Alich Kabbah leans into an open grave in the Ascension Town Cemetery.

SKULLS AND BONES IN SIERRA LEONE - PART 1

Rolling Dice to Talk to the Dead

TEXT BY DANNY GLENWRIGHT
PHOTOS BY KATRINA MANSON

I’m bending over an open grave in Sierra Leone and trying not to fall in. A boy stands next to me. He’s a member of a crew of kids who call themselves Skull and Bones. He points inside and says, “Look, do you see the head?” I can’t, so he pulls the cracked gravestone farther from its resting place. The rock easily gives way under his strength. Broken from years of neglect, this grave is one of many in Freetown’s Ascension Town Cemetery that has crumbled, reuniting the long dead with the still living.

The boy, whose name is Alich Kabbah, kneels on the tombstone and, bending over, drops his head deeper into the open hole. I am worried he will fall in. It is dusk and the sky has been threatening an outburst for hours, crackling, whistling, and rumbling down at us. Still, I am able to make out the splintered casket below me and the decaying body inside it.

“You see, there’s the head,” says Kabbah, pointing at the corpse. I had met Kabbah two days before this grisly encounter. Stoned, drunk, and happy for some company, he’d rescued me from the heat of the Freetown sun and led me to a shady patch behind a disintegrating tomb where some of his friends live. The 24-year-old is a long-serving member of Skull and Bones, who are also known as the Friends of the Dead.

Originally from the diamond-mining region of eastern Sierra Leone, Kabbah’s parents fled to Freetown 10 years ago at the height of the 11-year civil war that turned this once-prosperous West African country into hell on earth. Poor, hungry, and unable to provide for him, they dropped their son at the edge of the Ascension Town Cemetery and kept running. He’s been there ever since.

One of the Skull and Bones football players with the team mascot.

Like the more than 200 Freetown youths who make up the Skull and Bones gang, Kabbah lives in and around the cemetery. His crew dig graves, construct headstones, tidy the relentless tropical growth (especially when somber mourners toss them some coins), smoke lots of weed, and drink palm wine. Oh, and they speak to the dead.

Kabbah had trouble sitting still while I asked about his occult activities. The Skull and Bones football team, the Luma Boys, was about to play an important match against another Freetown team and he was anxious for it to start. Propped against the end of the grave we sat on were the team mascots—three painted human skulls on sticks. Unable to restrain himself as some of the players passed by on their way to the pitch, Kabbah grabbed one and, jumping to his feet, pumped it in the air.

“I used to know some of the dead. I used to work with their families,” he said, bouncing on the concrete slab. “Now they help me build tombs and show me how to work. I communicate with them.”

As if on cue, an agama lizard crawled across the eye of one of the other skulls. Part of its tail was missing and it bobbed its head in the sun. Kabbah took a toke on the joint in his hand and blew smoke toward the critter, then sat back down.

“I like to live here because I’m used to the dead. The dead are my friends now, in the night and in the morning. I sleep with them…”

“We are with the dead people always,” interrupted Christopher Benjamin, another Skull and Bones veteran and the gang’s self-proclaimed chairman. “We work in the cemetery, we sleep in the cemetery, we eat in the cemetery…”

Benjamin, 37, has lived in Ascension Town for 22 years. It’s not the dead but the living he fears—especially the police, who regularly threaten, arrest, and steal from his boys. Now he was telling me how he communicates with spirits. “We use kola nuts to speak with the dead,” he said.


TO BE CONTINUED
SKULLS AND BONES IN SIERRA LEONE | 1 | 2 | 3 |

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