Mayor/SLPP Versus Ignorance/Enlightenment
I was bemused and amused after reading the March 31, 2021 “Press Statement” by the governing Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP), with the pedantic word in its title “Incendiarism”, accusing the Mayor of Freetown, Her Worship Yvonne Aki-Sawyer, of “Hate Speech”.
What triggered my mirth the most were these words in paragraph 3: “After keenly listening to the five different audios, transcribing the words into English, having our own team of Linguists, Psychologists, Anthropologists, Sociologists, Political Scientists and Security Experts analyze the contents….” The style of the Release, its unusual length, reads like that of students at university flaunting their jingoistic intellectual prowess; and worse, it reeks with that individual and collective egoistic-ism of too many of the Mende-speaking educated elite who dominate in the SLPP – that which non-Mendes do find so irksome. If it is a political document, it sure is u