The Two Women in Lappas in Freetown

A Warima Village Boy Reflects on Sierra Leone

Yesterday, as I drove through central Freetown, I noticed two women walking along the street with lappas wrapped around their waists. Nothing unusual, really. But for some reason I kept thinking about them. They reminded me immediately of Warima, the village where I grew up.

In those days, I do not remember seeing women in Warima wearing trousers. Women wore lappas. It was not regarded as traditional dress or something reserved for special occasions. It was simply what women wore. Seeing two women dressed that way in the middle of Freetown, so many decades later, set me thinking about how Sierra Leone has changed, and about the subtle differences I have encountered among our people.

Warima was my first understanding of Sierra Leone. It was a Temne-speaking environment. People greeted one another properly, elders were respected, and adults could correct children who were not their own. People knew who you were and, more importantly, they knew your parents and family. I did not think of any of these things as culture. That was simply how people lived.

But I left Warima quite early and gradually discovered other Sierra Leones. I attended Tomlinson High School at Songo, near Waterloo. Later, I spent about two years teaching secondary school in Kono, living among predominantly Kono-speaking people. I then went to Njala University College, at that time a constituent college of the University of Sierra Leone. I lived at Mokonde for several years, first as a student and later as a research and teaching assistant before leaving for Germany. Njala brought me into a predominantly Mende-speaking environment.

So even before I left the country, I had lived among Sierra Leoneans speaking different languages and carrying somewhat different customs. Yet I do not remember feeling that these were vastly different worlds. The language changed. Some foods changed. Accents, greetings, and social practices varied. But there was always much that felt familiar.

Nearly three decades later, I returned home. My job allowed me to visit and spend time in every district headquarters.

I began noticing the little things.

In one place, the greeting might take longer. Somewhere else, the way one approached an elder or chief was slightly different. Certain foods became more common as we moved from one part of the country to another. Islam was more visible in the everyday rhythm of some communities, Christianity in others, although our remarkable religious mixing made any neat division impossible. Muslims and Christians attended one another’s ceremonies, lived together and married one another with an ease that we perhaps do not sufficiently appreciate.

The reception of visitors also interested me. An official delegation from Freetown might arrive ready to get down to business, while the community had its own order of things. First, people must greet. Introductions must be made. Elders and local authorities must be recognised. There might be a prayer and sometimes something to eat. Then the meeting could begin.

Language remained the most obvious difference as I travelled. Temne here, Mende there, Kono somewhere else, and the many other languages of our country. Yet Krio increasingly connected us. People moved comfortably from their mother tongue into Krio when somebody from another part of Sierra Leone joined the conversation. Sometimes even the Krio revealed where the speaker came from through an accent, rhythm, or expression.

Freetown was different, of course. It had developed its own urban culture and history. But the Freetown I returned to after many years abroad was also becoming Sierra Leone gathered into one city. People had come from every district, bringing their languages, food, dress and customs. At the same time, Freetown had travelled in the opposite direction. Its language, fashions, music and ways of doing things had reached towns and villages across the country.

That brings me back to the two women. Perhaps what caught my attention was not that they were wearing lappas, but that they were wearing them in central Freetown. Something that had been completely ordinary in the Warima of my childhood now caught my eye in the capital. At the same time, if I returned to a village today, I would see women and girls wearing trousers and other clothes that I do not remember seeing there as a boy.

Culture had travelled in both directions.

My profession taught me to classify people: district, chiefdom, urban, rural, ethnicity, language, religion, education and occupation. We need such categories to produce statistics. But people themselves are never quite so tidy. A Sierra Leonean may be born in one district, grow up in another, speak several languages, marry somebody from another ethnic group and spend most of adult life in Freetown.

After all my travels, I therefore find it difficult to draw hard cultural boundaries across Sierra Leone. The differences are there, but they often appear in small things: a word, an accent, a greeting, a meal, a piece of clothing, the way an elder is approached or the manner in which a visitor is welcomed.

Yesterday, those two women did not know that I had noticed them. They simply went on their way, and I drove on. But their lappas had taken me from Freetown back to Warima, then through Songo, Kono and Njala, and eventually across the Sierra Leone I rediscovered.

Perhaps that is what all those journeys have taught me. We have our differences, certainly, but they are often differences of shade rather than walls between us. Travel far enough across Sierra Leone and, amid the changing languages, accents, food and customs, you keep finding something familiar.

Yesterday, in the middle of Freetown, two women in lappas took this village boy home.

Bongolistically, Mallam O.