Vitabu Books

A t   104-pages Si aka Kroma’s  novel Manners Maketh Man: Adventures of a Bo School Boy is a fraction of  Sama Banya’s 484-page autobiography Looking Back, My Life and Times , but the cross references and descriptions of Bo Town and Bo School are fascinating.  Together, both books make a study of how one school enforced national consciousness in Sierra Leonean education. In Banya’s story, it is the second week of March 1940 when he arrives at Bo School, which by then had only about 90 pupils enrolled. From Looking Back , we learn that Bo School was patterned after the British public school system.  The boys were divided into dormitories named after European cities: London, Liverpool, Paris, and Manchester. Equally, we also learn about the school’s original mission to integrate the “sons and nominees of chiefs” from Northern and Southern Sierra Leone,  “promoting nationally-unifying doctrines, beliefs, personalities, and languages.” One of the highlights in Banya’s “Bo School Yea

Two weeks later it was Easter Sunday. The atmosphere suited Jedi’s mood even more, for the whole church was decorated with flowers and buntings in happy celebration of Christ’s glorious resurrection and triumph over the forces of Satan, sin, death, and hell. Jedi felt he, too, had triumphed over the forces of evil that had sought to destroy him. He, like Christ, could be said to have trodden the forces of Satan underfoot and to hold the keys of death…So he sang the Easter hymns with as much joy and fervor as though they had been written specifically for him . L ittle did Jedidiah Thomas know his victory celebration that Easter Sunday was premature. Moral hypocrisy is what ultimately bring about his downfall. When we first meet the 49-year-old Jedidiah on the balcony of his five-year-old mansion he fondly calls 'My Repose,' Jedi enjoyed a very powerful position as Permanent Secretary in the civil service. He was also serving as a People’s Warden in his home church, and h