IN THE MAGAZINE

A Skull and Bones member prepares to tidy a tombstone.

SKULLS AND BONES IN SIERRA LEONE - PART 3

Rolling Dice to Talk to the Dead

TEXT BY DANNY GLENWRIGHT
PHOTOS BY KATRINA MANSON

A radio is sitting on top of a tombstone in front of us and broadcasting fuzz. Behind it, the ruins of the first church built on this site, sometime around 1800, glisten with green moss. Mansaray has taken over my tour from Kabbah. He wears Birkenstocks and trousers that hang below his ass. His t-shirt is bright orange and trumpets the People’s Movement for Democratic Change Party. It is one of hundreds of shirts that were printed for Sierra Leone’s recent election. The main electoral issues were food, security, electricity, infrastructure, and jobs—all necessities the country is currently without. There are lots of election t-shirts though.

Mansaray says he often sees two dead bodies fighting inside the ruins of the church. Benjamin had also mentioned these ghouls. He said they destroyed the church in what he calls “spiritual attacks.” It seems Muslim ghosts buried nearby provoke afterworld spats with the dead Christians lodged in Ascension Town. Considering Sierra Leone is one of the only non-Western countries where Muslims and Christians truly get along—they marry one another and even tolerate apostasy—maybe it’s logical they’d need to let off some steam after they die.

Mansaray says the ghosts in the ruined church look like people but have a slight glow and always disappear when he gets close. No matter, because he’s able to use the kola nuts to speak to friends buried in Ascension Town. Demonstrating his toss technique, he bites two nuts in half and rolls them onto a rough grave. Three fall face down and one looks up to the evening sky. There will be no conversation today. Maybe later, he says.

People sleep here.

As we’re completing our tour and reaching the side of the cemetery where the Skull and Bones dwellings are, young men seem to emerge from everywhere. To my left the grass parts and two boys jump out of the bush. To my right, another Friend of the Dead appears on a tomb. In front of me, a boy crawls onto a grave slab and kneels in two pools of dirty water on top of it. In seconds there are 15 boys around us.

I follow Mansaray toward a decrepit stone building. “It’s a grave,” he says. I peer inside, squinting into the dark, stifling space. A sweat-flecked face peers back at me.

“May I come in?” I ask the Skull and Bones boy inside.

“Yes,” he replies, shuffling backward and moving a few piles of clothes onto the floor. “But my things are everywhere, sorry.”

Santos sitting on his bed.

This boy, who lives in a crumbling mausoleum and sleeps on top of a grave, is embarrassed at the state of his bedroom. He wasn’t expecting guests today and didn’t tidy the tomb.

He introduces himself as Santos and tells me that ten people share the tiny crypt. He is clutching a dirty stuffed tiger doll—a counterfeit Tigger.

As my eyes acclimate, I can make out a small area on the ground that is charred and black. “It’s where they cook,” says Santos. Dirty clothes, moldy pillows, and empty palm-wine jars litter the unmade graves, and as the remaining light peers in through slits in the wall, for a second, in the half-dark and gloom, it could be any teenager’s unkempt bedroom, anywhere.


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