On a Silver Plate: A Profile of the Sierra Leone Informal Economy (III)

Dr. Umaru Bah, CEO

DataWise (SL) Ltd.

@DataWiseSL

Originally Published in Medium on February 10, 2019.

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You get burnt if they catch you with burnt plates of Sierra Leonean artists.

You do not pirate original plates produced by CDSA. That’s the Sierra Leone Compact-Disc Sellers Association. Too much hassle from the police. The CDSA is very powerful. If you burn Salone artists, the police will take you and your merchandise and everything else to the station where you will spend your whole day and money to release yourself, your merchandise and your boombox. Most times, you never get back your merchandise. And you have to start back from zero. And hope the producers loan you back some plates to sell and make enough profit to pay back all those lost plates.

Selling Groundnuts for Peanuts: A Profile of the Sierra Leone Informal Economy (II)

By Dr. Umaru Bah, CEO

DataWise (SL) Ltd.

Aminata is exhausted.

Like the one-hundred-plus other visitors at New England ville. That’s understandable. It is now a few minutes past 5:30 p.m. Has been an unusual and eventfully long day. Unusual for Aminata’s co-visitors, who are here for a special occasion. You could tell from their livery of black suits and black ties covering white shirts. Mostly borrowed, a few recently purchased, all judging by the ill-fits and, had she dared to go close enough to any of them, by the lingering smell of oxygen-deprived muskiness. The kind you smell from clothing locked tight at the bottom of a suitcase, which sees literally the light of day only on special occasions. The very special kind that happens only once every 18 months. Like this one.

A dead-pan livery of black suits, black blouses and skirts, white shirts. All adorned with hushed conversations occasionally interspersed with the buzz of bumble bees. Reads like dawn of a funereal wake. Sounds like it. Funereal it is not. Or perhaps it is, Aminata would have found out or verified had she cared to ask one of them. At least one of them would have suffered the dignity of her invisible presence and informed her that they are there to interview for the British Commonwealth scholarship. No laughing matter.

Hence the ice-cold silence on a sticky-hot tropical November reluctantly welcoming Harmattan.