''While We Have Hands"

Friends of freedom and fellow citizens of West Africa, your presence here gives us much hope that freedom for Africa very much remains a possibility. Those who have defended freedom around the world have told us that freedom is not free. I therefore thank you for coming out to make a down payment on freedom for our brothers and sisters in Liberia and Sierra Leone.

We are here because we want to have a hand in our own destiny. We are here to hold hands and to cheer for and encourage one another toward a free Africa that will permit us to make our own choices; to be free and to pursue our goals – both individual and regional. We also need freedom to contemplate African continental goals. We can achieve these goals and more with our hands together.

Between noble dreams we have frivolous uses for our hands. We clap, we greet, we point, we feel, we embrace, and we sooth with our hands. But we can hardly eat without our hands. And that’s not a frivolous use of our hands. There are even more purposeful uses for our hands. We grab, we push, we punch, we throw, and we warn with our hands.

For allowing us to do all this, we adorn our hands. We groom them; we paint them; we dress them with gem and jewelry; we hold them in front of our faces to admire them before we put them on display for others to see.

Despite our hands, we fail to grasp, we slip and fall because we did not have a firm hold on what we desired. All this, in a life which fully contemplates the use of hands as a mean of easy facility for our creative existence.

Now – imagine a world in which we each have but one hand or one leg. But in this world, there was a choice. You had to choose which hand or leg you could afford to lose if you had no choice but to lose one or the other. Now – stop imagining, because that world already exists in Sierra Leone. And it was brought from Charles Taylor’s Liberia and introduced to Foday Sankoh’s Sierra Leone.

Let me emphasize, however, that there was a freedom of choice in the mandatory amputation which Foday Sankoh practiced in Sierra Leone. There was freedom of choice. However, there were Sierra Leonean citizens who were too young to understand their own need to make a choice. They too had to lose their limbs – an arm or a leg. So it was their mothers who cast a vote for each of them. The mother might caress the left hand of her one-year-old daughter for the last time before submitting it as the least useful of her young daughter’s limbs.

Of course choosing the least functional limb was not an exact science. A truly gifted hand might have been cut off to satisfy Charles Taylor or Foday Sankoh. Life is tough enough with both hands. Tougher still with one limb cut off without the backing of any lawful authority.

So how can we ever forget? As long as that Sierra Leonean girl, whose hand is cut off, will never wear a diamond ring, or as long as that Liberian boy will never kick a soccer ball, let alone shoot a winning goal, we will never forget that we too have a choice.

We choose to end Charles Taylor tenure prematurely before we lose another limb, and we have chosen to let Foday Sankoh spend the rest of his life in prison.

If we are angry, let no one be so quick to ask for our forgiveness. We only ask for the understanding of the incredulous world.

Take one more look at both your hands, and never again take your hands for granted. Use them toward the fight for freedom in Liberia and Sierra Leone.

Thank you.

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