Harmattan by Jackson Michael

Author:Jackson, Michael [Jackson, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SOC002000, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Anthropology / General, REL029000, RELIGION / Ethnic & Tribal
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2015-04-14T04:00:00+00:00

Ezekiel’s Story

It was against this background of the initiations, with its rumors of hidden menace and its intimations of rebirth, that Ezekiel gave me the dog-eared pages that chronicled the terrible events that had befallen him and his village toward the end of the dry season of 1995.

After finding a corner in the parlor of Bala’s house where I could read undisturbed, Ezekiel left me. “I will be with Bala if you need me,” he said. But I hardly heard him, engrossed as I was by the manuscript I now held in my hands.

It wasn’t the first attack on Sangbamba. The RUF came eighteen months earlier, brandishing their weapons and pillaging. They were seeking revenge for the tamaboro attacks on them.

Mystified, I went out to the porch to seek clarification from Ezekiel. “Who were the tamaboros?” I asked.

Ezekiel explained that the tamaboros were a kind of militia, recruited mainly from among village hunters, who used their special powers of night vision, immunity to bullets, stealth, shape-shifting, and silence to track and ambush RUF brigades. Terrified by the supernatural abilities and guerrilla tactics of the tamaboros, the RUF retreated to their strongholds in the south. But the military junta in Freetown, itself increasingly threatened by the successes of the tamaboros, abruptly ordered the militias to disband. It was at this time that the RUF regrouped and, with the help of renegade soldiers, reclaimed the diamond fields and drove north in retaliative raids, scorching and burning at will. “But they targeted only certain houses, and certain people,” Ezekiel said. “The destruction was by no means random. And Sangbamba survived, more or less unscathed.”

I went back indoors and began reading again.

In those days you never knew what to expect. To travel anywhere was to risk ambush and death. And stories spread like wildfire, of atrocities committed by the RUF and South African mercenaries alike. Small boys tortured or thrown to their death from helicopters by the South Africans. Old men thrown into pit latrines and drowned or made to drink boiling palm oil. Fathers forced to rape their daughters. Everything was possible. You took nothing for granted. You did not know what to believe or who to trust. But, even if you believed everything you heard, you could do nothing. You could only go to ground like a hunted animal or sit at home like a frightened child, unable to tell the difference between the word fire and actual flames. And so I traveled to Alikalia that March, and on to Sangbamba. I met no rebels. I heard of nothing untoward. And, like others, I let myself be lulled into a sense of false security.

The very day I returned here, Chief Keli called a meeting. The news from Freetown was that the Nigerian ECOMOG forces had forced the junta from power and that President Tejan Kabbah had returned to Freetown from Guinea where he had been living in exile. Junta soldiers and their RUF allies were now fighting a last-ditch battle against superior forces.

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