Editor’s Note: This article is culled from the popular Salone Discussion Forum.
By Mohamed A. Jalloh, USA.
Good Evening my SALONEDiscussion sisters and brothers,
Today, we humbly introduce yet another Sunday feature in our constant quest to make our forum an even better total experience for our valuable members: "Reflections." This is the result of our wildly successful Sunday feature, "A Walk Down Musical Memory Lane," which showcases musical selections.
However, instead of music, our newest introduction will feature reflections that any of our valuable members may wish to share about a public figure in our beloved nation’s recent history (say, during the past 100 years). The individual need not be a Sierra Leonean, but since ours is a forum focused on SL, it would be preferable for some action or words of the individual to have had an impact, however small, and whether positive or negative, on our country. Other members are encouraged to contribute their thoughts on the public figure so that a fuller public profile of the individual may eventually emerge. The goal, ideally, is to gain insights that are not available in the public record and which may help us move our country forward. However, that is only an ideal: at a minimum, we would hopefully contribute to making a fuller public record about the featured individual.
It is with great humility that I kick off the series with my reflections on one of our country’s most accomplished and yet unsung heroes, a brilliant economist and scholar, who was born 99 years ago today.
Noah Arthur William Cox-George (shown in photo above), a Sierra Leonean, was born on June 15, 1915 in Nigeria, 17 years after the end of the Hut Tax War in SL that had pitted Themne Chief Bai Bureh of Kasseh and his Sierra Leonean allies against the British colonialists who had imposed a so-called hut tax to finance their operations in SL and, incredibly, according to one writer, Richard Chipchase, "to force Africans to work" (as if before the hut tax war Africans lived off manna that dropped into their laps from heaven)! http://www.humanities360.com/index.php/the-british-empires-hut-tax-introduced-in-1898-2-12288/
Prof. Cox-George’s birth preceded that of U.S. President John F. Kennedy by about two years. Additional information about Prof. Cox-George in the public record may be found via this link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noah_Arthur_William_Cox-George
Prof. Cox-George, an alumnus of the SL Grammar School in Freetown as well as the London School of Economics where he obtained a master’s degree in economics, graduated from Oxford University, also in England, with a doctorate in economics in 1954. His critically acclaimed publications include the following writings: "Finance and Development in West Africa: the Sierra Leone Experience" (1961), "Crucifixion of SL? An Examination of the new Constitutional Proposals, Etc." (1948), and "Report on African Participation in Commerce of Sierra Leone" (1958). He played a major role in establishing the economics department, not only at a university in Nigeria, but also at Fourah Bay College in Freetown, SL, which is where I first met him in 1973 in my first year as a student in the Faculty of Economics and Social Studies.
My memories of that moment are a blur: I had to have a faculty member sign my "course form" which FBC alumni would remember as the "passport" without which a student could not officially enter any class. I remember waiting in line at the only "skyscraper" at FBC, the John F. Kennedy Building that housed mainly the Faculty of Economics, for Prof. Cox-George’s signature on my form and hearing gleeful hair-raising stories from older students (undoubtedly intended to terrorize us new students) about how mean and fearsome he was. So, you can imagine that by the time it was my turn to enter his office I was trembling with fear at what lay ahead of me behind his partly open door. Mercifully, nothing fearsome happened to me.
Prof. Cox-George, in his characteristically gruff manner and voice growled, "yes?" I replied in a tiny voice that I had a course form for him to sign. He replied: "Give it to me." He looked it over briefly and then signed it. That was it! I had survived my first encounter with the alleged implacable terror of the economics faculty — the destroyer of budding teenage dreams of a degree in economics from FBC (if you believed the older students)!
That was a harbinger of our future relationship — a relationship that had little resemblance to the stereotypical caricature of perhaps SL’s greatest economist, Prof. N.A. Cox-George. Four years later, I would spend lots of time in Dr. Cox-George’s office on the top floor of the Kennedy building, as he meticulously pored over my handwritten drafts of my B.Sc (Hons) Economics dissertation. I still have copies of it with his cryptic comments (in red ink) in the margins. His greatest compliment was a single word: Good. Never excellent, at least in my experience. So, his "good" was the equivalent of excellent for more liberal graders. Similarly, his worst notation was "untidy." Fortunately, I never received such a compliment from the great man!
However, I do remember a story narrated to me by some of the older students about a certain gentleman, a classmate, who will remain unnamed. The last time I saw him was at a graduate African students’ conference in Waterloo, Iowa in 1988, when he was a graduate student of theology and I was an MBA student at Washington State University. Back at FBC, in SL, the story went, our friend, who I will call Mr. T., received his paper he had submitted to Prof. Cox-George with a single notation — in red, of course: Untidy.
Incensed at the cryptic allusion to what he thought was the cosmetic appearance of his paper, Mr. T eventually revved up enough courage by the end of several days of his increasing anger to approach Dr. Cox-George’s office. He knocked, was told to go in, and with second thoughts about the wisdom of his uncharacteristically bold move already clouding his brain, Mr. T heard Prof. Cox-George’s trademark greeting, "yes?" very faintly, as if from a far distance — so discombobulated was he by that time. So, he rushed the following memorable words out of his mouth before his always uncertain courage completely deserted him: "Please sir you wrote "untidy" on my paper, but it’s clean!"
As the story was told to us, Prof. Cox-George fixed Mr. T with a baleful eye, flicked the ever-present cigarette ash from his shirt front, and growled at Mr. T (he seldom spoke in complete sentences to students outside the classroom): "Not your paper — your ideas!" Then, he turned back to the papers he had been reading in an unmistakable sign of dismissal! Mr. T stumbled out of the office in utter humiliation and with rising impotent anger — which is how the story came to be notorious as he vented his frustration the only way he could: by spreading the tale of his humiliation far and wide.
In my final undergraduate year, after completion of my dissertation, I was fortunate to be invited by Dr. Cox-George to his house at Kortright, where I was surprised to learn that he had been caring all those years for his disabled daughter — perhaps a source of his gruff manner that he employed frequently with students. Later, after I started working at the Sierra Leone Produce Marketing Board (SLPMB), he would visit me at my office on his once-monthly trip to SLPMB’s Cline Town headquarters to buy his bag of rice in those days in the late 1970’s when rice was frequently scarce following the sudden collapse of the SL Rice Corporation and the SL’s govt.’s hasty transfer of its responsibilities to what was then, arguably, the best-run corporation in SL — the SLPMB. Cf. http://www.thepatrioticvanguard.com/spip.php?article1074
I have always wondered what SL would have been like if the SL government had listened to Prof. Cox-George when he argued that SL did not need foreign loans to develop its economy — a point he frequently emphasized to me in our monthly discussions at my office as the SL government of Pres. Siaka Stevens piled on debt after massive debt in the run-up to hosting the OAU conference in 1980.
Best regards,
Moh’m
The author, Mr. Mohamed A. Jalloh.
About the author: Mohamed A. Jalloh, known to his friends as Moh’m, earned a B.Sc (Hons) Economics degree from Fourah Bay College (FBC) in 1978. He was the youngest student ever admitted in the university’s then nearly 150-year history as the oldest institution of higher learning in sub-Saharan Africa. He was also the first Sierra Leonean to graduate from FBC with a joint major in economics and accounting. Upon graduation he was recruited at the Sierra Leone Produce Marketing Board where he ended his exemplary 14-year service to his native Sierra Leone as head of the Economic Planning Department. Mohamed Jalloh, who also holds MBA and Master of Accounting degrees from Washington State University in the USA, subsequently immigrated to the USA where he has established a successful internationally-recognized career in financial services, investment management, and social security administration.
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