The Right to Write
Edison Yongai
African Australian author and journalist, Edison Yongai, discusses his lifetime love of stories and writing – and its ultimate cost: being forced to flee his homeland of Sierra Leone. Edison is appearing at Sydney Writer’s Festival.
As a child in primary school in in Kono District in Sierra Leone, I loved listening to stories. The teachers wanted us to ask our parents to tell us stories so we could re-tell them in school. But my parents were busy – I grew up in a polygamous family and my mother had eight children. However, my grandmother, Kumba Yamato, was always ready to search in her bag of animal stories for me.
I went to a village school in the east of the country, where you could hardly lay hands on a story book. Even though I really wanted to, there was nothing to read. The only way to get a story book was from the children of rich families – by stealing it or exchanging it for your day’s lunch.
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In secondary school things were different. My first secondary school (Yengema Secondary School) was a Catholic school and was one of the best in the whole district. We were lucky that our teacher, by the name of Finnegan from Ireland, was the hardest-working English teacher I ever had. He would force us to pick out books from the school library, read them and write a report on them. By the end of the first year, I had read Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Kidnapped, Treasure Island, Shane, Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, and other books. I owe a lot to my school and English teacher, Edward Finnegan.
The first time I saw myself in print, I was a teenager. It was around 1976. I wrote a story called ‘O Justice, Where Are You?’ that was published in a magazine in the city, over 200 miles away from my village. It was about a rich man who killed a poor hunter’s only son in a village, through careless driving. In court, because of his riches, the rich man was set free by the judge. The poor man and his family wept and wept, and found it hard to recover from the agony. When he could no longer bear the grief, the poor man took his old single-barrel hunting gun and left his village for the town. In the town he searched for the rich man’s house – until, late in the evening, looking through a window, he saw the man and his family at dinner, laughing happily. He looked at the rich man’s son. Remembering his own son, his tears began to flow. He raised his gun and aimed it at the boy, but couldn’t pull the trigger. Instead he entered the house and held the family at gun-point, explaining he’d come for revenge – but he couldn’t do it. He said even if he killed the rich man’s son, his riches would not buy back his own son’s life – and would only cause him more grief. He told the rich man he forgave him and was going back to his village to forget everything. While this was going on, the rich man’s wife had phoned the police, telling them that a bandit had entered their house and was trying to kill them. The police arrived. The poor man, found in the house with a gun, was arrested. He was locked up for 10 years for attempted robbery. This just shows how corrupt our political system has been since the colonialists left the country right to this day.
After I’d written the story, I continued my studies to University. I then taught at a secondary school until 1987 when I was drafted into full journalism by the editor of the magazine that published ‘O Justice, Where Are You?’. He was now publishing a weekly newspaper. I also wrote articles for magazines in London.
By 1996 everybody in Sierra Leone was tired of corruption and other vices of politicians. I and some of my colleagues decided to start a newspaper called THE POINT. My first objective as the paper’s editor was to dig out and expose the corrupt activities of the government so as to ensure probity and fairness in governance. The articles I wrote after careful investigations backed by authentic documents, were not favoured by the government. In general African politicians don’t like criticism of any kind; all they want is praise even when they do the wrong thing.
Because of this series of articles, I was arrested in my office by plainclothes policemen and detained in a mosquito-infested, dirty and congested cell for more than a week without charge. When I was taken to court I was refused bail. This is because in my country, Sierra Leone, there is hardly any distinction between the executive, the legislature, and the judiciary; they are all fused and the president can control the judges and magistrates at will.
I was then sent on remand at the maximum security prison and kept in solitary confinement for nearly a week. After a series of detentions and release, the government dropped the case, following pressure from the international community and human rights organisations.
I published my newspaper throughout, even when the rebel fighters invaded the capital Freetown and turned it into a pool of blood. When they invaded the city for the second time in January 1999, they burnt my residence and everything I owned – I lost more than a dozen manuscripts of novels, plays, short stories and poetry. When I fled and went to my wife’s residence, they followed me there and burnt their house down. Finally I thought I had gambled with my life for far too long and I fled to neighbouring Guinea. There I wrote several articles for a local paper published in French.
In Guinea I was granted refugee status by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and was resettled in Australia in October 2001.
I have now had three books published by Macmillan Publishers in London: a novel ‘Who Killed Mohtta?’ and two children’s books, ‘Check, Come Here’ and ‘The Birthday Party’.
…Well, that’s it. My time on the library computer is now up, and so I must go…
Yours
Edison Yongai
Copyright, Edison Yongai, May 2005
Postnote: In Australia, Edison has completed a Masters in Journalism and now presents the popular Sierra Leone radio program on Radio Skid Row, while working on two novels about the war in Sierra Leone. To contact Edison, you can email: salbata2000@yahoo.com.au
