘White Race’
The racist provisions in our laws conflicts with international human rights provisions that Sierra Leone is a signatory to. It would be easy to condemn Sierra Leoneans for this racist provision. But, understanding is called for. It was this land area later named ‘Sierra Leone’ that over a three hundred year period that a lot of slaves were yanked from during the era of the Atlantic Slave Trade. It was here that thousands of these slaves were returned to two hundred years ago. Freetown was one of the centers of British colonization of Africa in the 19th Century, another century in which the slave trade was continued in a benign form, with emphasis on crude exploitation of natural resources, not human muscles. During the boom years of the 1960s/1970s, the people of Lebanese descent in Sierra Leone grew excessively rich as the premier merchants and diamond buyers and exporters. During the ‘bust years’ of the 1980s – as has been documented in the book by William Reno, ‘Corruption and State Politics in Sierra Leone’, which postulates the ‘Parallel Government’ ran by Lebanese merchants, when they plundered the country as the economy plummeted - the Lebanese joined the worst of our Negroid political exploiters to vampire the country. The lurking fear of Negroid Africans NOT to grant the people of Lebanese descent full citizenship is not borne out of whimsical thinking. There is also the social aspect – or perception - of this matter which grates the nerves of normal Negroid Sierra Leonean males especially.
“The Lebanese Don’t Allow us to Marry their Women”
Read this bit published in 2010 by Rev. Kabbs-Kanu, publisher of Cocorioko online newspaper in the United States: ‘…We need to use a political and social ‘volcanic’ eruption to find out what lies underneath their stay and their relationship with Africans in general and Sierra Leoneans in particular…..Socially, they have made it a taboo and even a curse for a noble Blackman to marry their daughters. …Almost all the ‘bi-racial’ Lebanese are from black mothers and Lebanese fathers….’
How many Negroid Sierra Leoneans have tried to woo ‘white’ Lebanese women? If we persist with such thinking, won’t we be questioning the amorous powers, the very manhood, of our Negroid Sierra Leonean males? Besides, it is not entirely true. One ‘Bonthe Lebanese’, Randa Nehme, the daughter of famous Bonthe socialite, Afif Nehme, is married today to a a Negroid Sierra Leonean, one Morrison Conteh, who used to work in Standard Chartered Bank in Freetown. There are others.
Rebrand Salone: As ‘The America in Africa’
Turning the spotlight on, and addressing the racist provisions in our laws, would lead us inexorably to confronting another deadly national malaise – our ethnic political thinking. When we change the racist laws, we can market Sierra Leone as the ‘home of every man, every color, every ethnic group’ – the essence of ‘The America in Africa’. The Temnes, the Mendes, the Fullahs, etc. all entered this territory known as ‘Sierra Leone’ between one to three hundred years ago. Like the Lebanese, every Negroid here (apart from the Bullom and Sherbro) are migrants from somewhere else. While the Lebanese are largely silent about this racist law (with few lone voices, like Nasser Ayoub, of Africanus Hotel in Freetown; and Rodney Michael, businessman based in Bo, and national sports executive), their children are showing their revulsion with their feet – migrating to the UK and U.S., where they easily gain FULL CITIZENSHIP rights. The country is the loser in all of this racist legal miasma. We are discriminating against some of the most productive of our citizenry, and forcing their children to take away rare knowledge to developed countries. We are ‘giving our country unnecessary bad name’ by violating basic international human rights provisions.
We can gain more from by changing the laws, by confronting our fears that we could be dominated by the Lebanese who dominate our economy already. This was in the past. They no longer dominate our economy. They are too integrated in our society to think any different from any Temne or Mende. Alas, the Lebanese business men, especially the richest among them, when they begin to accept Sierra Leone as their home, ought to show more ‘Corporate Social Responsibility.’
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