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Last Updated: 03/10/2005
The Rockbridge Report is produced
under the supervision of the Dept. of Journalism and Mass Communications
at Washington and Lee University.
Reporting supervisors: Prof. Doug Cumming
Technical supervisor:
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W&L professor overcomes
adversity, civil war in educational pursuit By Ashley Metzloff Watching Professor Mohamed Kamara teach students African Literature in a
college classroom, it’s hard to believe that he doesn’t know his birthday.
Legally, it is Dec. 6, 1968. He was born in Sierra Leone, but there is no official record of the actual day or year he entered the world. Kamara chose a date at random as he was filling out forms for college entrance exams. Sitting in his office that is decorated with his children’s art and shelves of books, Kamara tells the story of his beginning. Sometimes the events sound almost like excerpts from an African folk tale, but the story is very real to the man who lived it. It’s a real-life epic which shows the power of perseverance that led Kamara from a life of extreme poverty to a life of success in a new land. Kamara didn’t grow up in his biological mother’s house. He lived with his mother, Kadiatu, until he was about two, but then he became very sick. “My mom had lost at least three other children before, and they died around about the same age, about two years old, of the same illness,” he says, “So when I got the illness, she decided, ‘This child is not going to die this time.’” Kadiatu knew that her uncle’s wife, Adama, understood traditional African medicine. She rushed Kamara to Adama’s house, fearing the worst. “In her opinion I was already dead by the time we got to Adama’s house,” Kamara says. Adama cured him in less than a day. “She practically brought me back from the dead,” Kamara says. He has no idea what sickness killed his siblings, but his mother also lost two other children after he was born. All of them died of the same illness. After Adama cured him, Kadiatu decided he was better off staying in Adama’s home. His mother was the youngest of his father’s four wives and didn’t think she would be able to take care of him the way Adama could. “She didn’t abandon me,” Kamara says, explaining that in Africa people sometimes let their children stay with others if they believe the caretakers are trustworthy. Although they lived in different towns, he and Kadiatu visited frequently. In Adama’s home, Kamara was surrounded by many other children. “She would just see a child on the street and just pick that child up and bring the child home until the child decided, or the parents finally decided, to bring that child back… She was an extremely generous woman,” he says. When Kamara was 11, he started working in diamond mines for extra money to help support Adama. “I thought that she needed help, and one way I could help was to go to the mines, and so I went with grown-ups,” he says. He would often wake up at 1 a.m. and walk to the mines with a group. After mining, he would return home in time to get ready for school. Diamond mining could be dangerous work, especially when digging illegally on state-owned mines. People were often arrested and taken to prison. Most people in Kamara’s hometown didn’t continue education past primary school because of the gems. “Diamond mining is like the lottery… People spend their entire lives mining for diamonds and never hit anything big,” he says. “I was never lucky enough to find a big diamond with the group that I was working with to turn my head away from school, which, in retrospect, was a blessing in disguise.” Sheka, Adama’s husband, was the only one who pushed Kamara to study when he was younger. “He was always there for me, to encourage me,” Kamara says. In 1986, Kamara hitched a ride on an 18-wheeler to attend 6th form, the two optional years after secondary school. Sheka, who had separated from Adama by then, helped him through school in Freetown by paying his fees and buying his books. After 6th form, Kamara went to the university. His first college experience was very different from that of most Americans. “Life was very difficult there… Sometimes we would go for months without electricity on campus,” he says. There was no reliable water supply, and students would often have to walk down one of the highest mountains in the country to find food in the towns below. “It was very picturesque, a very beautiful campus, but life was difficult,” he says. The friendships he built during his early college years helped him through challenging times. In 1991, Sierra Leone erupted into a devastating civil war. Two years after the war started, Kamara applied for and won an exchange scholarship to Kalamazoo College in Michigan. By then “the war was taking over the whole country,” so he decided to use the scholarship. “I’m glad I did get out… The moment I left, the situation got worse,” he says. The war would kill some of Kamara’s closest friends and relatives before its end 10 years later. The brutality of Michigan’s winter, which locals said was the worst in 10 years, gave Kamara what he called a “cruel initiation” into the United States. Kamara was also shocked with the privileges that were available to American students. “We didn’t have a hundredth of those resources,” he says. Kamara was also taken aback by lack of political involvement on campus. “Student bodies were very, very disengaged from what was going on outside the student body itself,” he says, unlike in his home, where “we were the de facto opposition party to the government.” After Kalamazoo, Kamara completed his masters in French at Purdue University in Indiana. He then went to Tulane University in New Orleans for his Ph.D. “After three years in the Midwest, I said okay now, let’s go somewhere sunny.” He was too busy to get to know New Orleans well enough to like it, but the city’s humidity, food, and easygoing culture reminded him of Sierra Leone. Kamara married an old friend from home in New Orleans, and their daughter was born in 1997. They named her after Adama. Their son, Musa, was born in 1999. His middle name is Sheka. They also have a daughter, Hannah, who was born in Sierra Leone and attends Rockbridge High School. Now in his fourth year as a professor at Washington and Lee, Kamara says he is comfortable in Lexington. While his dream is to return to Sierra Leone permanently, he believes that going back might be impossible. Most jobs in Sierra Leone come from the government, which Kamara believes is crooked. While he would like to be part of the educational system there, he refuses to consider moving until he can survive without the state’s help. “I will go back if I am financially independent because I wouldn’t depend on the government for my survival… But if I go now, the only way I can be self-sufficient is by being corrupt,” he says. Kamara also believes some of his opinions might not be welcomed by those in power. “I would continue to be very vigilant, to criticize wherever I see aberrations, and so because of that I wouldn’t fit in very well into the system,” he says. People in Sierra Leone who disagree with the government can get into lots of difficulties Sheka vanished 10 years ago during the civil war. He lived in Freetown, where about 6,000 people were killed in a week when rebels took over the city. “He’s probably dead, because he was an extremely smart man who knows how to get hold of me,” Kamara says. “So either he is alive and incapacitated or he’s dead.” Kamara’s greatest passion is teaching. He says he loves sharing knowledge with students, but also loves learning from their different perspectives and ideas. “You’re dealing with many students, different students, at different times, and they are coming with their different perspectives on things, and that is always enriching,” he says. When Kamara teaches, he doesn’t stand behind a podium or sit behind a desk. He walks around the front of the room, occasionally writing a note or two on the board, but he doesn’t lecture. Instead, he fuels discussion. He asks students questions instead of just telling them all of the answers. He also shares personal narratives of his own. “I always tell them my stories of things I went through,” says Kamara. He continually advises students to be grateful for what they have, and says experiencing poverty “gives you humility and respect for those who work hard, for the survivor.” “Life is not always rosy and should not always be rosy,” Kamara says. He believes that students, even at privileged places like W&L, will have to endure some form of pain in their lifetimes, but will grow by learning how to draw strength from life’s harder experiences. “All of us in one way or another need experiences like that,” Kamara says. “I got that education for free.” |
