In searching for Gen Alpha (Part 2): A New Citizenship, By Toyin Falola,
not totally related this interesting item surfaced :
Rethinking the Case of John Joseph Akar
John Akar is indeed an interesting example - not only as he who composed the music of the Sierra Leone National Anthem , but also as a very talented broadcaster , I'd say a precursor of David Frost and Larry King and Jon Stewart and Stephen Sackur , in the era when Lionel Miller was the director of the Sierra Leone Broadcasting Service, and Joseph Findlay was one of the main news readers, John Akar had a weekly programme " My Guest " in which he interviewed various Sierra Leoenean and other guest of his from our movers and shakers community.
( Very interesting our SLBS - in 1963 I read the six O' Clock News in English, a couple of times after winning the third prize in Oral English in our O level exams -a spoken conversation and a dictation - (If I remember correctly, Violetta Luke and Jonathan Fitzjohn won the first and second prize respectively; well of course, I wasn't there to listen to what kinds of conversations they had with the examiner, suffice it to say that I was probably feeling a little like the battered and bruised Tyson Fury after being terribly walloped by Oleksandr Usyk for the second time in not so many months - " I won" said the battered and bruised Fury) Violetta later on became the director of SLBS; Gipu Felix-George a music connoisseur and the drummer in our band the Cacademics, was also director of the SLBS at a later period - most importantly, Gipu - on the phone from Manchester explained to me, how he had fallen foul of the later authorities, for having interviewed either Foday Sankoh himself or one of the RUF commanders and asking whoevere it was, why, against the grain of sound guerilla warfare strategy, they had gone out of their way to embark on the "cut-han" policy - amputataing their victims' hands - at the wrist -their victims in this case, the Sierra Leone rice-growing and rice-harvestingh peasantry - thus alienating them and their crucial support or sympathy for their "revolutionary cause ")
John Akar's younger brother Edward J Akar ( attended St. Edwards Secondary School,) also played at the position of fullback for Sierra Loene's National Football team , as indeed, did Stevens Bio ( the younger Brother of the current president of Sierra Leone, Julius Maada Bio)
Back then, if the law about Black African ancestry had not been in place, then, someone like Sierra Leone-born Nabih Berri ( currently the speaker of Lebanon's parliament ) and a host of wealthy Lebanese diamond miners and diamond merchants and bankers - with some of the grandest mansions in Beirut, could have entered Sierra Leone politics , and with money as king, could have had a good striking chance at wrangling their way to the Sierra Leone President and becoming undisputed King of all the Diamonds… In my last phone chat with Sierra Leone a few days ago, I was told that nearly all of Wilkinson Road is owned by "the Lebanese".
Akintola Wyse deliberates on the Indigenous Sierra Leone -Lebanese rivalries in
The Krio of Sierra Leone and H. C. Bankole-Bright and Politics in Colonial Sierra Leone, 1919–1958
Leo Spitzer also delineates the Colonial Brits - Creole - Lebanese interface in his
The Creoles of Sierra Leone: Responses to Colonialism, 1870-1945
#This" indigene" business ! On the authority of Samuel Tinga Khendekha Seisay I was reliably told that my first cousin Fr. Edward Hamelberg cssp ( of Austrian ancestry) should have rightfully been appointed the first indigenous Catholic Bishop of Sierra Leone - his mother was an indigenous Sierra Leoenean ,but that because of political machinations, Joseph Henry Ganda was appointed Bishop becaiús he was a "real indigene"
Gen Alpha (Part 2): A New Citizenship, By Toyin FalolaAdebayo Ajadi (ND Business Administration )Assistant Brand Manager,Toyin Falola Network- Pan-African University Press- The Toyin Falola Interviews- Toyin Falola Center for the Study of Africa- Toyin Falola Annual Conference on Africa and the African Diaspora (TOFAC) +234-810-7262-267 | +1 (512) 689-6067 | https://toyinfalolanetwork.orgFacebook | Twitter | YouTube | Linkedin
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue+subscribe@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/38a8f5d1-90c1-4423-83bb-6123fa5be151n%40googlegroups.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment