Bongolistically,
Mallam O.
Alfred stepped onto his balcony at precisely 11 PM, his body tensing as the almost familiar darkness of his area of Freetown suddenly gave way to light. Without thinking, he found himself joining the chorus of neighbours shouting “Lait don kam!” The power had returned after nearly eight hours of blackout, and the entire neighbourhood erupted in jubilant celebration.
The laptop charger dangled uselessly from his right hand, momentarily forgotten as Alfred was swept up in the collective euphoria.
The narrow streets below his third-floor flat were suddenly alive with activity—young children darting outside despite the late hour, women ululating with practised trills that carried through the warm night air, men laughing and clapping with unrestrained joy. They were all expecting light to be back!
Alfred caught himself mid-shout, startled by his own instinctive reaction. Just hours earlier, he had been pacing his sparsely furnished living room in mounting frustration, unable to complete his presentation for tomorrow’s critical board meeting. The battery on his laptop had died around 8 PM, and with it also was dying, his carefully laid plans for impressing his NGO’s British investors.
“What on earth am I doing?” he whispered to himself as he realised that he was dancing to welcome the light, the cool night breeze bringing a moment of clarity.
Six months ago, when he’d first returned to Freetown after fifteen years in London, Alfred would have scoffed disdainfully at a display of gratitude to government for what he thought should be a basic service to the populace. He recalled how he’d lectured his cousin Aminata about societal complacency just last week.
“This is precisely why nothing fundamentally changes in Salone, people are grateful for their own right!” He once told Aminata over a dinner of cassava leaves and rice during another interminable blackout.
“In the UK, if power went out for even an hour, there would be formal complaints lodged, news coverage on the BBC, perhaps even organised protests outside the utility companies. Here, people celebrate like it’s a festival when a basic service is temporarily restored.”
Aminata had simply smiled at him, her face half-illuminated by the Chinese lamp between them.
“You’ve been gone a rather long time, brother. Perhaps too long.”
Now, as the lights from neighbouring flats cast warm rectangles onto the street below, Alfred began to understand what she meant. This wasn’t mere acceptance of too little—it was a community keeping its strength and dignity in the face of challenges.
He thought back to the air-conditioned lecture halls of his London university, where he’d studied economic development with such certainty. The theories had seemed so straightforward then: good governance, infrastructure investment, accountability measures, public-private partnerships. But standing here now, feeling the genuine relief washing through his community, he realised how abstract those concepts had been to him.
“Or Professor!” called Mr Koroma, his elderly neighbour from the adjacent flat, using the nickname he’d bestowed upon Alfred when he learned of his economics degree from the London School of Economics.
“You’re finally joining us common folks in the celebration, eh? Have you become properly African, ah Sierra Leonean, again?”
Alfred laughed, slightly embarrassed.
“Oh yeah I joined the dance! I need to finish an important presentation, sir. The laptop died hours ago.”
“Ah, then you understand now!” Mr Koroma’s face crinkled with the wisdom of his seventy-odd years. “When you truly need something basic, you properly appreciate it when it comes. That’s not weakness—that’s being human.”
Back inside his flat, Alfred plugged in his laptop and opened the PowerPoint presentation he’d been working on. Throughout the night, fuelled by multiple cups of coffee, Alfred completed a presentation quite different from what he’d originally planned to show his boss. It now addressed both the economic theory he’d been trained in and incorporated the lived experiences of people adapting to inconsistent infrastructure—how communities organised around these challenges, the informal economies that emerged to fill gaps, and the psychological strength required to maintain hope in difficult circumstances.
When his British boss, Mr Williams, raised his eyebrows at the new thinking in his presentation the next morning, Alfred explained,
“I realised I was approaching our development work from an outsider’s perspective. I was asking why people don’t demand more, without understanding what it means to live with uncertainty as the baseline.”
Later that evening, as he shared a drink with Mr Koroma on their adjoining balconies, the old man said:
“You see, Professor, sometimes you must go away to truly come home,” he said thoughtfully. “You brought back your fancy education, yes, but you needed to relearn the wisdom that was here all along. The real development isn’t just about having light all the time. It’s about recognising the light that never left—the one in here.” He tapped his chest. “That’s the light that sustained us through the darkest times in this our good old Salone.”
As night properly fell over Freetown, Alfred raised his glass in silent agreement.
“Lait don kam,” he whispered to himself. “And this time, perhaps, it might stay.”
Enjoy the weekend.
Mallam O.
