James Manna Kajue—An Obituary

The death of James Manna Kajue, popularly and famously known by his nickname “JB Roy”, was announced on Saturday, November 5. JB Roy (pictured) grew up in Wilberforce, Freetown, and Kenema. He attended secondary schools in Bo and Freetown before enrolling at Fourah Bay College (FBC) in the early 1980s. He studied English Language and Literature and was a student in the English Department’s honors program. His own neglect, and perhaps his own personal demons in his final year in the honors school, denied him the prestige and accolade of scoring the best degree in his class. After college he was a farmer, an activist, and a journalist. He practiced the latter for over four decades, and was still doing so when he passed.

The most critical and formative parts of JB Roy’s life occurred at FBC, where he became very involved and was popular in student activities spanning the political, cultural, intellectual, and social lives, and even gastronomical concerns, of the campus.

JB was popular among students because of the way he promoted social and cultural activities on campus. He loved music and (when he later became a minister in the student government) organized weekly “break dancing” sessions at the Students Union (SU) building every weekend, mostly on Friday or Saturday nights. He was equally comfortable in joining a Goboi dance at Mary Kingsley Auditorium as he was at showing his reggae moves or break-dancing skills at shindigs at the SU building or any social or party gathering that involved music and dancing.

However, his most memorable, and perhaps greatest, contribution to the social and cultural life on campus was his role in the formation of FBC’s only student band, Fusion. Formed at FBC by FBC students, Fusion was an artistic and musical collaboration at its best, and highest ever, at the College. The musical group was a collection of students who combined their academic studies with their love and passion for music. Among its members were Alfred Tucker (Choe), Donald Karimu (Don Lu, late), Brian Sama, Freddy Cole, Khalid Kamara, and JB Roy. Never a musician himself (at least when compared to his peers in the group), JB Roy was Fusion’s General Manager. He did all the group’s promotional activities and made sure that the campus—and the nation at large—knew of its presence and performances.

Fusion’s performances (although rare) at the Adjai Crowther Amphitheater were infectious, popular and crowd pullers. They were always jam-packed, and subsequently talked-about days and weeks after. They did covers of then-popular songs, but their own original songs (for example, “Bai Bureh Was a Warrior”) were even far more favored. Fusion made FBC campus vibrant musically and socially, and provided insights into students’ abilities, imagination and capabilities (outside of the classroom) and how they can transform these talents into their aspirations. (Lately, and before his death, JB Roy had been thinking of reviving a group in the Fusion fashion. That much communicated his abiding love for and dedication to music)

JB Roy was an active and always a constant presence in FBC Students Union (SU) politics. He was mostly in the radical wing of that politics, ultimately serving as Minister of Canteen Affairs in the administration of Daniel Yamba Kamara (famously known as “Okama”.) Indeed, JB Roy was one of the most admired cabinet members in Okama’s government, particularly for his uncompromising stances in defence of students’ rights, welfare and privileges, and also for his efforts in making sure that students’ allowances were paid by the Government of Sierra Leone (GoSL) on time.

He was especially articulate in campaigning that the quality (and quantity) of food served to students in the College’s dining halls did not diminish—and this was the period when the GOSL’s commitment to providing additional finances to feed students on campus was being cut. Not surprisingly, JB Roy was one of the leaders who spearheaded one of the most memorable demonstrations about food that started on campus and ended in the office of President Siaka Stevens at State House.

On campus, and in his approach to life generally, JB Roy was against conformism and groupthink. He was a formidable force and promoter of critical thinking—advocating his strongest and abiding belief that students should use this capacity to empower themselves and question what he believed were “fake” choices or modes of living on campus. Unsurprisingly, JB Roy was not silent about matters he considered sycophantic and pretentious on campus—and in the country generally. In doing so, he became one of those students who popularized the concept of “fake-ism” on campus which he used to rail against the “fake” objectives, appearances and ideas on Mount Aureol. Today, “fake” is part of international discourse—but JB Roy had used, popularized and circulated that term almost over forty years ago, before its current acclaim.

His political activism was never in hiding. For instance, he was the first to go around campus announcing, almost acting like the campus’s town crier, “Mobilize! Mobilize!”, which was the students’ call to congregate, mostly for some hot-button issue that always ultimately ended in a demonstration on campus, or one that started on campus and ended in the streets of Freetown. He was keenly aware that student politics and government was the most effective instrument to question college and university authorities to account to students’ interest and welfare. For good measure, he also believed that such a government should be used to promote political education, participation, consciousness, and even radicalization, on campus.

He was cynical of power and authority (their nature, manifestations and practices)—be they political, academic, etc.—period. (By nature, JB Roy was an extremely cynical person, suspicious of everything and everyone, especially those in power.) In fact, for him the posture and attitude for all-right thinking students (and Sierra Leoneans) is to question everything that emanates from the political (as well as the academic) leaders of the country and the university. At College, he was fearless in reminding and even imploring students to not trust their college officials—from the College’s Principal to the University’s Vice Chancellor to even their lecturers and administrators.

He was even more so when he directed students’ attention to the political malaise, incompetence, brutalization and violence that dominated the national scene under the one-party dictatorship of the APC.

Politically, JB Roy was far more mature and perceptive for his years as a college student. In fact, he was far more advanced and sophisticated about national politics than many of his college peers. He saw the ways political leaders in the country used power for dishonest, divisive, unpatriotic and criminal means. In particular he saw through the corruption and malfeasance of the one-party APC government of Siaka Stevens. For most of the APC’s one-party regime in Sierra Leone, there was the unwritten (but perhaps spoken) acknowledgement and recognition that the only opposition to this rigid, suffocating, stifling, dehumanizing and violent political system was student opposition, primarily directed by FBC students. In fact, if the tradition of opposition to the APC by students (and this was even before the one-party era commenced as when students in the nation demonstrated against the regime in 1977) continued on campus after the one-party system was instituted, it was through efforts led by students like JB Roy.

In general, JB Roy was a relentless campaigner against governmental and societal corruption and injustice, lawlessness and disorder, moral lapses and dysfunction, incompetence and nepotism. His acute political acumen led him to see through the insidious, manipulative, destructive and tribalistic nature of one-party politics in Sierra Leone—a state of affairs he warned will not only lead to national violence and mayhem but one that will fundamentally alter the civic relations and civil society in the country. He was prescient, even in his student days, that only deathly and unrelenting violence will uproot the APC. The Civil War bore testimony to his prophecy.

As tributes continue to flow in following his passing, one thing that has been constant in them is the association of JB Roy with the word “Golconda.” In his college days, when he was a final Honors 2 student, JB introduced FBC students to the term (which was a part of the title of a draft novel he had penned about Sierra Leone’s then corrupt, discreditable and abysmal state. The novel was reviewed by publishers in London but was never published.)

To JB Roy, Sierra Leone was (and is still) Golconda.

One of the uses of the term is in the context of “Golconda Diamonds.” These were diamonds mined in a region then called the Golconda Sultanate in present-day India. The diamonds were well-known for their qualities, including their largeness and high clarity, etc. (One of the most famous diamonds from Golconda is the Koh-i-Noor; it is among the few of the largest uncut diamonds in the world and is part of the Crown Jewels of the United Kingdom. The diamond is currently set in the Crown of the late Queen Elizabeth II, and you would have seen it prominently displayed on the crown on top of her casket.)

It is in JB Roy’s appropriation of the concept that his true understanding of the pathetic, disgraceful, disgusting, and irredeemable state of the country and the rape and misuse of its primary natural resource, diamonds, for selfish and corrupt ends can be grasped.

In other contexts (contexts which guided JB Roy’s use of the term in applying it to Sierra Leone), Golconda Diamonds have been synonymous to diamonds of high quality (which Sierra Leone’s diamonds were and are still known for). But other legends associated with the Golconda Diamonds—extreme wealth, curse, ill-fortune, smuggling, stealing, violence, corruption, back-channel dealings and robbery, danger, killings and deaths as well as larceny and misappropriation—are what JB Roy saw in Sierra Leone as Golconda. Additionally, the Golconda term has been used for any rich diamond mine, and also for any source of great or excessive wealth accrued from diamonds but that did not benefit the regions where they are mined. All of these myths, legends and realities, JB Roy concluded, equally and truly can apply to Sierra Leone and its diamonds.

It is for these reasons he used Golconda for literary inspiration in his perceptive and insightful view and characterization of his country. To him, Sierra Leone is Golconda—a nation cursed and condemned by its high quality diamonds. JB Roy foresaw and predicted the shambles Sierra Leone will become, and is today, because of its diamonds. For many, Sierra Leone’s Civil War was primarily caused by what has been dubbed “blood diamonds.” However, JB Roy’s Golconda had characterized the “blood diamonds” relationship between the country’s diamonds and their propensity to generate violence before that phrase became associated with the country during the civil strife. To JB Roy, diamonds were, and are, the existential threats to Sierra Leone’s future—and existence.

JB Roy was confrontational and in-your-face when he has points to put across. His voice was loud in calling for reform and change in Sierra Leone. He advocated for active resistance (JB was not at all about passive resistance.) Those who did not understand him, or just ignored him, dismissed his jeremiads about Sierra Leone as a cursed and unredeemably corrupt nation, saying that he was just one of those “idle” and “crazy” students with nothing to do. But intervening years have shown that JB Roy was not insane or crazy or just idle. He told Sierra Leoneans the truth of what will happen to their nation if corruption and kleptocracy and institutionalized violence were not curbed and removed from the country’s national consciousness, culture and practices.

JB Roy contributed significantly to the intellectual atmosphere and conversations on campus. He was himself an intellectual—diligent, probing, objective, rational, open-minded and humble when he engaged matters of national and campus importance. Ever present (either as member of a team or just an audience member) at all debates, panel discussions, and discussions on campus, especially in the Mary Kingsley Auditorium, JB Roy’s participation at these events were legendary and demonstrated his possession of a highly developed intellect. He was an avid and incisive reader and discussant as well as a fine writer whose lapidary style reflected a rich, discursive and regenerative mind.

In his life and attitudes, JB Roy was a nationalist who strongly and passionately believed that Sierra Leone can only be a functional nation when it serves all its people as one and equally, a state where ethnic, tribal and regional interests were subject to the bigger, national endeavor. In fact, he abhorred tribalism, ethnicity and regionalism, which he saw as narrow and destructive and the greatest problem towards the development and realization of a better, unified, peaceful Sierra Leone. These perceptions extended beyond his college days. As a journalist, his points in his writings were always about the national good, for instance how to marshal the country’s resources for the betterment of all—not just a tribe, an ethnic group or specific region.

Every bit as committed to exposing corruption and injustice as he was to advocating for a viable, proud and self-sustaining Sierra Leone, JB Roy represented the spirit and youthfulness of his generation and beyond. Though gone, his legacy of a vision and a reality of a resourceful, energetic and productive Sierra Leone endures, and will forever endure.

Good-bye JB Roy and, in one of your favorite sayings, “A Luta continua.”