From Sierra Leone to Lawrence, by way of Texas football
By Joe Vanden Acker
Lawrence Today magazine, Spring 2002
One would think hope had long since died in the heart of Momodu Maligi, after years of civil war, senseless violence, and countless atrocities. But hope is what Maligi, '04, has in abundance. Hope for his homeland of Sierra Leone. For restoring the faith and spirit of the people. For reconstructing all that was bombed and burned. For rebuilding a shattered economy and government.
Hope is all he has right now. Hope for the future.
Maligi is one of about 5 million people who call Sierra Leone, a small war-torn country in western Africa, home. The Lawrence University sophomore has lived in the United States since 1995, but his heart rests with the country of his birth, and the promise of a brighter outlook for the world's poorest nation.
"I have to go back. I have to go back," Maligi says softly but firmly. "It's something I want to do. It's something I feel I have to do."
Maligi had always planned on going back to his homeland after he finished college in the United States, but he didn't anticipate arriving in America when he did. The start of a civil war in March 1991 unexpectedly changed his plans. The civil war in neighboring Liberia helped spawn the brutal Revolutionary United Front (RUF), and suddenly Sierra Leone had a civil war of its own. A military coup in April 1992 ousted President Joseph Saidu Momoh and put Valentine Stasser in power. In 1994, Strasser agreed to a two-year transition to multi-party democracy, with elections set for 1996.
Maligi's father, Samuel, was the country's former Secretary of State and a presidential candidate. He decided in April 1995 that the situation was becoming too dangerous for his son to remain in Freetown, the nation's capital.
"I didn't know anything about it until the night before I was supposed to leave," Maligi says. "My parents said, 'Go get your stuff ready. You're going to America.'"
On April 22, 1995, Maligi left for the United States, and he hasn't been back since.
"At first you're excited, but then it hits you that you might not go back for years and years," he says. "I wanted to go back as soon as I got here. I hated it."
Maligi, who hasn't seen his father since 1996 and his mother, Dentuma, since 1999, eventually settled in Arlington, Texas, with an uncle. As a teenager in Texas, he was quickly introduced to the Friday night lights of the Lone Star State's favorite sport, football. He began playing as a freshman in Houston but admits football frightened him a bit at first. He was content to be a kicker because of his soccer background, but the coach told him, "You're too big to be a kicker."
"Sports really didn't become a big part of my life until I moved to Arlington, and then everything changed," says Maligi, an academic All-Midwest Conference selection at Lawrence this past fall. "That's when I became a football player."
Lawrence head football coach Dave Brown had contacted Maligi in high school, but he was set on attending the University of South Dakota, his father's alma mater. His status as an international student caused havoc with obtaining an athletic scholarship at the NCAA Division II school, and he was forced to make other plans. That prompted a call back to Brown.
"I asked Coach Brown if I could still come, and he said, 'Yes.'"
Just four days before he joined the football team for fall camp in 2000, Maligi received all the paperwork telling him he was officially a Lawrence student.
"Like all other things in my life, I was moving too quickly," says Maligi, who played linebacker for the Vikings as a freshman and sophomore but will switch to fullback in 2002.
At first reluctant to come to Lawrence, Maligi, a government and philosophy major, now says he "can't imagine being anywhere else." He cites the rigorous academics, the people, and the Lawrence community as reasons for his respect and love for the school.
"I really like it," he says. "If I had come up here and spent some time here and talked to the people, I would have chosen Lawrence, even over South Dakota."
Maligi then tells the tragic story of his cousin, 27-year-old Joe Tucker, a medical student from Kalamazoo, Michigan. Tucker and Maligi had bonded like brothers when he first came to the United States, and it was a stunning shock when word of Tucker's death came in late October. Tucker had been visiting Sierra Leone, and although the circumstances surrounding his death remain murky, Maligi says his cousin received a medical injection and had a violent reaction. Tucker, his lungs collapsing, was robbed and left to die. With no family to lean on during this tragic time, Maligi found a support network on campus.
"With all the stuff I've been through this year and considering the kind of love and support I get at Lawrence, this is probably the best place I could be right now," he says.
While Maligi adjusted to life in America (his teenaged sisters, Komeh and Samantha, are now also living in Texas), the civil war raged on in Sierra Leone. The first multi-party elections in nearly three decades put Ahmed Tejan Kabbah in power in March 1996, but a military coup in May 1997 placed a coalition of the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) and RUF in charge.
The stories of atrocities by the AFRC/RUF are horrible beyond belief. The Human Rights Watch says, "many thousands of civilians have been raped; deliberately mutilated, often by amputation; or killed outright in a campaign by the AFRC/RUF. Men, women, and children, probably numbering in the thousands, have been abducted by the AFRC/RUF for use as combatants, forced laborers, or sexual slaves."
When the AFRC/RUF took over Freetown, the atrocities hit the Maligi family. The second husband of Maligi's grandmother and his son were burned to death in their home by AFRC/RUF forces. Maligi's grandmother, already ill, died a few weeks later.
"There is no law for war in Africa; everything goes. They find out who they think is the enemy and they do whatever," Maligi says. "You're not dealing with a disciplined force. You're dealing with a bunch of hooligans."
Things began to turn for Sierra Leone in February 1998, when Nigerian troops taking part in a peacekeeping force in Liberia mounted an offensive against the AFRC/RUF and took control of Freetown. Kabbah returned to office from his exile in Guinea, but that didn't stop the AFRC/RUF from conducting a campaign of atrocities in the countryside. Thousands of civilians were killed, raped, or mutilated to send a message of intimidation to Kabbah's government.
Nigerian forces repelled a large-scale assault on Freetown by the AFRC/RUF in January 1999, but thousands of civilians were killed in the fighting. In July 1999, Kabbah and RUF leader Foday Sankoh signed a peace agreement outlining a transitional government. The United Nations established a peacekeeping force in Sierra Leone later that year to oversee the agreement and help disarm and disband the RUF forces. The agreement collapsed in May 2000, when RUF forces clashed with the UN peacekeepers. Sankoh was captured as he attempted to flee Freetown and remains imprisoned today.
More than 12,000 UN peacekeepers are in Sierra Leone, and they have disarmed more than 45,000 RUF fighters since May 2001. On January 12, 2002, the closure of the last disarmament camp took place in Kailahun, in the diamond-rich eastern part of Sierra Leone. It is believed more than 50,000 people died in the conflict.
"Hopefully, the international community will get involved and the few good people who are left will try to change things," Maligi said. "I can hope that our generation will come in and solidify that change."
Maligi believes that one change the country needs is financial independence. He says it must control its natural resources, especially the lucrative diamond mines.
"My country could be one of the richest in Africa; instead it's the poorest country in the world," he says. "It doesn't make any sense."
A more difficult change may be altering how the Sierra Leonean people perceive their government and its power.
"You have to structure the constitution in such a way that you can't have military coups; you can't have people staying in power for 30, 40 years," he says. "You have to change the whole ideology, change the way people think, change people's expectations of government."
He believes that any hope of effecting that change rests with the young men and women of his generation.
"When the people who have been educated in the United States and those who have been educated in Africa and been through the struggles come together, I think it will be something very special for Sierra Leone," he says. "I think that's the hope."
There's always hope.