Beneath the Tamarind Tree

by Isha Sesay

  When the time came for high school, she packed her bags for the Magburaka Government Secondary School for Girls, more commonly referred to as “Mathora,” the first public girls’ school in the north of the country, hundreds of miles from her home. Without hesitation, Kadi waved goodbye to all she’d known and loved and headed off to boarding school. There she developed into a fiercely independent young woman, one who amassed prizes and scholarships. When her time at Mathora was over, she made her way to the capital of Sierra Leone, Freetown. Here, she enrolled at another high school for her A-level qualifications, which paved the way for her to study English language and literature at Fourah Bay College (FBC), part of the University of Sierra Leone.

  My mother entered college in 1970, when hemlines were high and the nation’s politics were in turmoil. Sierra Leone’s independence from the British had been achieved just nine years earlier, in 1961. My mother embraced the fashion of the times, as well as the vibrant college scene. Three years later, in 1973, she secured a bachelor’s degree with honors.

  Her degree completed, she had no intention of slowing down.

  Thanks to a scholarship, she was off to England next, where the heels were stacked and the pants flared. Kadi soon had a large Afro and her master’s degree in African literature from the University of Sheffield in 1974. Marriage to my father, who’d been studying law in England, soon followed, as did the births of my sister, Jane, and me in London, in 1974 and 1976 respectively. By the early 1980s, when everyone else was embracing large shoulder pads, my mother wore a Jheri curl, was pregnant with my brother Mamud, and was finishing up her PhD at the University of London.

  During this time I saw my father only periodically, because he was working in Sierra Leone as the legal adviser for the Sierra Leone Produce Marketing Board, a national import-export company. In 1983, with Kadi’s doctorate in hand, my parents decided it was time for the family to be reunited in Sierra Leone and for their professional lives to begin in earnest. So we swapped London for Freetown, a decision that as a seven-year-old I found shockingly unpleasant and totally unnecessary.

  My mother’s homecoming was a return to her roots, but years of academic achievement meant she’d blossomed into something different from the rest of her family. She returned to lecture English at her alma mater, Fourah Bay College, and her professional success now meant she bore the financial responsibility and decision-making burden of caring for her parents, siblings, and countless other relatives, all of them living lives hamstrung by little to no education.

  Before the move back to Sierra Leone, I had no memories of these relatives. My very first memory of my grandmother Mammy Iye is from the night of our arrival. My young brain couldn’t process why this old, wrinkled individual, dressed in peculiar colorful clothing, speaking a language I didn’t know, was crying and incessantly touching my face and head.

  In time I grew to adore this beautiful, fragile-looking woman, who brought me sugarcane, mangoes, and other sweet, sticky treats whenever she visited. Our conversations always required the help of a relative to translate, as my proficiency in Temne, our tribal language, remained poor and her grasp of English elementary.

  My mother and grandmother couldn’t have been more different. Mammy Iye was afraid to speak much louder than a whisper and was seldom disagreeable, even to advocate for her own best interests. This meant many of life’s most important decisions—when to marry, whom to marry, how many children to bear—were not hers to make. Kadi, though, was a force of nature. She had a clear sense of self and no shortage of personal conviction. Growing up, I rarely welcomed my father’s words “it’s up to your mother,” as attempts to coerce her were futile.

  For all their differences, my mother and grandmother remained alike in one critical way: they both possessed an unshakable faith in God. Both believed deeply in the fundamental precepts of Islam: prayer, fasting, giving to charity, and never doubting that whatever happened was ultimately the will of God. Education had led my mother to places that might as well have been another planet as far as my grandmother was concerned, but it never affected their relationship, and they remained adoring of each other.

  Everything in Sierra Leone’s patriarchal society directs women and girls to be quiet, docile, and subservient to men. But with Kadi as my bulwark, those norms never infiltrated my childhood. Much to my father’s chagrin, she insisted they have separate bank accounts for their respective salaries and a joint account for household expenses. The kitchen was another battleground, but my mother held her line. She would cook only on the weekends. My father grumbled whenever he got the chance, but he accepted it. During the week, all meals and school lunches for my brother and I were prepared by a cook, one of the many relatives who lived with us. Most weekends, though, Kadi would serve up huge breakfast spreads of crepes, eggs, bacon, and sausages. The people I loved most in the world sat around that dining table. As I watched my parents playfully tease and bicker, I was the happiest girl in the world.

  That is, until my father died at age forty.

  In time, our life assumed a new normal. We went back to school and Kadi returned to work, but she now occupied an even bigger space in my life. She was both mum and dad.

  Regularly, friends raised the subject of her remarrying. “I don’t want to deal with some man telling me how to raise my kids or having expectations of me going into the kitchen to cook for him. That’s just not going to happen,” she defiantly said.

  Kadi wouldn’t be controlled or contained, nor would she allow me to be. While other girls my age found themselves being restricted as puberty set in, my physical freedom was guaranteed. One summer while visiting in England, I complained I was bored. Kadi headed to the local library and researched residential summer camps. Soon I was on my way to camp in the English countryside, and for the next few summers without fail, my mother packed my cases and sent me off to be with kids from all over the world—a concept entirely foreign to our Sierra Leonean culture. When my love affair with acting first took hold, she whole-heartedly supported my passion, allowing me to stay late after school and rehearse on weekends with unknown groups of kids—always pushing me forward, encouraging new and varied interests.

  Meanwhile when Kadi’s friends talked of circumcising their daughters, she rejected the discussion without hesitation or apology. The practice of partially or totally removing the female genitalia, known as female genital mutilation or cutting (FGM/C) is a coming-of-age rite in Sierra Leone, with deep roots entwining culture and politics. Though its origins remain a mystery, UNICEF estimates up to 90 percent of Sierra Leonean women are subjected to genital cutting. It has long been performed as a part of rituals to mark the transition to adulthood and initiation into Bondo—the women’s “secret societies”—and despite concerted local and international efforts to stamp it out, Sierra Leone remains one of twenty-eight African countries where this practice continues. But despite the social pressure on mothers and the public ridicule of girls who aren’t “cut,” Kadi steadfastly refused to subject me to the painful rite of passage she’d endured as a teenager. My mother placed no limitations on my imagination or sense of what I could attain. As far as she was concerned, with an indomitable will, a plan, a willingness to work hard, and God’s blessings, everything remained within reach.

  At sixteen years old, I was one of a handful of black students attending the Lebanese International School (LIS), a private high school in Freetown. Kadi had yanked me out of my public school because of the near-constant teachers’ strikes and the falling academic standards. On April 29, 1992, I was in class at LIS trying to pay attention to the teacher droning on. It was a bright morning and shaping up to be another hot April day. Out of the corner of my eye a couple of young Lebanese men ran through the school gate. At first I ignored the distraction, but then more arrived, shouting in Arabic. Something was very wrong.

  One of my Lebanese classmates yelled out in Arabic to the multiplying stream of running men, and a frantic conversation ensued. When th
ey were done, the non-Arabic speakers in our class pounced.

  “What’s going on? What’s happening?” we asked.

  “There’s been a coup. Soldiers have taken over State House,” a classmate said.

  State House, the seat of the executive branch of the Sierra Leonean government, was located only a couple of miles away. As the Lebanese have long been custodians of much of the country’s commercial wealth, we all knew the school was a magnet for looters if widespread trouble broke out. No one waited for the teacher to wrap up. We took matters into our own hands and dismissed ourselves.

  Unable to make it home due to the distance from school, my only other option was to go home with my cousin Maggie, who also attended LIS and was in the year below. With the sound of gunshots and yelling in the air, close to a dozen of us climbed into a classmate’s SUV, which was handily parked out front. We sat on each other’s laps, crouched on the floor, and even sat in the trunk. As we pulled out of the school drive and headed in the opposite direction to the sounds of chaos, we were terrified and too afraid to say much besides our prayers.

  The days that followed were full of mayhem and widespread fear. We learned the sitting president, Joseph Momoh, had fled to neighboring Guinea, family friends had been arrested, the National Provisional Ruling Party (NPRC) was in charge, and that a twenty-five-year-old army junior, Captain Valentine Strasser, was now president, the youngest head of state in the world. Countless questions were triggered. What did NPRC and Strasser plan to do next? How would the international community respond? How would this new military government tackle the country’s long-running civil war against rebels who’d taken control of the country’s east and its diamond mines?

  I finally made it home about a week later, when it felt safer to move about the streets. Late one night during this period of heightened fear, a number of cars pulled into our driveway unannounced. A power outage had swept the neighborhood. It was so dark you couldn’t see your own hand stretched out in front of your face. Everyone in the house trembled in the darkness, too afraid to make a sound as the heavy footsteps approached our single-story home.

  “We want to speak to Dr. Kadi Sesay,” a loud male voice announced.

  All the windows were closed, the curtains drawn, and the house completely dark. We sat terrified and silent in the living room.

  “It is nothing bad,” the voice insisted. “Don’t be afraid. We just want to talk to you.”

  None of us made a sound. The unidentified man waited for a few more minutes before he gave up and returned to the vehicles. Seconds later we heard them roar off into the darkness.

  Later, we discovered that Kadi’s reputation for being independently minded and willing to speak up for the truth had brought her to the attention of the NPRC military junta. They were seeking her help with their stated goal of transitioning the country from military rule back to a civilian government, in due course. A series of conversations between them and my mother ensued, and eventually she agreed to quit her position at the university, where she was a senior lecturer and the first woman to serve as the head of the English faculty, to head up the National Commission for Democracy.

  This was 1994. In 1996, fellow NPRC soldiers ousted Strasser in a coup and Julius Maada Bio assumed the presidency. The elections he called for brought a new president, Ahmed Tejan Kabbah, to power. Kabbah appointed my mother to the position of minister of development and economic planning during his first term. After his reelection to a second term in 2002, my mother was given a new portfolio, minister of trade and industry. Neither position had ever been held by a woman before.

  By the time my mother became a politician, I was going to school in England. I watched from afar in amazement as she took to the male-dominated arena of African politics. She was a member of the president’s cabinet and sat at the heart of government as a fierce feminist and advocate for the advancement and protection of women, girls, and the poor. She was part of the government’s negotiating team in Lomé, Togo, that wrangled with rebels to secure the contentious peace deal that marked the end of Sierra Leone’s eleven-year civil war in 2002. Her audacity and unwavering belief in doing the right thing, even if controversial and hard, continued to motivate me.

  As I navigated my way through Cambridge University, where I was studying English, she inspired me to disrupt my college life and advocate for a fairer, more respectful treatment of female students, and to start an incendiary college magazine loathed by the male students far and wide.

  When her political party, the Sierra Leone People’s Party, or SLPP, was swept from power in 2007, my mother settled into the role of an opposition politician and party elder. I hoped the turn of events would make her slow down a little, maybe even leave the country and take a job with an international body like the United Nations. The idea of leaving the country she loved deeply was unappealing, and she quickly dismissed it whenever I or anybody else suggested it.

  Instead she once again embraced Sierra Leone’s byzantine politics and set her sights on becoming the SLPP’s presidential nominee in the 2012 elections. She lost the race to Julius Maada Bio, but instead of turning away in anger, she became his running mate, making her the first female vice-presidential nominee in Sierra Leone’s history. Amid widespread allegations of vote rigging and electoral fraud, the SLPP lost once more at the polls in 2012. But my mother and Bio remained undeterred, buoyed by the conviction they were the pair to set the country on a new path, and they set their sights on the next vote, in March 2018.

  When my poor, uneducated grandmother Mammy Iye gave birth to my mum in 1949 in sleepy Rotifunk, a place not much different from Chibok, no one could have known she’d brought into the world a girl who would go on to reach the heights of academia and settle in the nation’s history books. It was a path unforeseen at her birth, but one carved out by education and an enduring faith that kept Kadi strong the entire way.

  I am a beneficiary of her journey, educated and emboldened to fight for girls from places like Chibok, so they too may one day move through the world with voices unchecked.

  Chapter Eighteen

  FOR PRISCILLA, REGARDLESS OF WHETHER IT WAS IN THE FOREST OR town, there was no getting used to life in captivity. Living in Gwoza meant she’d swapped lying on the cold, hard ground in the forest for the cold, hard concrete floor in the house, but she hated her situation just as much. Not a day went by when Priscilla and the other girls didn’t shed tears for the life and loved ones they’d been taken from. But there were days in captivity when laughter also broke through and for the briefest of moments, the clouds of grief lifted. On those occasions the girls would often be sitting out on the veranda and memories of life in Chibok would set off ripples of laughter. During those few minutes they chuckled freely and temporarily forgot where they were, and the fact that they weren’t actually free.

  The Nigerian military’s effort to crush the terror group was a constant source of danger and tension. At the heart of their strategy lay aerial bombardments—a tactic wholly incongruent with the government’s stated goal of doing everything possible to find the Chibok captives and bringing them home safely. Bombs routinely fell all around the girls. Priscilla and her schoolmates learned to differentiate the low rumblings of surveillance aircraft from the loud, oppressive vibrations of fighter jets and could make a determination within seconds about the likelihood of a bomb falling near them. But there were occasions when they didn’t get it right and what was thought to be a surveillance aircraft turned out to be a bomber; these were the instances when the girls failed to get out of the house in time. Within minutes, hundreds of them would be sent running through the Gwoza compound as the roof of the veranda collapsed, windows were blown to bits, and some of their friends lay in pools of blood, injured by shrapnel fragments flying through the air.

  Priscilla was permanently on edge. Just as she feared the bombs falling from the skies without warning, she feared in equal measure the danger lurking much closer: the possibility her captors woul
d force her to convert to Islam and marry her off to one of their own. So she stayed in the room where they all slept, refusing to wander into other parts of the house unless it was absolutely necessary.

  Priscilla came up with a simple, two-pronged plan for survival. First: remain quiet and prayerful.

  When the girls voted for leaders among them to negotiate with their captors for additional soap or to ask for conditions to be improved, Priscilla made sure she was never included. She’d noticed a trend. All the girls who’d taken on the role of the group’s spokesperson in dealings with Boko Haram were suddenly married off to them.

  Secondly: remain as inconspicuous as possible and minimize all contact with the men.

  In March 2015, six months after the girls first arrived in Gwoza, the militants decided to move them back into the forest. At this point, they’d been separated from their families for almost a year. The men gave the girls no explanation for the decision, but it was more than likely triggered by the growing pressure caused by the intensifying military campaign to reclaim Gwoza, which was widely referred to as the group’s headquarters. In the months leading up to the relocation, there’d also been media reports of the girls being spotted in Gwoza by former Boko Haram abductees who were also once held in the town.

  In fact, back on April 14, 2015, exactly one year after the girls had disappeared, the BBC reported the accounts of four unnamed eyewitnesses who claimed to have seen some of the Chibok girls in Gwoza. One of them described seeing the girls in their hijabs being escorted by the militants. “They said they were the Chibok girls kept in a big house,” the eyewitness reportedly claimed. “We just happened to be on the same road as them.” Boko Haram knew it needed to move the girls.