Childhood Deployed: Remaking Child Soldiers in Sierra Leone

Preface

>> xi Preface I taught mathematics in a rural secondary school in northern Sierra Leone as a Peace Corps Volunteer from 1987 to 1989, several years before the brutal civil war began. When I returned to Sierra Leone ten years later in October of 1999, my first task was to try to understand the war. It seemed impossible to me that the country I had known (and loved) could be home to such horror. I had of course followed the war from the United States, and tried to discover what happened to my friends and “my village.” But news was scarce, and biased, focused on the capital city, Freetown, and mainly on counting up bodies and atrocities . How could I make sense of it? What methods could I use to try to get a handle on this traumatic event, particularly on the postwar experiences of the children who had been forced to become combatants? I knew that it required more than summing up the facts, and it required moving out of the capital city. It meant talking to people of all kinds of backgrounds to achieve some sort of tapestry of meaning out of their sometimes conflicting but always compelling stories. I was often told over my two years of fieldwork in Sierra Leone, “this war is deep.” In other words, the war is complex, not completely understood by observers or even participants, with many secrets yet to be revealed. In this book I can only give a taste of the complexity, and I will by necessity focus on aspects of the war that are important to understand for my argument regarding the experiences surrounding child soldiering. Anthropologist Valentine Daniel says in the introduction to Charred Lullabies—a highly personal account of the conflict in Sri Lanka—that writing his book arose in part out of a need to tell the stories that people had entrusted to him. xii << Preface Stories, stories, stories! I have never known for sure if I am their prisoner or their jailer. . . . In opening up my tape recorder and notebook to my informants, I took upon myself the responsibility of telling a wider world the stories that they told me, some at grave risk to their lives, only because they believed that there was a wider world that cared about the difference between good and evil (Daniel 1996, 5). I listened to hundreds of stories about the war. Everyone had a story; everyone had felt the war’s impact. One of the first tasks was to understand a kind of shorthand that people used to refer to different events of the war, for example January 6th and May 25th. (Everyone knew what these dates meant. It was not necessary to add the year.) But despite a certain shared language, I realized that there is no such thing as the war. It, whatever it was, moved through time and space in such a way that its participants came to understand it differently based on where they were living, their tribe, their gender, their class, and often their blind luck. There is no way I or anyone could tell the story of the war. War is a total social phenomenon, affecting not just the combatants, but every person, thing, social structure, and ideal. It plays itself out not just in the realm of extraordinary physical violence but also in the realm of symbols, in language, in witchcraft, in the everyday. War is experienced and narrated in different ways, and all of the layers are crucial in any attempt to understand social trauma at such a scale (Ibrahim and Shepler 2011). This book offers, therefore, a partial reflection of the civil war in Sierra Leone. I experienced it first-, second-, third-, and tenth-hand. All of these “hands” involved stories about the war, but those stories also become ways of talking about the nation, gender, tribe, and other categories of social life. War is continually lived and re-created for purposes that extend beyond the end of the conflict. When I was there, in the course of my research and daily life, I too told my stories, and in doing so was part of the postwar world. But rather than just recounting what happened, this book investigates how people lived through and talked about “the war” after the fact, the social practice of meaning making, and how, in particular, they made sense of child soldiers. ...