A Long Way Gone_ Memoirs of a Boy Soldier - Ishmael Beah [105]
After such gatherings, my peers and I—all the children between the ages of six and twelve—would brainstorm several possible answers that would avoid the death of one of our parents. There was no right answer. If you spared the monkey, someone was going to die, and if you didn’t, someone would also die.
That night we agreed on an answer, but it was immediately rejected. We told Pa Sesay that if any of us was the hunter, we wouldn’t have gone hunting for monkeys. We told him, “There are other animals such as deer to hunt.”
“That is not an acceptable answer,” he said. “We are assuming that you as the hunter had already raised your gun and have to make the decision.” He broke his kola nut in half and smiled before putting a piece in his mouth.
When I was seven I had an answer to this question that made sense to me. I never discussed it with anyone, though, for fear of how my mother would feel. I concluded to myself that if I were the hunter, I would shoot the monkey so that it would no longer have the chance to put other hunters in the same predicament.
CHRONOLOGY
It is believed, though not recorded in written form, that the Bullom (Sherbro) people were present along the coast of Sierra Leone before the 1200s, if not earlier—before European contact with Sierra Leone. By the beginning of the 1400s, many tribes from other parts of Africa had migrated and settled in what came to be known as Sierra Leone. Among these tribes were the Temne. They settled along the northern coast of present-day Sierra Leone, and the Mende, another major tribe, occupied the south. There were fifteen additional tribes scattered in different parts of the country.
1462 The written history of Sierra Leone begins when Portuguese explorers land, naming the mountains surrounding what is now Freetown Serra Lyoa (Lion Mountains) due to their leonine shape.
1500–early 1700s European traders stop regularly on the Sierra Leone Peninsula, exchanging cloth and metal goods for ivory, timber, and a small number of slaves.
1652 The first slaves in North America are brought from Sierra Leone to the Sea Islands, off the coast of the southern United States.
1700–1800 A slave trade thrives between Sierra Leone and the plantations of South Carolina and Georgia, where the slaves’ rice-farming skills make them particularly valuable.
1787 British abolitionists help four hundred freed slaves from the United States, Nova Scotia, and Britain return to Africa to settle in what they call the “Province of Freedom,” in Sierra Leone. These Krio, as they come to be called, are from all areas of Africa.
1791 Other groups of freed slaves join the “Province of Freedom” settlement, and it soon becomes known as Freetown, the name of the current capital of Sierra Leone.
1792 Freetown becomes one of Britain’s first colonies in West Africa.
1800 Freed slaves from Jamaica arrive in Freetown.
1808 Sierra Leone becomes a British crown colony. The British government uses Freetown as its naval base for antislavery patrols.
1821–1874 Freetown serves as the residence of the British governor, who also rules the Gold Coast (now Ghana) and Gambia settlements.
1827 Fourah Bay College is established and rapidly becomes a magnet for English-speaking Africans on the West Coast. For more than a century, it is the only European-style university in western sub-Saharan Africa.
1839 Slaves aboard a ship called the Amistad revolt to secure their freedom. Their leader, Sengbe Pieh—or Joseph Cinque, as he becomes known in the United States—is a young Mende man from Sierra Leone.
1898 Britain imposes a hut tax in Sierra Leone, decreeing that the inhabitants of the new protectorate be taxed on the size of their huts as payment for the privilege of British administration. This sparks two rebellions in the hinterland: one by the