Word: sierras
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Smart decided to become a doctor--an almost unreachable goal for an African then. He was the first member of his community to go to college, and only the second from an indigenous tribe in the entire country to go to professional school. The first was Sir Albert Margai, Sierra Leone's first Prime Minister; Karefa-Smart became Margai's top aid and the country's first Foreign Minister...
Karefa-Smart's political awakening came shortly after that, during a tour of East Africa. He was stunned by the exploitation of Africans in the mining industry throughout the copper belt, and, looking around, saw far more rigid repression than relatively liberal Sierra Leone had known...
Karefa-Smith returned to Sierra Leone and resigned all of his other posts to go into political life. With Sir Albert Margai, he organized the Sierra Leone People's Party, which eventually won Sierra Leone's independence from Britain in 1961. Over the next three years, he served in a variety of key positions: Foreign Minister, Minister of Defense, and Acting Prime Minister during Margai's frequent illnesses...
Karefa-Smart commuted from New York to sessions of Parliament four times a year until 1965, when new coups forced him to cut off all political contact with Sierra Leone. For the next five years, he served in Geneva as assistant director general of the World Health Organization, but continued to watch the political situation in Sierra Leone. In 1970, with power in the hands of an old political ally, Dr. Siaka Stevens, he reasoned that the time was right for him to return to Sierra Leone for good. Karefa-Smart smiles at his own innocence now when he says...
There was no peace waiting for him in Sierra Leone. Stevens saw his return as a political threat--the people might sweep this old but not aging hero, who had negotiated Sierra Leone's independence, back into office. He declared a state of emergency, and, in October, 1970, ordered his former friend's arrest...