Yoni Emmanuel Sesay: Sierra Leone Telegraph: 23 October 2025:
“May God grant that this land never be ruled by greed or the unwise; may those who lead it remember that freedom without conscience is only another form of bondage.” — Clackson’s Prayer, 1961.
They say the last white governor, before handing the keys of the realm, whispered that prayer into the humid air of Freetown. It was a farewell both tender and foreboding — a benediction laced with warning. But as the drums of independence drowned the echoes, the words faded into legend.
Decades later, they returned — not as a blessing, but as a curse fulfilled. For the prophecy of bondage reborn in freedom had found its perfect heir: The Prince.
Long before the Prince ever dreamt of power, a cartel of savage hands — known in whispered dread as Black December — roamed the land of the free. They wrote to their victims before robbing them, politely announcing the hour of plunder and never once failing to keep time.
Their bullets spoke grammar; their violence had discipline; their execution, theatrical. It was said their lineage was a study in organized theft — their Bio, a hereditary science of taking what did not belong and never giving it back.
Those seeds of savagery did not die; they merely slept beneath the nation’s soil, patient and cunning. And when the air grew heavy with discontent, a young Prince appeared — radiant, reformist, redemptive — a messiah in political robes.
The people, weary of betrayal, greeted him as Jerusalem might greet salvation. They shouted Hosanna! as he arrived, not on a donkey but in a convoy of promises, flanked by praise-singers disguised as prophets.
The joint venture that birthed him was hailed as divine partnership, a covenant of renewal. But prophecy, like perfume, often conceals decay. Soon the Prince grew restless with fellowship and sought ascension alone.
The partnership became a solo flight toward heaven, and the clouds turned crimson. His reign, brief but brutal, spilled blood like flakes of snow — a carnage that ended before the political cock could crow thrice.
When silence fell, the nation reeled in chaos. Then, from the ashes, rose a retired Al-Kabba — a man whom, decades earlier, the gavel of the realm had condemned: “You must never be given any office of state.” Yet destiny, with its taste for irony, rewrote the verdict. The outlaw became the redeemer. What the law had rejected, history now enthroned.
Al-Kabba’s first five harvest seasons brought shade to the scorched land. No brute, no blood, only the whisper of renewal. But peace, like politics, rarely retires in dignity. When his second five seasons came, the calm grew teeth. The soil drank the blood of twenty-eight others, doubling the famous fourteen of yesteryears — proof that even arithmetic can bleed.
Before the baton could be safely handed, fate intervened. A true son of the rising sun took the helm — a period brief yet blessed, untouched by chaos or blood. For a moment, it seemed the nation had outwitted its curse. But history, amused by human hope, stirred once more. Beneath the loam, the old seeds of Black December began to breathe again.
From that soil of uneasy peace, the Prince returned — older, smoother, infinitely more dangerous. The people welcomed him once more, this time not as saviour but as habit. He came perfumed with reform, adorned in diplomacy, fluent in the grammar of governance.
The old brutality had evolved; its violence now spoke in policy briefs and constitutional smiles. Black December had not vanished — it had simply learned manners.
Power intoxicated him. He and his Cabal drank deeply, mistaking the nation’s treasury for inheritance and the people’s patience for loyalty. As the economy stumbled, the Cabal feasted. Youths fled as praise-singers grew louder. Every theft was renamed a sacrifice; every failure, a triumph. The Republic became a carnival of madness disguised as governance.
Lies were promoted to national policy. The Cabal of Vengeance — his loyal flatterers — sang of peace while sharpening long knives. And when they preached unity, it was the unity of silence. Such is the shadow underneath the fountain of honour that the Prince regularly: Lied without deceiving, deceived without lying.
Yet even as governance decayed, another empire quietly thrived — the empire of addiction.
Through the alleys and gutters flowed a new dominion — powdery, profitable, and lethal. Families dissolved into grief; youths faded into ghosts of promise. The Prince saw it, knew it, and said nothing. The same silence that shielded his power now guarded his complicity.
The merchants of death were his unspoken allies — dealers of dependence, patrons of despair. Each bag of brown or white powder was a quiet ballot for ruin. And while the nation buried its sons and daughters, the Prince buried his conscience.
His genius lay not in his cruelty but in its elegance. He ruled not by breaking the Constitution but by folding it neatly into his pocket. Every decree smelled of progress; every violation danced to the rhythm of reform. His tyranny was polite, deliberate, and signed with Machiavellian applause.
The surest way to enslave a people, he knew, was to convince them they were being governed. His greatest conquest was not territory but thought — the domestication of conscience itself and imprisonment of outrage.
But time, that patient archivist, turned its page. The people who once shouted Hosanna now whispered Enough. The Prince, sensing twilight, sought to baptize his tyranny with repentance.
Before a weary crowd, he raised his hand and declared, “We will not kill again.” The nation exhaled — not in hope, but in exhaustion. Even remorse had become theatre. The words were not a promise, but a pause — the moral fatigue of a ruler too tired to continue sinning.
Then came the final irony. The Prince who once wielded the Constitution as both weapon and shield now blamed it for his bruises. He lamented that executive power was too vast, too tempting. He preached proportional representation as redemption — arithmetic as ethics, democracy as mathematics.
But the people remembered: his conversion came not from revelation, but from expiration. Nearing dusk, he sought to chain the same power that once adorned his wrists with gold. It was not repentance — it was reform in slow motion, while reign endured.
And so, like all rulers who mistake fatigue for virtue, his story ripened into a fable.
Once, a hunter named Sesay chased an iguana through the bush. He ran, panting, proud, relentless — until exhaustion conquered appetite. At last, he stopped and said, “Ah, I must stop. After all, I am Sesay — we don’t eat iguana.” The iguana turned and asked, “Eh-heh? So, what if you were Conteh?”
And there lay the truth: most principles are merely names we give to our tiredness. So, it was with the Prince — his restraint was not conscience, but fatigue.
In the end, the exquisiteness of his savagery lay not in its brutality but in its grace. He destroyed without shouting, deceived without lying, and cloaked his conscience in silence. He blamed the Constitution for his crimes and arithmetic for his absolution. But history, immune to eloquence, will not be fooled.
For every hunter becomes the hunted, every Prince meets his December, and every Constitution that bleeds was first betrayed by the hand that swore to protect it.
And perhaps, somewhere above the smoke and silence, the old governor’s words echo again — not as a prayer this time, but as a warning: “Freedom without conscience is only another form of bondage.”
The real savagery of the Prince is not only that he rules unchecked, but that he convinces the people to applaud while he does. Yet even as his reign endures, the land still breathes.
Nations, unlike tyrants, are blessed with the stubbornness of memory and hope. The conscience of a people may slumber under fear, flattery, or fatigue — but it never dies. It waits. It watches. It remembers.
Let the Prince take heed: the same soil that sustains his power also nourishes its reckoning. And let the nation take heart: even under the weight of oppression, moral renewal is inevitable.
When the people awaken, when voices once silenced find their song, they will know that power is not only in the hands of the cunning — it resides equally in the courage of those who refuse to forget, and in the unyielding will to restore what tyranny seeks to steal.
So long as December casts its shadow, April waits in patience — and freedom, however tested, will find her way home.
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