Qualla: Mattru Jong

Mattru Jong: Introduction

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

According to legend, a hunter from the village of Senehun once paddled across the Jong River chasing game and brought down a great buffalo on the far bank. He told others. They came, they hunted, and rather than paddle home each night they simply stayed. From that crossing grew Mattru Jong, whose Mende name is said to come from "Mo-Tewoo," the Place of the Buffalos. Today some 20,000 people live in this riverside town, the mainland capital of Bonthe District, 52 miles southwest of Bo. It is a place of fishing canoes and rice fields, of palm oil and cassava, and of a recent history far heavier than its sleepy waterfront suggests.

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Mattru Jong: Place of the Buffalos

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The founding story is more than charming folklore; it tells you how this town reads its own landscape. The Jong River is the organizing fact of life here, a slow brown highway that links Mattru Jong to Sherbro Island and the Atlantic beyond. Fishing fills the canoes, rice grows i...

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Mattru Jong: The Hospital That Refused to Die

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 1950 missionary nurses from the United Brethren in Christ opened a small dispensary in Mattru Jong. It grew. By 1959 it had fifteen beds; by 1981 it had sixty-nine, with surgery, obstetrics, pediatrics, an X-ray room, and a laboratory, a substantial hospital for a rural West A...

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Mattru Jong: Eight Months Under the RUF

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

At the end of January 1995, fighters of the Revolutionary United Front entered Mattru Jong almost unopposed; the army had already pulled out. The rebels set up their own administration, looted the hospital for medical supplies, and turned it into a training base, with another cam...

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Mattru Jong: A Long Way Gone

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Mattru Jong gave the world one of the most widely read accounts of that war. The memoirist Ishmael Beah was a boy visiting friends here when he learned that his home village of Mogbwemo had been attacked. He and his companions sheltered in Mattru Jong until the rebels reached the...

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