By Megan Cornell
To celebrate this year’s International Day of Peace, the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies invited Sierra Leone’s Minister of Information and Civic Education, Chernor Bah, to speak on his career trajectory and experience working for peace in Sierra Leone.
Every year as part of their annual Peace Day celebration, the Kroc Institute honors a Notre Dame graduate cultivating peace globally with the Distinguished Alumni Award. Bah, who received his master’s in international peace studies from Notre Dame in 2011, is this year’s award recipient. Associate Director for alumni relations, Anne Hayner, praised Bah for his work while introducing him.
“We are delighted to welcome Chernor Bah to the Kroc Institute and the Keough School at Notre Dame, as a former refugee and war survivor, a longtime youth activist, an NGO founder, a United Nations leader, and last year was appointed Minister of Information and Civic Education in Sierra Leone,” Hayner said. “As inscribed at the base of the award, we are confident that you will go forth in peace.”
In accepting his award, Bah promised to continue dedicating his life to peace.
“I also pledge that for the rest of my life, I will continue to earn this award, because I believe peace is something you continue to earn every day,” he said.
Bah said his commitment to peace stems from his experience growing up in war-torn Sierra Leone. Although the war in Sierra Leone is now over, the country still faces challenges in overcoming the legacy of colonial rule.
“Colonialism is not just the past. It is now, and it stops us from fully claiming the future … colonialism and other biases imposed on us frameworks [that] disregarded our belief and traditions, and this oppression of our local culture and the political ecology of our society, deeply affected and undermine our ability to construct a national identity,” Bah said.
While some political leaders urge citizens to disregard the past, Bah believes that understanding Sierra Leone’s history is the only path to cultivating national identity and unity. Bah said this mission motivated him in his work as Minister of Civic Education, which makes him a bridge between Sierra Leone’s citizens, especially the youths, and policymakers.
“I have a responsibility of defining what civic education will mean for Sierra Leone, setting up the structure and institutions for civic education, and rolling all of these out within this short period,” Bah said.
Bah furthered that his time at Notre Dame continues to inspire his work in civic education. When completing his master’s, Bah remembered feeling most connected to his fellow students singing the Alma Mater at the end of a football game. The song created a sense of community and solidarity, which Bah hopes a new national anthem in Sierra Leone, written in Creole, not English, will produce.
“If you leave the city and go to any village, you can’t get any Sierra Leonean to get excited by the national anthem, or by a national symbol. It’s not possible to create a [national] consciousness if you don’t challenge these things,” Bah said.
Ultimately, Bah hopes that his work will be the beginning of a new history for Sierra Leone.
“A privilege I have had in my education here at the Kroc Institute and the University of Notre Dame is the audacity to question things that we have been taught,” Bah said. “That’s the job that I’ve given myself, that the President of Sierra Leone appointed me to do, and I’m hoping that I can convince the people of Sierra Leone to just start asking these questions because for too long we were taught never to ask these questions.”
