Commentary
Anthony K. Kamara (Snr), Winnipeg, Canada.
I was browsing the web weeks ago when I strayed into a May 26, 2006, publication in the Awareness Times with the Headline ’Late A. D .Wurie deserves recognition in Sierra leone’ which was Dr Alpha Wurie’s response to Lunsar Descendants Union’ (USA) opposition to naming a School in Lunsar after his Late dad.
Let me begin this story by thanking members of the Lunsar Descendants Union in the United states for doing a fantastic job in their brave challenge to Dr Alpha Wurie’s embellishment of his father’s service in Sierra Leone. When a child gets the story from a parent it is the bright side that he always gets, not all of it. The down side is often ignored or swept under the carpet. Dr. Wurie did not believe someone knows the story not only from oral narrative from old people but also from documented sources. I got the undocumented oral side from our Lunsar people most or all of whom are now deceased. But aside from this, I have a documented source which will tell the worldwide readership that the son either did not say it all, or know it all or simply chose to lie; and he went on to plead with Dr Sylvia Blyden to have his side published and instructed a young Civil Servant Sayoh Kamara to write the story as he dictated it to him. I understand the Public Service language of “I am directed to”. Sayoh Kamara had no choice but to “echo his master’s voice” for which he is not to blame. I am also pleading with Dr Sylvia Blyden to kindly publish this response to that article as my side of the story, so that readers will determine who has the facts.
True Late Ali Dausy Wurie was an eminent Sierra Leonean who served this nation very well and so in appreciation for dedicated and meritorious service won many distinguished honours like MBE, CBE, MRSL, Membership of a number of District Councils and President of the SLFA etc. For all this, I call on all Sierra Leoneans to posthumously salute him for this. He is the best decorated of all the Gbinti Wurie I know of.
I don’t like to correct an intellectual of Dr Wurie’s stature for his false narrative of this story. But unless people are corrected, they will go on misleading the people believing that nobody knows the story. Dr Wurie wrote in his father’s profile that his dad graduated from the Bo Government School in 1931 after successfully completing his secondary education. I have told the reading public time and again that Bo School which was opened in 1906, was upgraded to Junior Secondary School in 1936. So how did A D Wurie complete secondary education in 1931 when the school was still a primary Standard VI school? Dr Alpha Wurie must be careful about his facts and say only what he is sure of so as not to be challenged.
However, this account is untrue. I have said in earlier postings that Bo School was started as a Primary school and for thirty long years 1906-1936 it remained a primary School. If A D Wurie left in 1931, understandably he was a Standard VI Primary school leaver because the school was only upgraded to Junior secondary status in 1936 that is five years after A .D. Wurie left the school; and it is four years later that Bo School became a full-fledged secondary school in 1940: so that both Late Amadu Wurie his uncle and one of the foundation pupils and his younger brother Ali Dausy a later pupil never had secondary education as they both left school years before 1936. This was Alpha Wurie’s LIE No.1
In the same profile, Dr. Wurie mentioned that his dad was a renowned Economist and Educationist. I don’t know the source of this concocted account. Dr. Wurie was probably confusing his Late Uncle Pa Amadu Wurie a former Minister of Education in the 1960s whom every Sierra Leonean knows to be a veteran Educationist and, who having graduated from Bo School Standard VI, taught and became Acting Principal of the school for some years, and later became Principal of Koyeima Secondary School from 1935 to 1945 and also Kenema Secondary School in 1955. LIE No.2 Late A D Wurie was never an Educationist. DR, Wurie was silent in the years 1931-1956; he did not state what the dad was doing. That period of silence showed there was some skeleton in the cupboard nobody must see. I did not see that Skeleton Dr Wurie as I was not yet of school age, but I know about it from documented sources and local Lunsar oral accounts, and it is my pleasure to share it with you (if you did not know) and the Sierra Leonean reading public. Lie No.3: A D Wurie was a clerk at the mines not an Economist. What Economics does a Standard VI pupil know even in those days? After his forced exit from Delco, he was employed at the United African Company (UAC). Dr. Wurie, when and where did A D Wurie read Economics?
Now the DELCO story:
The story is told that in 1931 at the age of 21, Ali Dausy Wurie secured his first job as clerk at the Sierra Leone Development Company (DELCO) after leaving the Bo School Standard VI. Three years later he was promoted to the position of Personnel Officer at the mines, a position which gave him the advantage of closely working with the White European personnel. It was an admirable and enviable position for the first Sierra Leonean and a Blackman with all its benefits.
Also at this period at the same mines in Lunsar, Late Siaka Stevens a product of the Albert Academy secondary School was also employed from 1931 to 1946 where he worked on the construction of the DELCO railway linking Pepel port and the iron-ore mines in Lunsar. In 1943, Siaka Stevens helped found the United Mine Workers Union which he served as Secretary-General. In 1946 he was appointed to represent workers’ interests. This was the genesis of lifelong malice and acrimonious relations and tensions between Stevens and Dausy Wurie which was to affect their future political relations and made the Fulla as an ethnic group opposed to the APC from its inception to this day. A D Wurie accused Siaka Stevens of being behind the strike at DELCO and the Lunsar Temne of destroying him. He did not mention his betrayal of the poor Mine workers to the White administration, instead he went on to portray Siaka Stevens and the Temne people of Lunsar as enemy of the Fulla. To be fair to the Fulla, no member of that ethnic group ever understood why there is animousity between them and the Temne people. They simply accept that the Temne hate them by the incitement of Siaka Stevens during his days at the Mines. When such pronouncement came from one considered as an educated Fulla, all his brethren would naturally believe him. No Fulla of any old age group today can tell why their ethnic group don’t support the APC (apart from the One Party Era) as a political party or accused the Lunsar Temne of being behind what happened. Were there not workers from the South and East of the country leaving at the Company’s Labour Camp? So why blame Siaka Stevens and the Temne of Lunsar for the events of 1950 instead of blaming himself?
The conditions of service including miserable wages for the workers were too unbearable, and while workers were demanding better conditions of service, A D Wurie was believed to be the stumbling block to their interests opposing any wage increase. Siaka Stevens was the poor workers’ champion as Secretary General of the United Mine Workers Union was on the side of the workers in demanding a wage increase and better conditions of service, and had become a thorn in the flesh of the company while Wurie was their darling. The UMWU wanted Siaka Stevens as Union Secretary-General to be involved in any negotiations with the SLDC on workers’ rights. The Company did not want the Union’s involvement but preferred to use their young personnel officer Wurie. This was the beginning of problems. Things had become so bad by 1950 that the workers decided to go on an industrial action against the opponent to workers’ rights in a violent strike in October 1950. True the workers had insidious plans for the personnel officer if they could have caught him.
But in any strike plan, there is always the possibility of traitors. It appeared there was a fifth columnist among the workers who leaked the plan to Wurie not to enter Lunsar town after work that day as there was a plot to attack his person. This information helped save him. In the afternoon of that day, Lunsar people along Port Loko Road saw him speeding on his BSA Motor bike with his bowler felt hat and khaki shorts from the mines towards Port Loko and that was the last time Wurie ever set foot in Lunsar town. So their target had escaped; what the strikers did next was to descend on his compound which stood opposite the house of the then town chief Pa Santigie Folla Kabia (father of the current Director of sports Chief Bai Kabia) destroyed his property and set the building in flames. We were told there was no looting of his property. Their aim was to destroy everything. Does this Lunsar workers’ action merit naming a school in a town A D Wurie fled for dear life? Is this a fitting send off for A.D Wurie? I believe Alpha Wurie did not know the details of this story and so chose to ignore the down side of it.
Here was the ”Report of the Board of inquiry into the causes and circumstances of the Stoppages of Work at the Works of the Sierra Leone Development Company, Ltd., October 1950, at Marampa and Pepel” (mimeographed; Sierra Leone Government Archives), pp.11 ff., 19 ff.
“It would seem that only the more skilled wage-labourers in such places as the hinterland mining towns does one find a specific populist definition of goals. One such instance in Sierra Leone was a strike in 1950 by the African United Mine Workers’ Union in the iron-ore mining towns of Marampa and Pepel, Northern Province. Strikers burned “the house of the African personnel officer and commited various other acts of hooliganism and violence,” but the goals involved were quite clear: the union wanted the British iron-ore firm, the Sierra Leone Development Company, to negotiate in all matters affecting the workers with their own elected representative and Secretary-General Mr Siaka Stevens, who was himself a former worker”.
Martin Kilson in “Political Change in a West African State Page 186.
Thus abruptly ended the career of A D Wurie at the mines in Lunsar after 19 years of service. It was therefore seen as deliberate bully to even suggest to the young Paramount Chief of Lunsar the starting of a school to be named after a man rejected in that town. The Chief did not know this story and is too young to know it. DR Wurie simply used political power as Minister of Education under his SLPP to force this matter on the town. The Wurie are notorious for provocation. In 1965 as Minister of Education, Late Amadu Wurie, the Muslim Minister instead of opening a school at GBINTI, chose to provoke the Sierra Leone Anglican Mission (former CMS) to rename the Annie Walsh Memorial School as “AMADU WURIE MEMORIAL SCHOOL”. I want to believe it was old age that was telling on him. Howeve , with the fall of the SLPP in 1967, the name fell with him and the AWMS regained its name.
True Ali Dausi Wurie was in 1964 appointed to be Director of DElCO a company from which he fled. But A D Wurie never set foot again in Lunsar town from 1950 on to the end of his life for fear that his old colleagues most of whom were still in active service were unhappy over his new position. In all his visits to the Mines without exception, he was flown by the SLDC helicopter from Delco House right into the Mines and also took off from there back to Delco House in Freetown. He never set foot on Lunsar soil for the rest of his life.
The 1967 General election in which the SLPP imported trucks of Fulla from Guinea to vote for the SLPP further generated malice between the Fulla community and Siaka Stevens new Government when the new Prime Minister immediately after being sworn in had all imported ’gorilla’ or mercenary Fulla rounded up , loaded in lorry trucks and ferried back across the border into Guinea territory including the Fulla Tribal Headman at Krootown Road. Who in his right mind would blame Mr Siaka Stevens for returning ’gorilla mercenary’ voters, a group that caused the confusion of March 1967 Election all of whom could not even say ’KUSHEH’? These were all the reasons that made the Guinea Fulla resident here to believe that Siaka Stevens did not like Fulla, an allegation that most Fulla believe.
Let me assure Dr. Wurie that the descendants of Lunsar are going to re-open that fight for the name change or merge it with another school in Lunsar because they don’t appreciate that name in their town which they consider provocative. Dr Wurie himself was born and raised in Freetown and it is doubtful if he has ever been to Gbinti. His only claim to be Gbinti is that of ancestry.
I know the reason for not starting a school at GBINTI. The Wurie are not a popular family at Gbinti a predominantly Temne settlement with Fulla minority. Late Pa Amadu Wurie would not have won election in Gbinti in 1962, but Sir Milton Margai put him up and so, a must win. But in 1967 Pa Wurie was defeated hands down and retired peacefully not to his ancestry Gbinti, but to Mahera Kaffu Bullom. In fact Gbinti is just an ancestral home of identification for the Wurie family. They don’t care about Gbinti and they all moved to Freetown many years ago having only one old storey building along the main road. I slept in that house with my late Grandfather many years ago. Most if not all Gbintians of today’s GBinti don’t speak Fulla. The Lingua Franca is Temne who are in the majority. The only few Fulla words people like Alpha Wurie can utter are: Baba for Papa, Neneh for Mama, kow for Uncle or aunt and Nkorthor for big brother or Big sister and ofcourse, jarama which we all know.
Finally if Dr Alpha Wurie wants to boast with lies about Ali Dausy Wurie’s days at the Marampa mines, this is the true story. He did a very bad job for our people and does not therefore deserve a memorial to his name. Readers may now compare the two versions and see whose story is more credible.
Comments