Pilot Project: Facilitating an Elderly Person's Recollections

On page 39 in The History of Sierra Leone, C.M. Fyle says that Kent village, on the extreme southern tip of the Freetown peninsula, was among the seaside peninsula villages founded by Governor Charles MaCarthy in 1819 to settle "disbanded African soldiers who had been fighting in the British army against the French. These soldier-settlers were joined in these villages by recaptives with whom they intermarried and soon became one people." "Recaptives" refers to those persons from along the coast in West Africa released into Sierra Leone from slave ships intercepted before they crossed the Atlantic by the Courts of Mixed Commission in Sierra Leone. The "one people" to whom the author refers are today called the Krio, one of Sierra Leone's ethnic groups. Kent village today is ethnically a highly diverse community, but the ruins of a gated wall from those early days and the proud awareness of the history of this unique village (which in the late 1800's provided two principals to the Sierra Leone Grammar School) remain.

Between the years of 1989 to 1994 at SELI in Tengbeh Town I intermittently recorded the recollections of an employee in the SELI compound in Tengbeh Town named William Africanus Beckley. Mr. Beckley was born in 1916 in Kent village, a century after its founding and nearly a century ago. He lived there until 1934 when he moved to Freetown. Although he never returned to the village to live, he always thought of himself as a "Kent boy" and wanted this to be the title of his recollections. I recorded many conversations between us, many describing his accompanying his grandmother on long river trading trips among the Sherbro. As is the nature of conversations, topics would appear, disappear, and reappear again, unpredictably. I typed out the scripts, and then organized his recollections into chapters. In January, 1994 I finished a dummy of Kent Boy and read it aloud to Mr. Beckley, who was an avid reader in English but did not read Krio. He suggested some changes. I attempted not to put any of my own words into his book, with the idea that a native Krio speaker with some knowledge of the period of history he was referring to would later help us edit his text.

Mr. Beckley often used proverbs, and we also recorded these. Over several years he would come to work in the morning with one written on a scrap of paper to ask me whether I'd included it. I identified two key words in each proverb, and alphabetized his list according to these words; this meant that the over 400 proverbs in his list became a book called Krio Parebul containing more than 800 items, each proverb listed twice. He was not one to explain proverbs, and was opposed to the idea of including any translation in the book apart from the occasional word that had fallen into disuse. I agreed with not translating the proverbs because I thought it wouldn't be helpful: anyone who has spent time around a proverb-user knows that they are explained in terms of the situation that they enlighten and not by the words they contain.

In 1994 I gave copies of both books to Mr. Beckley. He left work not long after that time, and died in January of 2001, at the age of 85.