Fambul Tok Director by Sara Terry (review)

Sierra Leone is still best known outside West Africa for a brutal civil war that lasted from 1991 to 2002 and saw the collapse of the state, brutal human rights violations (including, infamously, the mutilation of civilians), and the violent deaths of over 50,000 people. Much less well known outside Sierra Leone is the story of that country’s slow, steady, and continuing recovery from war and violence and their destructive social and psychological effects. Some of that recovery has been born out of the work of the international community and the local political elite, but a far more significant part of Sierra Leone’s recovery has been based on grassroots efforts for reconciliation. These efforts for reconciliation and postwar healing are the subject of the documentary Fambul Tok.

After the civil war’s end in 2002, Sierra Leone was one of many postconflict environments that saw trials of those who had violated human rights, as well as organized and state-mandated commissions concerned with “truth and reconciliation.” For several years, the Special Court for Sierra Leone sat in the capital Freetown, delivering verdicts on eleven of thirteen people indicted for war crimes (two died in prison while awaiting trial). While some key players in the conflict were convicted, for most of those involved in war as combatants, a general amnesty was issued that covered most offenders. Sierra Leone’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission also sat in Freetown and heard much testimony concerning the war, its atrocities, and their consequences. Thanks to the amnesty, however, little of this testimony came from those who had committed crimes during the war. For Sierra Leonean communities still suffering from the war’s effects, this left much unfinished business, and it was in this context that the nongovernmental organization (NGO) “Fambul Tok” began its work.

Those who set up Fambul Tok—which means “family talk” in Krio, the lingua franca of Sierra Leone—wanted to create a new kind of reconciliation process, one that brought together perpetrators and victims with the communities in which their shared tragedy had taken place, to facilitate forgiveness and healing. In sharp contrast to the trials that took place at the Special Court in Freetown, this new process would be rooted in the rural villages where the vast majority of Sierra Leone’s population lives and where some of the worst atrocities of the civil war occurred.

The film Fambul Tok deals with the day-to-day realities of the NGO’s work in today’s Sierra Leone. A recurring scene in the documentary depicts a late-night ceremony in which community members gather round a fire to create a new space in which victims of atrocities can tell their stories and name the perpetrators of those atrocities. The perpetrators—often people well known to other community members—are then asked to step forward, identify themselves, and ask for forgiveness. The film returns again and again to scenes like this, but it also shows how the process is explained to community members and how the Fambul Tok network is being built across Sierra Leone. An important part of this story is the struggle to win the trust of communities so that people can be persuaded to participate in the work of reconciliation.

The key question is whether, and to what extent, this process can be successful. In a country where political power remains in the hands of an elite that is very often corrupt and unaccountable, the official truth and reconciliation processes and institutions risk being seen as remote and irrelevant to the people. This doesn’t necessarily mean, however, that an NGO-promoted alternative will automatically be taken up by the people it seeks to assist. Thus, of great importance to the film’s subject are the scenes depicting NGO members explaining the process to the communities they are seeking to reach and scenes in which members of those communities tell their own individual stories. It is these narratives that are at the very heart of the story Fambul...