Building a future for an African village

I had dreamt of this place before I had ever even seen it. My father was born there in the 1930s, and I first learned the name of the village two years ago when I began to write a book, The Devil that Danced on the Water, the story of our lives and his death at the hands of one of Africa's many dictators, Siaka Stevens. By then Rogbonko, the village in the north of Sierra Leone that my grandfather founded near the turn of the last century, had been sealed off from the rest of the world for 10 years.

In 1991, the rebels of the Libyan-trained Revolutionary United Front (RUF) crossed the border from Charles Taylor's Liberia. Their ranks soon swelled with disaffected young men and women who joined the fight against Sierra Leone's government, a regime that had brought the country to ruins. But whatever ideology the RUF had once aspired to was soon lost as it turned upon the civilian population. By the early 1990s it was in control of the north, and had created bases in the towns of Magburaka and Makeni, close to my family's village. In 2000, as part of the research for my book, I attempted to reach the village, accompanied by my photographer husband Simon and under the protection of the United Nations. By then, the sands upon which the fragile peace that followed the Lome peace accord of 1999 was built had already begun to shift. The RUF was still evidently in control; roadblocks were manned by six-year-olds with sub-machine-guns; the UN peacekeeping troops had not dared leave their camps for weeks. We made it as far as Makeni before our presence was discovered by the local RUF commander and we were obliged to leave. Six weeks after our encounter, the same RUF general shot a UN peacekeeper point blank in the face and took 500 peacekeeping troops hostage.

It took two more years to reach Rogbonko. By then Tony Blair had sent British troops to shore up the uncertain efforts of the UN; the disarmament campaign was well underway; international aid poured in. In February 2002, I returned to Sierra Leone, accompanied by a Channel 4 film crew, to make a documentary about my father's trial for treason. We rested in a dank hotel in Makeni, which had neither plumbing nor electric light, and the next day set off in the direction of the village, down narrow tracks overhung by towering elephant grass.

From stories gathered from my aunts and uncle I had imagined Rogbonko many times. I had even used their words to describe it in passages in my book. Now here it was in life: the clay-brick houses, clustered around the round bamboo barrie where the villagers meet to discuss community matters; the river sprinkled with lilies; the paths through the mighty trees leading to the spread of rice fields. And children were everywhere. They clustered around the car, staring at us and at their own reflections in the shiny panels, leaving dusty fingerprints on the bodywork. This was not so much another world, but a whole different reality.

I joined members of my extended family on the veranda of my grandfather's old house, next to the mosque, in front of the main square and the village well. "We were told we had relatives in Europe," Ibrahim, my eldest cousin, told me. "But we did not know whether it was true."

My father was the only one of his family to be educated. His mother died when he was young. Missionaries came to the village and demanded that each family send one child to their new school five miles away. None of my grandfather's 16 wives (society here is traditionally polygamous, although men now have fewer spouses) wanted to give up her child. People believed children who were educated left and never returned; so they sent the motherless boy. Years later, he won a scholarship to Scotland to study medicine, met my mother and together returned to Africa. What lay between my cousins and me was fate and history. I was educated in England, became a journalist and now live in a Victorian terrace in London. They are trapped in a tiny village in what is officially the poorest country in the world. No one in Rogbonko has a job that pays cash. Some weave baskets which they take to Freetown to sell. Everyone else is a subsistence farmer with no stake in their own country's economy, let alone the global one.

These days, the current generation in Sierra Leone understands the life-changing value of education. "We don't want you to give us money," Ibrahim said. "We need our children to be educated." He asked me if I would consider paying school fees for one, perhaps two, of the family's children, who would be sent to live with relatives in the town. I promised to see what I could do.

The first person I turned to for advice was Morlai, favourite above all my cousins, who had accompanied the film crew and I from Freetown to Rogbonko. I had worshipped him as a child growing up in Freetown. He sported purple flares and teased me by calling me "sista" in a phoney American accent. Morlai was smart, and had been picked by my father to live with us in the city and go to school. Then my father was killed, the family fractured. Morlai had to abandon his studies. Before the war he had a job first as an untrained teacher and then with a non-government organisation (NGO), but after the expat staff were evacuated he had no more work. He saw two homes burnt by rebel bands, and fled into the trees with his wife and children while his neighbours stood in line to have their hands hacked off. In January 1999, he was away from home when rebels attacked from the East End of Freetown. He tried to skirt around the city but was stopped, along with other civilians, at a road block guarded by Nigerian Ecomog peacekeeping troops and government soldiers. He was taken for a rebel, stripped and lined up with several other men to be shot. At the last minute one of the firing squad, a former pupil, recognised him.

Africa is a continent littered with lost dreams and vanished hopes. Morlai now lives in a corrugated iron hut and raises pigs. Back in 2000, Morlai had helped me track down the men who had been paid to give false evidence against my father. We worked well together. On the long drive back to Freetown I turned Ibrahim's request over in my mind. I thought there might be a way we could help everyone in the village, without the need to send any children away from home. We could take the mountain to Mohamed. I asked Morlai how much he had been paid when he worked as a teacher.

"Thirty-five pounds a month!?" It was April. I was as far away from Africa as I could be, strolling in the gothic splendour of south London's Nunhead cemetery with Zanne Findlay, a friend and neighbour. I was explaining the logic behind my desire to build a school in the village. Morlai and I had talked over the logistics. What contribution might we expect from the villagers? Was there land available? The villagers had told us some of the children made the five-mile journey to the nearest school everyday. En route they had to swim a river. During the rains the waters rose and the little ones could no longer make the crossing. We would begin small, we agreed, with just one class of six-year-olds.

"I'll give it to you," Zanne said without hesitation. "You build the school. I'll sponsor the teacher." Not long afterwards, I came across an article about a trip to Sierra Leone by the Duchess of York and the organisation she was working with, which helped fund informal schools for war-affected children. I wrote to the programme manager, Linda Cook of Children in Crisis, and told her what I planned to do. She furnished me with the names of individuals and organisations in Freetown who might be able to help find and, if necessary, train a teacher. Linda had no doubt it could be done and wished me luck.

In December, I was back at the village, this time accompanied by Morlai and my husband Simon. We had spent the night in a guest house courtesy of an aid worker overseeing the rehabilitation of former RUF rebels in the town. Many of them refused to return to their homes in other parts of the country. They hung around the town, occupying homes they had seized during the war. That day, a passing-out parade was held for 100 or so ex-combatants who had been retrained as carpenters. Among them were young girls with babies on their backs. During the war thousands of women were kidnapped and forced to "marry" rebel com- manders. Many knew no other life. Last week, Human Rights Watch published details of the systematic sexual violence that had taken place during the war; "the silent war crime" committed on a far larger scale than the highly visible mutilations.

Our vehicle, one of the few four-wheel drives for rent in Freetown, was a black Nissan Patrol with smoked windows. It looked like something a rap artist might favour. We came up fast behind a young woman with a bundle on her head. Too late, she saw us. She dropped her load and fled into the elephant grass. At first we laughed; then it happened again, and again: women running for their lives. Suddenly we saw ourselves through their eyes. The Nissan was exactly the kind of vehicle the rebels would have favoured as they tore through this country.

Two days after we arrived, the village headman called a meeting to discuss the matter of the school. I had stopped in Magburaka to pay my respects to the Paramount Chief, and he had sent a representative to the meeting. Alongside the headman was the headwoman, as well as the head of the youth. No village meeting anywhere I have ever been in Africa starts without the formality of speeches from the elders. Yet once we got down to business we covered ground at an impressive pace. In the months since my last visit, Ibrahim and Morlai had told them of our offer. The village had selected a site, and cleared and burnt the land. The village said they could provide all the material and volunteer labour for the schoolhouse. It had to be constructed as cheaply as possible, out of clay brick and thatch, so that all available funds could be spent on books and materials. Each parent would provide a slate for their child, which was certainly the extent of what they could afford. Books, teaching materials we would provide. Picks and shovels were added to the list (the rebels had taken them all). Two hours later, the meeting ended. There were a few matters left to resolve, not least the question of where we would find a teacher.

In our remaining days, Simon carried out a census of the village with Augustine, the village secretary, who had diligently recorded proceedings at the meeting. Augustine worked late into the night and produced the census almost the next day. There were 39 houses occupied by 455 people. The adults' occupations were unvarying: farmer, fisher, weaver of baskets. There was one blacksmith, a pastor and a Muslim cleric. More than half the people were under the age of 16, and more than half of those were below six. It was a village of children.

Indeed, the children drove Tamba, our driver, to distraction. During the day he shooed them away. But at night he relented, opened the vehicle doors, turned on the stereo and held an impromptu dance. Yet the elders maintained an unbending authority. One evening, a misunderstanding prompted a fight between two young men. Their brothers weighed in on either side and soon there was an impressive scrum. Late that night we strolled around the village. In the moonlight outside one house a meeting was taking place. In the morning we learnt the headman had been called to the scene. The meeting was between the headman, the young men and their parents as well as the head of the youth. The protagonists were fined, as were all those who had encouraged them. There we were, in a place that has seen one of the most violent wars in Africa's recent history, where a few miles away former fighters still roamed the town they had once terrorised. And yet here the headman had just done exactly what Tony Blair would like to see happen in Britain: he issued on-the-spot fines for anti social behaviour.

The village met to discuss the school a second time. Someone had found a blackboard. We had also decided on our teacher. Augustine, one of only two literate people in the village, had proved himself eminently capable of the task. We put our thoughts to the elders, who said they had the same idea, but were waiting to see whether we had been equally impressed with him. We agreed to enrol him on one of the NGO-run training schemes, and I took Augustine's photograph to take home to Zanne. The headman set a deadline for the completion of the school building: 15 January. Meanwhile, classes would begin in the barrie. I was stunned by what we had achieved in a week.

Afterwards, when I told people what we had done in our Christmas holidays, an NGO worker in Freetown demanded with a laugh to know the secret of my success. I replied that it was almost certainly my cousin Morlai, whose help had been vital. Then I thought that what we had done right was this: we had made our manoeuvres within Africa's own systems and structures, and found that they worked.

Countries such as Sierra Leone, created as pseudo-states in imitation of European models, have been all too quickly fleeced and then dismembered by their post-colonial leaders. The rule of law turns into anarchy, followed by the collapse of the state. Sierra Leone's has been called "a new kind of war", one in which renegade groups of youths steamed and ram-raided their way through a country. But there is another Africa, one that existed long before the first Europeans attempted, and still attempt, to ignore and to mould the continent in a Western image. It has its own institutions, patterns and logic. It is an Africa most people in the West do not know. And it still exists.

Aminatta Forna's 'The Devil that Danced on the Water' is published by HarperCollins, £17.99.

Readers who wish to make a donation to the village school should send cheques, made out to Rogbonko Village School Fund, to: Rogbonko, c/o Features Dept, The Independent, Independent House, 191 Marsh Wall, London E14 9RS