Sunday 6 March 2011

A boy named Abdul: Sierra Leone's child inmates

Sierra Leone's Freetown prison is a hell-hole where both children and adults suffer appalling deprivations. John Carlin tells the story of one young inmate's bid to escape
Sixteen-year-old Abdul Sesay was jailed at Freetown's notorious jail - known as 'Pademba Road' - after he was given a stolen radio and subsequently charged with the robbery
Fernando Moleres
Sixteen-year-old Abdul Sesay was jailed at Freetown's notorious jail - known as 'Pademba Road' - after he was given a stolen radio and subsequently charged with the robbery
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There are worse ways to die. He could have bled to death, as thousands of Sierra Leoneans did after having their hands chopped off during the war by men, or specialist child soldiers, who went about their task with the rhythmic professionalism of butchers working their way through legs of lamb. But the circumstances in which Steven Lebbise met his end were bad enough.
My friend Fernando Moleres, an intrepid and much travelled photographer, met him in the main prison at Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, just over a year ago. A court had sentenced Steven to three years for stealing two sheep. Being 17, he shouldn't have been in an adult jail, but there were plenty more teenagers there, all of them at the bottom of the pecking order for rice, water and soap. His life's chief preoccupation, by the end, was scratching his scabies sores. Just about everyone in the prison had scabies, a contagious skin disease that flourished in cells where people lay packed at night like fish in a trawler's hull. But no one was in worse health than Steven, who had a medical encyclopedia of other infections and illnesses to which his vitamin-deficient body had no reply. I saw some photographs of him. He had the glazed eyes you see in children who are starving, or feverish, or abandoned. Steven was all three: a prime example of the human debris of a civil war that began in 1991 and ended in 2002 – claiming 50,000 lives and as many rapes and driving half a million from their homes. The boy had had no visitors during the nearly two years he had been locked away, both his parents having died. The rest of his family – far away in the interior – had long forgotten him.
Fernando, who in a previous life had been a nurse, went back last August and found that Steven had died. "Like a stray dog," Fernando said. There were plenty more strays where Steven had come from. Abdul Sesay was the one that caught Fernando's eye this time: the same sickly, vacant stare; rampant scabies. He said he was 16 but, from another photograph Fernando showed me, looked 12. Again, he was from the countryside and, again, both his parents had died, his father killed in the war; his mother, of disease. He had been living alone on the streets of Freetown, the capital, since the age of nine. Sierra Leone, as I was to discover when I travelled there late last year with Fernando, is a nation of Oliver Twists, of wandering orphans who hustle to survive in conditions Dickens might have recognised in the darker neighbourhoods of Victorian London. Or maybe not. The 19th-century capital of global empire would have boasted more bustle and wealth, more opportunities for the wretched to build lives that went beyond mere animal survival.
The officer in charge at the entrance to Freetown's grey prison building, known to locals as "Pademba Road", asked Fernando and I to hand over our mobile phones and our cash. "For your security," he said. I handed over the mobile phone but not the abundant bills in my jeans' pockets. A blackboard chalked the number of prisoners at 1,307. A guard in green uniform was appointed to accompany us and the prison chaplain, a distinguished older man, came along too. It was 11am; we had till 4pm inside the prison. Our objective was to break away from our escorts and meet alone with Abdul Sesay and other under-age kids in the prison. First we'd have to go along with a guided tour.
The gates were opened into a compound dominated by four large squat buildings. The colours on view ranged from dark grey to light brown: the walls, the corrugated iron roofs, the shorts and tops the prisoners wore (even the Barcelona FC and Inter Milan shirts that some had on seemed to have faded to grey), and the prisoners' skins. Hundreds milling about a large yard stopped what they were doing and gathered around us, most of them grinning broadly. "Fernando!" cried one. "Fernando!", another. "Fernando! Fernando! Fernando Torres!" Read More

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