Skulls And Bones in Sierra Leone

Alich Kabbah leans into an open grave in the Ascension Town Cemetery. TEXT BY DANNY GLENWRIGHT
PHOTOS BY KATRINA MANSON I’m bending over an open grave in Sierra Leone and trying not to fall in. A boy stands next to me. He’s a member of a crew of kids who call themselves Skull and Bones. He points inside and says, “Look, do you see the head?” I can’t, so he pulls the cracked gravestone farther from its resting place. The rock easily gives way under his strength. Broken from years of neglect, this grave is one of many in Freetown’s Ascension Town Cemetery that has crumbled, reuniting the long dead with the still living. The boy, whose name is Alich Kabbah, kneels on the tombstone and, bending over, drops his head deeper into the open hole. I am worried he will fall in. It is dusk and the sky has been threatening an outburst for hours, crackling, whistling, and rumbling down at us. Still, I am able to make out the splintered casket below me and the decaying body inside it. “You see, there’s the head,” says Kabbah, pointing at the corpse. I had met Kabbah two days before this grisly encounter. Stoned, drunk, and happy for some company, he’d rescued me from the heat of the Freetown sun and led me to a shady patch behind a disintegrating tomb where some of his friends live. The 24-year-old is a long-serving member of Skull and Bones, who are also known as the Friends of the Dead. Originally from the diamond-mining region of eastern Sierra Leone, Kabbah’s parents fled to Freetown 10 years ago at the height of the 11-year civil war that turned this once-prosperous West African country into hell on earth. Poor, hungry, and unable to provide for him, they dropped their son at the edge of the Ascension Town Cemetery and kept running. He’s been there ever since.

One of the Skull and Bones football players with the team mascot.

Like the more than 200 Freetown youths who make up the Skull and Bones gang, Kabbah lives in and around the cemetery. His crew dig graves, construct headstones, tidy the relentless tropical growth (especially when somber mourners toss them some coins), smoke lots of weed, and drink palm wine. Oh, and they speak to the dead.

Kabbah had trouble sitting still while I asked about his occult activities. The Skull and Bones football team, the Luma Boys, was about to play an important match against another Freetown team and he was anxious for it to start. Propped against the end of the grave we sat on were the team mascots—three painted human skulls on sticks. Unable to restrain himself as some of the players passed by on their way to the pitch, Kabbah grabbed one and, jumping to his feet, pumped it in the air. “I used to know some of the dead. I used to work with their families,” he said, bouncing on the concrete slab. “Now they help me build tombs and show me how to work. I communicate with them.” As if on cue, an agama lizard crawled across the eye of one of the other skulls. Part of its tail was missing and it bobbed its head in the sun. Kabbah took a toke on the joint in his hand and blew smoke toward the critter, then sat back down. “I like to live here because I’m used to the dead. The dead are my friends now, in the night and in the morning. I sleep with them…” “We are with the dead people always,” interrupted Christopher Benjamin, another Skull and Bones veteran and the gang’s self-proclaimed chairman. “We work in the cemetery, we sleep in the cemetery, we eat in the cemetery…” Benjamin, 37, has lived in Ascension Town for 22 years. It’s not the dead but the living he fears—especially the police, who regularly threaten, arrest, and steal from his boys. Now he was telling me how he communicates with spirits. “We use kola nuts to speak with the dead,” he said. 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.” 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.