MY UNCLE BETRAYED ME_ BY BISHOP SAHR ISAAC

Chapter 1

How did I, Augusta, believe for seventeen years in Nongokor that every elder’s hand was safe, until the night we reached Goderich and my uncle Sahr’s eyes looked at me like I was something he had been waiting to claim?

I was born in Nongokor, a village tucked into the red hills of Kono District, in the Eastern part of Sierra Leone. We are Konos—people of the diamond earth and the deep forest, whose voices carry the weight of old proverbs and whose feet know every path between rice swamps and kola trees. In Kono, the harmattan does not just blow; it sings through cassava leaves and dusts the thatched roofs with a fine, golden powder. The night sky there sits so low you feel you could reach up and snap a star for your mother’s cooking fire. 

In Nongokor, life moved like the Moa River—slow, patient, and connected. If your neighbor’s roof caved in the rain, you brought your own bamboo. If a harvest failed, the village ate from one pot. Deceit was a word we kept for folktales, where the tortoise always got his comeuppance. I grew up believing that a man’s word was his chest, and his chest was open to all. That belief lived in me like the scent of smoked fish on my grandmother’s hands—familiar, unquestioned, true.

This was the world I knew when word came that my father Alimamy’s youngest brother, Uncle Sahr, had made his home in Freetown. He lived in Goderich, Metchem, where the Atlantic chewed at the land and men wore leather shoes even under the sun’s glare. Uncle Sahr was not loud with wealth. He did not return in a convoy of honking cars. But twice a year, his pickup would crawl into Nongokor groaning under bags of salt, sugar, coffee, and soap. 

He moved through the compound with a slow smile, calling elders by their praise names—“Pa Morlai, the lion of Gbense,” “Mamie Kadiatu, whose hands never tire.” He spoke soft Krio that rolled like water over smooth stones, pressed kola nuts into wrinkled palms, and bowed his head when the imam prayed. “Sahr has not forgotten his roots,” the village said. Even my mother, Mariama, whose eyes could read a lie in a man’s cough, nodded and said, “Allah rewards the grateful.”

Then came the talk under the mango tree at dusk. The smoke from the elders’ pipes curled into the indigo sky as my parents spoke in Mende, low and measured like warning drums. The city, they said, was a rapid stream—fast, bright, dangerous, but full of fish for those who knew how to cast. The village was a deep river: slow, sure, and safe. But if I was to learn pen and paper, to bring back knowledge like a hunter brings back antelope, I would have to go. 

It was decided: I, Augusta, would go to stay with Uncle Sahr. 

When he handed me the clothes he had brought—shirt the color of the sky after rain, trousers that did not itch, sandals that did not slap—the whole village gathered. Children clapped. Women ululated. Faces shone brighter than lanterns. In Kono, to be chosen for the city was to be touched by fortune. We honored him in return, as custom demanded. Twenty goats and thirty chickens bleated and clucked their way into his truck, a tribute from a village proud of its son. 

The word “city” sat heavy on my tongue, like iron. To the girls in Nongokor, a boy returning from Freetown for December and the Mansa Festival was a storm cloud in the dry season—irresistible, dangerous, inevitable. I did not know then that the same cloud could gather over a girl.

The city met me with noise. Not the drums of Nongokor, but a restless, grinding sound that never slept. Cars growled like hungry leopards. Generators coughed through the night. The sea at Lumley Beach hissed against the sand, endless and indifferent. Houses stood shoulder to shoulder, as if afraid of the dark. At night, the sky was a smear of orange, and the stars hid their faces in shame.

Uncle Sahr’s house in Goderich was white, two stories high, with a black iron gate and a yard swept clean every morning. He wore his Muslim attire like a second skin—white caps, flowing robes, a prayer bead clicking softly between his fingers. At dawn and dusk he prostrated, reciting Quranic verses in a voice that trembled with reverence. He greeted elders with both hands, asked after their children, and never passed a child without pressing a coin into their palm. To look at him was to see discipline walking on two legs.

We arrived at dusk. The truck’s headlights cut through the harmattan haze, and the smell of fried plantain drifted from the street. Uncle Sahr embraced my father, took my small trunk from the back, and led me inside. “You are home now, Augusta,” he said. His voice was gentle. Too gentle. 

That very night, the mask slipped.

After dinner, when the house had gone quiet and only the generator’s hum remained, he called me to the sitting room. “Let me show you how to lock the gate properly,” he said. His hand lingered on my shoulder longer than it should have. His eyes moved over me—not like a father’s, but like a man measuring cloth in a market. He spoke of how “city girls did not carry themselves like village girls,” and how I, with my mother’s fullness, would need to learn to “be careful.” He asked me to bring him water at midnight, his voice low, his gaze fixed.

I was seventeen. I had inherited my mother’s body—wide hips, full chest, the kind of frame Kono women carried with quiet strength. In Nongokor, it was a sign of fertility and health. In that room, it felt like a sentence. 

I did not sleep. I lay on the thin mattress in the boys’ quarter, staring at the ceiling, listening to the city breathe. My chest was tight, like someone had tied a rope around my ribs. How could this be the same man who had quoted Surah An-Nur with tears in his eyes? The same man who gave the imam a goat every Eid? 

But then came the catharsis, slow and bitter, like medicine. 

The next morning, Uncle Sahr was a different man. He rose before Fajr, woke me gently to pray, and walked me to the mosque himself. He spoke to the neighbors about my schooling, about how “this child must not be spoiled by the city.” He greeted the elders with both hands, his forehead smooth, his robes immaculate. He was disciplined, controlled, the picture of piety. He had covered his tracks with layers of respectability, so thick that if I had spoken, no one would have believed me. 

I understood then what my mother meant when she said, “Some men wear the Quran on their lips and a knife in their hearts.” 

Over the next weeks, the pattern repeated. At night, the advances—words too familiar, touches too long, requests made when the house was quiet. By day, the discipline—prayers on time, charity to the mosque, greetings to every elder in Goderich. He was building a wall of reputation between me and the truth. And I, a girl from Nongokor who had never learned to lie, did not know how to climb it.

But something in me began to shift. 

I remembered my grandmother in Nongokor, who used to say, “A river does not forget its source, even when it meets the sea.” I remembered the way the women of Kono held their heads high, how they spoke truth even when their voices shook. I remembered that I was not just Augusta, the girl sent to the city. I was Augusta, daughter of Alimamy and Mariama, of the Konos, of a line that did not break easily.

So I started writing. At night, by the light of a kerosene lamp, I wrote letters I would never send. I wrote about the smell of salt on Uncle Sahr’s boubou, about the weight of his gaze, about the way his prayer mat and his sin seemed to share the same floor. Writing became my river back to Nongokor. With each word, the tightness in my chest loosened. 

How does a girl unlearn safety in a single night?  

How does she learn that holiness can be a costume?  

How does she learn that tradition can send her to be protected, only to place her where she must learn to protect herself?  

Uncle Sahr still greets me each morning with “As-salamu alaykum.” I still reply, “Wa alaykumu salam.” But now, the words feel like two stones clicking against each other—hard, hollow, and cold. 

The village of Nongokor still believes he is a good man.  

The goats are still being fattened for his next visit.  

And I, Augusta, sit by the window in Goderich, watching the sea, holding my pen like a knife. The city gave me new clothes, but it also gave me this: the beginning of a voice that will not stay quiet.

How does a girl turn silence into a story?  

That was the question the city asked me. And for the first time, I was ready to answer.

© Bishop Sahr Isaac

- Sierra Leone, West Africa. 

18th May, 2026.