Written piece
FROM THE SOIL WE RISE
JOE JAMES
Sierra Leone
About this piece
This piece beautifully highlights the resilience of the Sierra Leonean people and their deep connection to the land.Through the cultivation of rice,cassava, and cocoa,it illustrates how these communities continue to thrive in the face of climate challenges The soil stands as hope
FROM THE SOIL WE RISE
From the soil, we emerge
not pristine, not untouched,
but carrying the weight of seasons in Kailahun, in Kenema, in Port Loko. The soil remembers us.
It cradles the footprints of farmers at dawn, cutlass resting on their shoulder, hope wrapped like a lappa around their waist.
We sow rice in the lowlands, lean over cassava and groundnut, watch cocoa dry under the patient sun, and wait for palm fruit to ripen like quiet promises. Even when the rains come too fiercely, washing away young dreams, or when they delay too long, cracking the earth beneath our feet we still come back. Because the soil is more than just dirt.
It is memory.
It is survival.
It is home.
We are the children of this land, nurtured on gari and plasas, on stories shared by firelight, on the rhythm of hoes striking the ground like a drum that won’t fall silent. We rise from places that fade from maps, from villages where strength isn’t just spoken but lived in every harvest, in every shared meal, in every hand that lifts another. And though hardship presses like harmattan dust, and storms scatter what we build, we refuse to stay buried.
We rise like green rice after a flood, like cassava after a drought, like voices that won’t be silenced.
From the soil, we rise.