Herbert’s passing is as hard to bear as it is unreal. The days and weeks may pass, “It” remains raw. But some of the abiding memories that formed in my heart and mind, starting from many decades ago, have resurfaced with renewed vigour. Like beacons on the parallel kinship landmarks that are the strong friendships that help lend structure and meaning to our lives.
Our friendship began with eleven plus at the Sierra Leone Grammar School. A band of brothers four that included Gerard John, who passed in the year 2000, and Radcliffe (Dr Lisk). We were tightly knit, particularly so during the first three (common curriculum) years, namely the last two years of the school at Fourah Bay Road and its first year in Murray Town.
At the time, I lived only about five minutes from Herbert, in a third parallel street to his Berwick Street home. This nearness meant frequent visits, which meant not infrequent football and other games were customarily in the offing.
Year after year, our school produced the best or near best results at the national level. Herbert, or HPM as I often privately think of him because those large book-edge initials have remained stuck in my mind, was one of its accomplished products. When he left, he was, in keeping with the school’s motto, primed to pursue in both academic and social terms. The next stage would be Fourah Bay College where three of us (including Gerald) began our studies the same year. And, for Herbert, the Hague followed.
I saw him a few times during his stay in the Netherlands. On his first visit from the Hague to Paris, l heard a strangely familiar whistle outside my three-storey building that threw me at first. It was the first five syllables of the first line from From me to you. But our friendship signature tune, vintage 1963 Beatles, soon registered.
And how could I possibly forget this meeting-point scene, from a visit much later, some fifteen years ago, in the central Town Hall Square in Paris. As he strode towards me, his right hand outstretched, he remarked that Gerald alone had left us (nar Geral’ nor more don lef we). That was the last time I saw him.
Testimonies abound about HPM’s professional and personal qualities; the way he jealously guarded his integrity.
I am sure he would not have objected to my saying he was “a most UNDP man”. Clearly driven by conviction, he was a person on a lifelong mission grounded on the principles and goals of the Programme, and his own results-based approach.
The Programme’s Focus Areas notably comprise sustainable human development, democratic governance and peace building. And who better than Herbert would have known, first hand and otherwise, about Sierra Leone’s continually poor performance as recorded in the UNDP’s annual Human Development Reports. None the less, after retirement he chose to go back home to serve the country and wider continent. A foregone conclusion. When others in his position would mostly have baulked at the perceived, and all too real, systematic risks, he saw the latter as challenges systematically to be met. In other words, he returned to continue his life’s work.
His presence and voice will live on, not only through his children and their children, but in other tangible and intangible ways: his immense work, of course, in its diverse forms, as well as his remembered human qualities and all those ineffable memories.
HPM has gone back physically to nature, and we are free to see and hear him in nature’s landscape and soundscape. See him in a garden’s profusion or a single flower, and hear him when birds sing: the ineffable songbirds that symbolize the continuing promise of enlightenment and peace.
I’m the chaffinch that sings: I’m here, right here, I sing for those who dare to care. I’m the wise thrush’s oft repeated song:
I wish that you would sing along!
Finally, I would like to renew the expression of my deepest sympathy to Selina and the entire M’cleod family.
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