Freetown Part 3: Beginnings

As a student in Sierra Leone, Samura was exposed to early protests against the end of free education

By Sorious Samura

FREETOWN, Sierra Leone (CNN) -- And then there were two.

We took Tamba and Mariama back to Freetown to the home of a good friend of mine, Mrs. Mani and her family.

Mrs. Mani is the wife of paramount chief of Kono, where both children were abducted from. As is traditional in my country, she has an obligation to all the people from her area. Her home has become a haven for people from Kono, and she is part of the hope in my country.

"Mariama and Tamba, I know they weren't glad to go with those people," Mrs. Mani says. "They too belong to a family, so that's why, with all my heart I received them."

"But how were you able to get them to relax and mix and play with all your children?" I ask her.

"You know, children are children. Children have no boundaries," she says. "If they were adult, they would be reserved. But we all know we were in a war. And all of us who were running, trying to escape, we knew that even our own children were being forced, they were caught and forced to do things that they didn't want to do."

Lessons in power

SPECIAL REPORT Follow Sorious Samura's Return to Freetown:  • Introduction  • Part 1: Release  • Part 2: Reunion  • Part 3: Beginnings  • Part 4: Memories  • Part 5: Doubts  • Part 6: Hopes    EXTRA INFORMATION Read Samura's account of his meeting with a rebel leader  in CNN Traveller  magazine   IN-DEPTH • Cry Freetown  • Exodus from Africa    RELATED SITE Sorious Samura's Africa

Children like Sasko, Mariama and Tamba have played their part in this latest phase of the civil war, but children have always been involved. And I was one of them.

The Methodist Boys High School in Freetown is where I went to school. I learned many things there, and a lot of it wasn't on the school curriculum

In my day, a teacher could fail you in your exams if you didn't help him form a relationship with a girl on your street they'd taken a liking to.

We had our first lessons in power and how it corrupts. And for most of us who didn't have power in those days, we were all potential candidates for a revolution.

When they took away free education, many of us gathered together to talk and demonstrate. Then other young people who had dropped out of school joined in, and very soon we were a movement.

Then a former corporal of the Sierra Leone army started working together with the youth leaders. He encouraged them to turn protests into battles, and protesters into fighters. That was beginning of the Revolutionary United Front.

'Very ashamed'

When I was at school, Cleo Hanciles was one of the most influential lecturers at Fourah Bay College in Freetown. He had a big effect on the students there; in fact he was one of the founders of the movement that was later to be hijacked by the RUF.

Cleo had helped lead a movement aimed at peaceful change, so he remembers only too well when all started going wrong, when that former corporal in the Sierra Leone army, Foday Sankoh, volunteered himself as the military leader.

"By '88 I knew that as a movement we were finished, and then out of nowhere appeared Foday Sankoh, I didn't know him," Hanciles says.

"But definitely something went wrong, seriously wrong, and I think every Sierra Leonean here who was involved at that time in organisation, we should be very, very, very ashamed that what started off as a noble -- very, very, noble -- patriotic intention degenerated to such a despicable level of barbarism."

Mindless killers

For his part in a failed coup, Sankoh spent 10 years in prison.

I wonder, was it in prison that he devised his cruel plan to build a brutal army out of children stolen from their parents' arms?

By 1993, 12 years after his release, he had hijacked the well-intentioned movement I was part of at school and changed it into the Revolutionary United Front. Compared to our innocent ideas as children, it was a monster.

RUF tactics involved cutting off hands and indiscriminate killing, and often these crimes were done by children like Sasko and Tamba, children who had been abducted, drugged, and trained to become the most vicious, mindless killers in Sankoh's army.

Using abducted children as soldiers was something the RUF and Sankoh not only admitted but were also proud of.

And as if this wasn't bad enough, the people who came to protect the innocent from Sankoh and his children's army began abusing children too.

And so there came a time when this country was one of the most dangerous places in the world to be a child. Peacekeepers, government soldiers and civil defence forces suspected all children of being rebels.

All this in a rich country full of diamonds and gold, and yet we were poorer for it.