On Eldred Jones’s Freetown Bond by Lansana Gberie
Just down from university sometime in 1994, I went to interview Professor Eldred Jones at his home for a newspaper. A nasty bush war had been raging in the countryside, but Freetown was untouched. At Fourah Bah College (FBC), however, the war had some immediacy. Shortly after it started, several students from the university who had gone on holidays to their villages in the countryside had been abducted by the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels, and those who escaped returned with graphic stories of atrocities. A coup had occurred, and the youthful soldiers who constituted what they were pleased to call National Provisional Ruling Council (NPRC) were in the habit of frequenting the college’s campus, the appearance of support from the famous school adding some glamour to the ‘revolution’. Jones, the universally venerated long-term principal of the university, was retired to his home at Leicester, at the tip of the Mount Aureol, where the university is elegantly situated