Question 1.1

1.1 This first question in our interview concerns your birth in Ourous, in the heart of the highlands of Guinea. It is not easy to understand how a child from the African countryside was able to become a cardinal. …

ROBERT CARDINAL SARAH

You are quite right! It is difficult to grasp what I have become today, considering my modest beginnings.

When I think about the animistic milieu, so deeply attached to its customs, from which the Lord took me in order to make me into a Christian, a priest, a bishop, a cardinal, and one of the close collaborators of the pope, I am overcome with emotion.

I was born on June 15, 1945, in Ourous, one of the smallest villages in Guinea, in the north of the country, near the border of Senegal. It is a mountainous region that is far from the capital of Conakry and often regarded as unimportant by the administrative and political authorities.

In fact, my home is about 310 miles distant from Conakry. The trip to the capital takes an entire day along especially difficult roads. During the rainy season, sometimes the cars get stuck. The journey may be interrupted for long hours, the time it takes to get the vehicle out of the mud, only for it to get bogged down again a little farther on. At the time when I was born, most of the roads were no more than simple dirt paths.

My years in Ourous were the most precious time of my life in Guinea. I grew up in that isolated place, where I went to school to earn a primary school diploma. We followed the same curriculum as little French children, and so I learned that my ancestors were Gauls. …

At the time, the Holy Ghost Fathers, members of the Congregation of the Holy Spirit-founded in the eighteenth century by Claude Poullart des Places and reformed in the nineteenth century by Father François Libermann-had already converted many animists to the Christian faith. These missionaries had come to our region because Islam was not widespread there; they saw it as a possible field for evangelization. In Conakry, for example, efforts to convert people were almost fruitless because the Muslims had long been the dominant group there.

Today, my village is almost entirely Christian and has close to 1,000 inhabitants.

At the beginning of the twentieth century-the mission was founded in 1912- the chief of Ourous welcomed the Holy Ghost Fathers with true generosity. He gave them more than 100 acres of land to promote the establishment of Catholic worship. By farming this land, the missionaries obtained the resources necessary to cover the costs of running the mission and providing for the boarding-school students. Six months after the arrival of the Holy Ghost Fathers, one of them was brutally carried off by an untimely death. Remember that hygiene at the time was very basic. Cases of malaria, in particular, were still common.

In such a setting, these men of God made great sacrifices and suffered many deprivations, without ever complaining and with unending generosity. The villagers helped them to build their huts. Then, little by little, they built a church together. This place of worship was decorated by Father Fautrard, who had just been appointed to Ourous by Bishop Raymond Lerouge, the first vicar apostolic of Conakry.

My father watched the construction of the mission and the church. He told me the story of how he had been chosen along with seven other young boys, animists like himself, to carry to the village the bell that had arrived by boat at Conakry. By working in shifts for a week, they completed the arduous journey.

Later, my father, Alexandre, was baptized and married on the same day, April 13, 1947, that is, two years after my birth.