A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, and: Black Man’s Grave: Letters from Sierra Leone (review)

As Time magazine notes (February 2007), “We’re at what might be called a cultural sweet spot for the African child soldier.” Those of us teaching in the academy need to be aware of the popular accounts our students are reading and/or watching (such as the Leonardo di Caprio vehicle, Blood Diamond), both to build on the genuine concern and to address the distortions that inevitably are communicated along with the “real” stories of terror, loss, and survival. Of the two accounts reviewed here, one (by Ishmael Beah) has received widespread attention in the popular media while the other is likely to circulate in a narrower audience. Both, however, provide important first-person accounts of the devastating regional war in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and parts of Guinea and Ivory Coast from the early 1990s to the present. Both also provide a sympathetic human face to the seemingly senseless conflict that has turned hundreds of thousands of people into homeless refugees and profoundly altered the life prospects of innumerable young people.

In 1993, Ishmael Beah, age 12, was on his way with a group of friends to a talent show in a neighboring community when his village was attacked by RUF (Revolutionary United Front) rebels. Unable to return home, and not knowing the fate of his family, he survived in the forest for weeks, running with his friends from various armed groups and looked upon with suspicion by civilians who had already learned to fear young boys. Finally forced into service with a national army unit that offered food and protection, he was taught to handle a weapon and introduced to marijuana, cocaine, and an assortment of other drugs. He was also taught—in lessons reinforced with American action films like Rambo—to kill without mercy and to take what he wanted or needed at the point of gun. He eventually was demobilized through the efforts of a humanitarian organization; some of the most harrowing descriptions in the book are of Beah’s cold-turkey drug-withdrawal process, experienced in the company of hundreds of other sick, paranoid, and reflexively violent boys like himself, all of them angry and confused that they had been betrayed and handed over to “rehabilitation” by the commanders they had come to idolize and depend on.

Beah ultimately became such a model of therapeutic rehabilitation that he was invited to a United Nations conference on child solders in New York City; there he was able to make contacts that ensured his survival when war broke out again in Sierra Leone. With a keen intelligence and a decent education before the war (in between massacring villagers he trades quotes from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar with his commanding officer)—and the good fortune to finish high school and graduate from Oberlin College in the U.S.—Beah is an eloquent writer. While his experience as a child soldier may indeed have been typical, it is clear that his postwar life has not been so; most young men and boys in the Guinea Coast region have had little in the way of trauma counseling and drug rehabilitation. (In Liberia, most demobilized fighters got three hours of counseling, if that, before being sent on their way.) Although well-intentioned, the DDRR (Disarmament, Demobilization, Rehabilitation and Reintegration) programs implemented by the U.N. and other agencies have been woefully inadequate to the task of retraining young fighters for normal life. As Africanist educators, we must point out to our students the exceptional character of Beah’s tale—and impress upon them that the lives of most former child soldiers did not end in as happy and successful a resolution as did Ismael Beah’s. In no way does it diminish his...