BY CHEUKAI SONGHAI MAKARI
232NEWS, FREETOWN
At what point do people notice the reality of what’s happening around them? Day in, day out going through the motions yet the pot is slowly boiling over and no one seems to notice. In the background of our lives there’s a house on fire but because the environment we live in doesn’t give anyone a second to come up for air we’ve become numb to the smell of smoke. If you dare to look up and start taking in the warning signs that something has shifted, is it too late?
We have been conditioned to not speak up. Be it based on trauma from when the loudest but most harmful voices took center stage, or the fear that comes in tandem when living in an environment where there is freedom of speech but no guaranteed freedom after the speech. We are distracted by the perceived mundane of our daily lives, failing to realize that the conditions couldn’t be furthest from mundane. They’re brutal. Violent in every sense of the word, whether passive or active.
Being bred in this violence that is foreign to our being yet seeped into our fabric leaves us in such a dazed state that we are unable to decipher the objective actor.The actor that is the bringer of violence into the home and into the mind of the native, perpetuating its existence like a virus in its host. The invisible hand.
On August 10th 2022, the slow burn of cohesive chaos finally erupted into the reactive violence of a pot boiling over. Violent, visceral and vulnerable, the people of Sierra Leone collectively expressed that they deserved better. After years of rumbling, a fearless few lost their lives in the foreshock of what happens when suffering acts as a blinding force. When the passive violence transitions to its most active and direct form, evoking the same reaction in return. At the invisible hands of the puppeteer turning our own people, our leaders, against us. The invisible hand that encourages us to point the finger at each other so we never think to question the same hand that sparked the match.
On August 10th 2022, through an expression that has become vilanized by stigma, Sierra Leone let out an audible cry for help for the first time in years. So raw and all-encompassing of the hurt that can only be channeled from the perspective of those who truly have nothing left to give, except their voice. Voices that were amplified by those who dared to come up for air, but only to be silenced by the ones the message was directed to. The ones who needed to hear it the most.
Living up to the strictness associated with African households, self-advocacy is seen as a sign of disrespect and undermining that often leaves no room for expression. Instead of looking beneath the surface to get to the root of the frustration, outspokenness is seen as a question to authority. The authority that in turn embodied the stereotype and delivered a hard dose of tough love on the people who had chosen them to guide and lead. As if living in the reality they experience isn’t tough enough. So called leaders use fear tactics and acts of violence to create a rosy picture on the outside to meet standards that are not their own. Ignoring the warning signs coming from inside the house.
Now having been denounced as a “Bloody Insurrection”, the palpable discontent in the republic may have been stifled temporarily, but not quelled. What was dubbed a “Bloody Insurrection” is a loaded and intentional attempt to further corrode the spirit of awareness and regard for the budding military state of active violence giving citizens no other option but to enlist as soldiers in the fight to survive. Only when we finally look up to see the flame in its path of destruction, it’s too late.
Driven By the Power of Love and Never the Love of Power.
Cheukai Songhai Makari is a young passionate Sierra Leonean based in New York City. She was raised in Freetown and is pursuing a career in economic development with a drive to increase the standard of living for the average Sierra Leonean.
