By: Lans Gberie
(Guest Writer)
“There is no elixir for longevity,” Sama Siama Banya, seated in his bedroom, a walking stick in hand, told me. It sounded like a practised line: I know he has used it before, in an article reflecting on his eventful life shortly after he turned 90. His friends, he wrote then, in a widely syndicated piece, “continually ask the secret of my long life; and my answer has been constant – the Grace and Mercy of the Almighty.” Dr. Banya is a medical doctor, and also a lay (or local, as he prefers) Methodist preacher: the two influences mesh, in the lineaments of his life, oddly easily. “One may take care of oneself, heed all the medical advice, but in the last analysis, He has the final say.”
The Doctor’s bedroom is spacious and airy, with a decent view of the city (now somewhat neutered by the noisy disturbances of an evangelical church). It is a later intrusion into what, when Dr. Banya built his house in the 1970s, must have been a lush, salubrious environment. Now, the ever-busy church, with its singing, stampeding congregants, nullifies the sense of a quiet retirement home he must have dreamt of. Dr. Banya did not seem to mind; he had told me on my way to meet him to look for the church as the key landmark towards his house: many formerly quiet residential places in Freetown and other cities are now blessed with the same kind of evangelical neighbourliness. Dr. Banya now spends his days mostly in his bedroom, with occasional walks around the large compound. He uses the stick for support but can walk around the house without it.
The Doctor has turned 95, but with his austere good looks and measured, carefully modulated voice each sentence clear and thoughtful, indicating a preternaturally lucid mind – he appeared to me when I visited him at least two decades younger. He understands why most visitors marvel at this endurance. “I ascribe it to providence,” he said, with a smile. “For I can’t say it is in my genes or DNA. My grandfather, Chief Kailondo, died at 51; my father passed away in 1942, at 62,” Dr. Banya said. This was at the height of the Second World War; Dr. Banya was 12; he was born in 1930: he drops this date, which was decades before most his visitors were born, matter-of-factly.
His grandfather was a famous warrior, founder of a small empire, which is now the district of Kailahun, in eastern Sierra Leone; and established its capital with the same name. The hazards of Kailondo’s day job may not have been entirely helpful to his lifespan: he died of a sudden illness after prevailing in one of his wars. As for Dr. Banya’s father, a Paramount Chief, many people those days would have considered the age at which he died, 62, as very advanced indeed. To Dr. Banya, now more than 30 years older than that, 62 was youthful. He was doing his long walks on Lumley Beach, and the annual marches of his alma mater, Bo School, till he was in his 80s.
Dr. Banya speaks in full sentences; everything he says is carefully chosen, print ready. The personality that his famous newspaper column, Puawui (which he has discontinued) might suggest to the reader – wise, mordant, unhurried and unawed – is exactly his. There is no attempt at protective self-satire. He started the column when he was in early 60s, at first exclusively for The Vision newspaper, edited by Siaka Massaquoi; such was its popularity that it later became syndicated. His trademark grey hair was already the distinctive feature, hence Puawui (literally grey head in Mende; connoting wisdom).
The tone – measured, lacking in anger or malice – is the same, when he speaks or when he writes. “During the rebel war,” he said, “Foday Sankoh stayed in my father’s house in Kailahun and made several of my relatives his ‘wives’. When we met, after insulting me publicly, he called me his daemia (brother-in-law.) For him, this was something to boast of, raping women. He laughed when he told me this. He thought it was funny.” I had been present at the initial meeting in Yamoussoukro, Cote D’Ivoire, in 1996 when Sankoh insulted Banya in a sudden fit of rage.
It was baffling to onlookers. Dr. Banya knew I was there, and he was eager to explain the background to this confusing episode to me. Sankoh, he said, had long nursed a grievance or two for him. Before the rude public attack, Sankoh had asked Dr. Banya about money (Le. 500) he had not paid him for a job he had done for him as photographer at Segbwema in the 1980s but told him it was alright. He didn’t have to make the payment. It also turned out that Sankoh was angry that Banya had written a letter to him, which he got furtively dropped off before the Banya compound at Kailahun where Sankoh was staying. In it, Banya fiercely reproached Sankoh: why, he asked the warlord, did Sankoh start his atrocious war in Kailahun, rather than in Sankoh’s home district of Tonkolili?
I had in fact read the details of this episode in Dr. Banya’s delightful 484-page autobiography, Looking Back: My Life and Times, published by SLWS in 2015. It is probably the most complete autobiography by an important Sierra Leonean politician ever published, interesting and important. He writes that during a private meeting between him and Sankoh, arranged by Ivorian Foreign Minister Amara Essy, Sankoh told him that “he had received my letter with its cheeky contents, and that if he were not using my family compound as his residence, he would have burnt it down in order to teach me a lesson. He had also taken into consideration the fact that we were now related by marriage although he had not yet paid me any dowry.”
Geography, he told Banya, determined his choice of Kailahun as the point of incursion into Sierra Leone. “Doctor, in your letter you asked why I had started my attack in Kailahun…The answer is simple: I had planned my attack from Liberia, and Kailahun was just next door. We surveyed the whole area as far as Bo and realized that there was nothing to stop us from overrunning the country because you people had nothing no weapons, and no real fighting men. But a most important reason was that your people, the Mendes, are very friendly and hospitable and they gave me a home in Segbwema.”
The Banya house, which Sankoh would have burnt down had he not been living there and made some of its occupants his ‘wives’, was described with a waspish air by the great writer Graham Greene, who spent a day or two in Kailahun in 1935 (Dr. Banya would have been 5 years old) on his way to Liberia for his epic bush trek. In Journey Without Maps (1936), he describes its owner, Banya’s father, as “one of the richest chiefs in the Protectorate,” and the house as new and standing “above the huts, an absurd concrete skyscraper with row on row of stained-glass windows not made to open; in one corner, tucked away, an unpainted door and a flight of splintery steps.” Waspish but not inaccurate: when I visited Kailahun in 2009, I was struck by the fact the house was still the most prominent structure in the town. Dr. Banya did not seem to recognize the writer’s name when I mentioned his brief stay in Kailahun.
“I am going to go away smiling,” the words were spoken without any prompting from me. Dr. Banya did not sound elegiac; his face lit up in triumph as he spoke: he seemed happy that his work was fully done. That work began a long time ago.
Upon completing his medical studies in England over 60 years ago, Dr. Banya returned to Sierra Leone and worked as a government doctor for before building a sizable hospital in Kenema, which he successfully ran. But he was always political, interested in the wider currents of events. In England, he was active in student politics, but, unlike some of his peers, whose focus was Pan African, the frontiers for Dr. Banya were narrower, his anxieties focused on Sierra Leone. And when he entered politics, upon the invitation of President Siaka Stevens, he was lucky to be appointed to many senior level cabinet posts, including Finance, from 1978 to 1985.
Some people thought that Sankoh’s public excoriation of Banya in Yamoussoukro in 1996 ruined his chances of being made Foreign Minister, as Kabbah had planned. (“And what is President Kabbah’s special representative [Banya] doing here? They have ruined the country; SLPP today, APC tomorrow and SLPP again…” Sankoh berated Banya then.) In fact, so stalwart was Banya’s support of Kabbah, risking his life to stand up against the Armed Forces Ruling Council (AFRC) junta, which overthrew Kabbah in 1997, that once restored to power by Nigerian troops in 1998, Kabbah appointed Dr. Banya as Foreign Minister, a position he held for several years. He continued to serve in Kabbah’s cabinet as Senior Adviser till 2007, when Kabbah handed over power to Ernest Bai Koroma.
He always had his detractors, many of them driven by political disagreements. The writer and politician Sheka Tarawalie wrote a mock tribute “to the late Sama Banya” in December 2002 paying “my last ‘respap’ to a tenaciously stubborn old man who, like the priest in Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God, does not know that his time is up until he discovers himself deserted and demented”. To adapt Mark Twain, the report of that demise, as well as the underlying sentiment of the ‘tribute’, turned out to be widely exaggerated. Dr. Banya soldiered on; he published his well received memoirs 13 years after the farewell tribute, and he only stopped writing his column a few years after that.
His only regret, Dr. Banya said, is that what defined his political life – tolerance, cosmopolitanism, the ability to interact easily across lines of political party, the thing that the nihilism of Sankoh saw as opportunism – may now be entirely impossible. “The APC leadership did not congratulate Maada Bio when he was declared winner in 2018,” he said. “But think about this: Ernest Koroma’s father, Sylvanus Koroma, was SLPP Chairman of Makeni Town Council. It is difficult now to see members of the APC and SLPP sitting together at a bar drinking. But one must not take politics too seriously. The problem is that some of our people in politics do not have alternative professions; they are just politicians. So, politics has become a zero-sum game. I fear this tendency, political intolerance, much more than anything for the future of our country.”
As I rose to leave, I asked Dr. Banya what entertains him these days – all his children, middle aged or older, are away. He has a nurse and one grandson around. He enjoys his glass or two of Campari, with ice, in the evening, and he likes dancing when he gets the opportunity, which is not often. His sense of humour remains charming. A couple of weeks after meeting him, I wrote Dr. Banya that he might have made a mistake about the age of his grandfather; I had him say he died at 45, but the historical record said 51. A week later, he wrote me in reply this: “A thousand and more apologies for my delayed response. The untrue excuse is old age. The honest one is INERTIA.” He then gave me the accurate dates for both his grandfather and father: “My grandfather, Kailondo: 1845-1896. My father, Momoh Banya: 1880-1942.”
I felt at that point that it was fitting that Dr. Banya had not read Graham Greene. The Englishman had his father’s name rendered as “Momno Kpanyan” in Journey Without Maps.