Book

Description

There is a particular kind of question that every generation of Waterloo Chiefdom asks of itself, and Matindi Town has asked it as long and as earnestly as any village in this stretch of the Western Area Rural District: what will become of us if the road we imagined does not open in our time? For many years, that road was thought of as a paved highway, or a bridge, or a market shed. In recent decades, for many of our families, it has come to mean a university gate — a place our children might walk through and come out the other side transformed, secure, and able to provide for those who raised them. We, the elders and traditional leadership of this chiefdom, have watched that hope grow heavier on the shoulders of parents in Matindi and the surrounding towns with each passing year that a university remains a long and costly journey away rather than a walk down the road. We have sat in family compounds where a father counted, out loud, the years and the loans it would take to send even one child through such a journey, and we have seen the quiet discouragement that follows when the sum does not add up. It is right that Professor Paul Allieu Kamara has chosen to address this hope directly, rather than to look past it. What this book offers Matindi Town is not a smaller dream in place of a larger one. It is, in fact, a truer memory of how our own communities came to be. Long before any of the villages founded in this district in the nineteenth century — Waterloo itself, Benguema, Regent, Gloucester, and the smaller settlements such as Matindi that grew up alongside them — had a college or a technical institute within reach, they were already becoming real, functioning places: a church and a mosque holding the community together and, in the old Native Pastorate arrangement our elders still speak of, quietly handling much of what we would now call local administration; families clearing and farming land; artisans passing a trade from an older hand to a younger one; a market finding its rhythm. The people who built those foundations did not have the comfort of a nearby university. They had one another, their land, their faith, and their willingness to organise.