Morquee: Chapter Two

Morquee: Chapter Two by Karamoh Kabba, excerpted from Morquee Gbankaya is the headquarters town of Gbankaya Chiefdom. It is the largest Chiefdom with the biggest towns in Kono District. The town had not changed much from the time Morquee left it in the early sixties. The road network into Gbankaya and in the township was the same. As a boy growing up there, he first saw these road projects as a white man's benevolence to help the natives. But after he studied the history of colonialism, he had developed a different view about the intention of the colonial masters when they constructed road networks into the provinces. It was more to facilitate cash crop transportation to the capital city for export. Even the popular railway that wound through resource-rich provinces seemed like a straw stuck into a ripe orange fruit with England at the receiving end sucking hard, dehydrating the fruit right to its stem and not putting nutrients back into the soil. There had been no change to t...