Palaver Hut to Parliament: Restoring Sierra Leone’s Culture of Conversation

 

By Mahmud Tim Kargbo

The renewal of our democracy, our education, and indeed our civilisation, requires more than the defence of free speech. It demands a rediscovery of conversation itself, that fragile and humane art that Sierra Leone once knew instinctively, and must now learn to cherish anew.

The Silence After Words

It is no coincidence that the shallowness of so much of our present civic life coincides with the erosion of genuine conversation. True, Sierra Leoneans are a people who talk constantly, in markets, at poda poda stops, on verandas, on radio phone-in shows, even over jollof rice in noisy parties. Yet the sheer volume of talk should not be confused with the art of conversation.

Conversation in its deeper sense implies listening, reciprocity, patience, and the willingness to risk candour without fear of reprisal. It implies, in Michael Oakeshott’s sense, “an unrehearsed intellectual adventure.” But in our national life candour is dangerous, reciprocity fragile, and patience short. We live in an age where political opponents brand each other as traitors, where criticism is swiftly labelled as disloyalty, and where speaking too openly may close doors or invite reprisals.

The result is a paradox: a society full of noise, yet starved of conversation.

Free Speech and Its Limits

Much has been said, both in Sierra Leone and abroad, about free speech: its boundaries, its limits, and its dangers. Free speech is, of course, indispensable. Without it the voices of victims would never have been heard in our Truth and Reconciliation Commission, nor the voices of activists who fought to end one-party rule, nor those who pressed for the abolition of the death penalty in our time.

Yet free speech alone is insufficient. For what matters more is not the mere ability to utter words, but the ability to sustain a conversation where those words are heard, weighed, and engaged. Too often our speech is weaponised: reduced to slogans at rallies, insults hurled across parliamentary chambers, or monologues shouted into microphones on street corners. These may be expressions, powerful, emotive, even cathartic, but they are not conversation.

Oakeshott reminds us that what distinguishes civilised humanity is not simply reasoning or invention, but the ability to converse. That insight resonates deeply in a country where the palaver hut once stood at the heart of the community. There, disputes were settled not by force or decree but through extended talk, where everyone had their say and decisions emerged through patient deliberation. The TRC itself drew on this tradition: its very method was conversational, giving space to listen, however imperfectly, to victims, perpetrators, chiefs, women, and children alike.

The Conversation of Mankind, and of Sierra Leone

Oakeshott described civilisation as a “conversation of mankind”, not as a transitional stage toward consensus, but as an end in itself. In this sense, Sierra Leone’s own cultural inheritance is rich. Our griots, our folktales of the spider Ananse, our late moonlight stories, our elders’ councils, all of these embody conversation as a way of being human.

But conversation requires scale. It thrives in the bounded space of a village court barray, or in the familiar bonds of a neighbourhood ataya base. It withers when transplanted into the vast impersonality of centralised state bureaucracies, or when silenced by fear of retribution. Oakeshott’s emphasis on the local resonates powerfully here. Just as he cherished the “garden enclosed” of medieval lore, so too must we cherish the small-scale spaces in Sierra Leone where conversation still lives: local councils, community radios, town meetings.

The Tyranny of Purposefulness

One of Oakeshott’s most striking observations was that conversation loses its soul when it becomes enslaved to purpose. He warned against “the rage to reform”, that ceaseless drive to instrumentalise every activity for measurable outcomes.

This rings true for us. Our politics is obsessed with projects, our universities with certificates, our NGOs with logframes and donor metrics. Students increasingly treat education as a means of upward mobility alone, not as an encounter with ideas or an initiation into a civilisational conversation. Politicians treat governance as a series of transactions, not as a patient dialogue with citizens. Even religion, once rooted in communal storytelling and moral formation, often succumbs to the transactional logic of prosperity preaching.

A culture without space for purposeless conversation becomes brutal. It reduces life to competition, mastery, and exploitation. And yet Sierra Leone knows, or once knew, the joy of purposelessness: in music sessions that stretched till dawn, in storytelling under the moonlight, in long debates about history or politics over endless cups of attaya. These were not “useful” in any narrow sense, but they nurtured the soul of a people.

Speech, Expression, and the Loss of Dialogue

Here a crucial distinction arises. Free speech is not the same as free expression. Speech, as Oakeshott and Aristotle both knew, is logos, reasoned, deliberative language that can be answered. Expression, by contrast, is monologue: a cry of the heart, a gesture, a performance.

In our politics, expression increasingly replaces speech. We see it in orchestrated protests that block roads without engaging opponents, in the chants that drown out debate, in symbolic gestures that substitute for policy reasoning. Expression can be powerful, even necessary, but it does not invite dialogue. It silences it.

Animals too can express pain or joy. Only humans can converse. If Sierra Leone is to deepen its democracy, it must defend not only the right to speak, but the conditions that make speech conversational rather than merely expressive.

Universities and the Gift of an Interval

The university, Oakeshott argued, should be “a place of learning”, a sanctuary for conversation, where young people taste the mystery of life without rushing to immediate solutions. He lamented the degeneration of universities into factories of certificates, producing graduates trained to exploit the world rather than converse with it.

This warning speaks with particular urgency to Sierra Leone. Too many students enter Fourah Bay College or Njala with the sole aim of securing a credential to escape poverty. Too many lecturers treat teaching as instruction, not as initiation into a conversation. Research becomes instrumental, tailored to exploitative donor demands to push their neocolonialist agenda, rather than exploratory and reflective.

Yet the university could be the very cradle of a renewed national conversation, a space where inherited knowledge is transmitted, tested, and expanded; where the wisdom of our oral traditions meets the rigour of philosophy and science; where students learn to disagree without violence, and to deliberate without fear.

If Sierra Leone higher education is to recover its once-proud place, Fourah Bay college was once the “Athens of West Africa”, it must restore the art of conversation at its heart.

The Conversation Between Freetown and the Provinces

In the West, Oakeshott spoke of Athens and Jerusalem as the twin poles of civilisation: reason and faith, knowledge and reverence. In Sierra Leone, one might speak of Freetown and the Provinces: the creole and the indigenous, the cosmopolitan and the traditional, the modern and the ancestral.

Our vitality as a nation depends not on the victory of one over the other, but on the continuing conversation between them. The tragedy of our history is that this conversation has too often been conducted as domination rather than dialogue: the imposition of one code upon the other, the silencing of rural voices, the dismissal of creole learning.

Yet our hope lies in treating this tension as a conversation without final conclusion, a dialogue between codes, each with its wisdom, each with its blind spots, neither entitled to absolute victory.

Toward a Politics of Conversation

What then does a culture of conversation demand of Sierra Leone today?

It demands first a politics of listening. Our leaders must recover the humility to hear criticism without instinctively branding it as sabotage. Opposition parties must see themselves not as enemies but as interlocutors. Civil society must resist the temptation to reduce dialogue to performance for rogue donors.

It demands secondly a renewal of educational culture. Universities must reimagine themselves as communities of conversation, not mere certification mills. Primary and secondary schools must teach pupils not merely to memorise but to deliberate, to listen, to question.

It demands thirdly a revaluation of our cultural inheritance. The palaver hut, the town barray, the oral traditions of debate, these are not relics. They are living resources for a democratic culture of conversation.

A Wild Flower Among the Rice

Conversation, finally, is not a race, nor an argument to be won, nor a project to be completed. It is, as Oakeshott wrote, a “wild flower among the wheat”: fragile, unnecessary in any utilitarian sense, yet indispensable for civilisation.

Sierra Leone, scarred by war and division, cannot afford to lose that flower. Without it, politics will collapse into noise, universities into emptiness, and culture into spectacle. With it, we may yet build a society where disagreement does not mean enmity, where speech invites response, and where the future is woven not by decree but by dialogue.

Our republic will endure only if it rediscovers this truth: that to be Sierra Leonean is, above all, to be a participant in an ongoing conversation, one that has no conclusion, but must always be put by for another day.