This website is the third version. The first was created back in 2005. The website has been a huge success in terms of the number of visits and page views. Visitors want to know about the life of Siaka Stevens. Sierra Leoneans need to know about the man and his politics. No nation can grow if she fails to learn from its history. A sure way to fail a nation is to deny its people knowledge of their history.
This websites (the third version) is based on the autobiography of Siaka Stevens-What life has taught me. Its an important source to know about our political history. The foundations of the politics of present Sierra Leone were laid by Siaka Stevens. Attempts have been made to distort our political history. It is not intention to speculate why. My intention is to present a source for Sierra Leoneans to learn.
The politics of Sierra Leone cannot be divorced from the wider sub region or the Africa region for that matter. The era of Siaka Stevens was the era of the cold war. To understand the so called failings of Sierra Leone, you need to understand the context in which policy was made. It is all to easy for many to blame Siaka Stevens for all our ills. Until we examined our own actions, we will never move that country forward. Blaming the past, to cover ones own failure is a dis-service to our nation. Some even blame him for the rebel war. Those who do so, do not have the intellectual ability to understand the wider geopolitic or political economy of this world.
One of the most encouraging characteristics of the present Government, (with Mr. Bai Koroma as President), is that they have simply got on to solving our problems; not playing the blame game.
Siaka Stevens was not perfect. But he was not Mobutu; Mugabe, Idi Amin, Kwamusu Banda, and the other despots of his era. Search the web and one would be forgiven to think Siaka Stevens was in the class as these tyrants. Indeed a novel (The Devil that danced on Water) did just that. The author even accused my grandfather of murdering their father. Those are very serious allegations. You can read for yourself here, the account of my grandfather.
We owe it to the next generation of Sierra Leoneans to provide sources for our them to learn about our history.
Francis Stevens George
This website is developed and maintained by Francis Stevens George. Thanks to Aunty Yvette for the pictures.
Siaka Stevens by Siaka Stevens is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at www.siakastevens.org.
With all due respect what makes Siaka Stevens different from that of a despot? To even assume he was a smart guy, now in retrospect, is ridiculous He was just a vicious man who couldn’t stand anybody that manned up to his draconian ways, especially the intellectual community, as he himself would attest to the disdain he had for that segment of society. The average Sierra Leonean was either not as sophisticated or he simply had his way through the actions of a few sell-outs. Sorry to say if it were now, your father would have relinguish power in disgrace like any Mubarak or Gadaffi. Sierra Leone would have boomed under Siaka Stevens but his narrow mindedness and government of patronage, his idea of a nation and a government were far detached, and in effect arrested the development of Sierra Leone. Here is a man who was vehemently oppossed to independence before election, but yet claimed how free he wanted Sierra Leone to be. When a Republican Constitution was proposed by Albert Margai, again Siaka Stevens was oppossed to it. Reason: he was not in position to benefit directly from such a move. When he was Prime Minister, he manufactured all kinds of reasons why we needed it. When it was stipulated elections were to be held before the Republican Constitution, Siaka Stevens as PM indicated it was okay for the elections to wait after independence, what a character? Those who were conscious enough to read within those lines were maligned as enemies of the country, and were to be later executed on trumped up charges. How smart can one be to be outsmarted by Jamil Sahid? Or is it a case of a con being coned?
I meant to say he wanted the Republican Constitution before elections which was a contitutional abuse to the draft that called for elections before the Republic.