I don’t have any idea. But here’s what Temba Kekura told me (this is the last part of my Sierra Leone series; if you read yesterday’s post, you haven’t seen this yet):
Before the war, when his village and his family and his body were whole, Temba Kekura was a farmer. He had few things, simple things, the things he needed – land, crops, family, and two strong arms. Then he became part of a story that repeats, village after Sierra Leonean village.
The rebels came. They looted, burned houses, raped. They killed Mr. Kekura’s mother, and when he refused to join the force, one of them cut off his right arm.
So now, he calls himself a gardener. He tends peppers and okra with a hoe. Proper crops – cassava, sweet potatoes, and rice – he leaves to men with two arms, or to their war widows.
Most days, his arm, that arm, hurts. “Whenever I feel pain, I just think bad things,” he says about his life, about himself, but mostly about the man who left him this way. “My heart spoils.”
So he has never talked about what happened; but his body tells a story everyone knows on sight. That story starts with Fallah Sakila.
