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The mausoleum where several of the boys live.

SKULLS AND BONES IN SIERRA LEONE - PART 2

Rolling Dice to Talk to the Dead

TEXT BY DANNY GLENWRIGHT
PHOTOS BY KATRINA MANSON

The kola is a mild stimulant chewed by many West Africans. It was originally the main ingredient in cola drinks and is a symbol of virility. To use it to talk to ghosts, here’s what you do: Take two nuts and divide them in half to make four pieces. Then roll them like dice on the grave of the corpse you wish to speak with. If two of the nut halves face the sky and two face the departed, you can expect a conversation. If any other combination of nut pieces falls, then, as Benjamin told me, “The dead aren’t in the mood for speaking. But when we do speak with them, we talk about problems and ask for help and advice,” he said. “Often, things will go better afterward.”

As chairman of the Skull and Bones crew, he’s responsible for distributing what little money is made from building tombstones and cleaning the graves, and funds are always tight.

Drinking palm wine.

It costs 800,000 leones ($270) to dig a grave, tile it, and build a standard tombstone and slab. From this, the profit is 80,000 leones ($27). Tombstone inscription and other frills like a headstone, cross, or altar cost more but are rare commissions for the boys in a country where 70 percent of the population live on less than a dollar a day. Their most common duty is building a cairn, a round pile of stones, which is the cheapest and simplest grave marker.

Benjamin takes pride in his work and the motley gang of boys under his care. Still, he says that he has yet to find the meaning for his life, and he’s decided to try to get out of Ascension Town. He’s been asking the dead to help him do it.

After I watch Kabbah replace the stone on our dead friend’s grave, we sit down on another slab. The smell of weed smoke fills the air while the Skull and Bones boys crouch or stand on cement slabs around us, drinking murky palm wine from pickle jars.

A grave nearby is inscribed with a verse that looks like it was etched with a blunt stick: “If love would have saved you, you would have never died,” it reads.

A tall, slim man in a button-up jean shirt walks up to another tombstone and begins mouthing prayers. He holds an unlit cigarette, a box of matches, and a lighter behind his back and bows his head. Five boys race toward him and begin yanking weeds from the grave and throwing muddy clumps into the wind. He pretends not to notice and continues to pray. His name is Jon Foray.

“That’s my uncle. He was born in 1910,” he says when he’s finished, pointing to a grave on his right. He points to other graves. “That’s my other uncle and that’s my mother and that’s my eldest brother. There are times I sit here and really want to be quiet. Actually, I like being here alone.” Today he’s far from alone. Some of the Skulls and Bones guys are still leaning over the adjacent grave, squinting through its cracks and admiring the corpse inside.

“A lot of these boys make more money being self-employed in this graveyard than government officials make doing whatever it is that they do,” says Foray, blowing smoke toward his mother’s grave. He leaves and I follow the gang deeper into the grass.

Osman Mansaray, the deputy chairman of the group, tells me, “We pray for more people to die. Then the jobs will come faster.”


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

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