Little boy soldiers

>> Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone tells
the story of his participation in and escape
from Sierra Leone’s brutal civil war

A LONG JOURNEY FROM KILLER TO WRITER: Beah

by PATRICK LEJTENYI

The day before the worst mass shooting in U.S. history, Ishmael Beah is sitting in a downtown hotel and talking about matters of life and death. He doesn’t look like a killer. He leans back into the sofa, his small frame enveloped by the oversized cushions, and yawns. He’s clearly tired: an eight-week book tour, endless rounds of print, radio and television interviews and the realization of being a New York Times and Amazon #1 bestselling author will do that to you.

At 26, Beah has seen more than his fair share of slaughter. Indeed, he contributed to it in no small part as a child soldier in Sierra Leone’s savage civil war in the mid-1990s. His memoir, A Long Way Gone, is his testament to his childhood, robbed from him in a spiral of violence, drugs and a tempest of events that stormed beyond his control. Frank, honest and poetically articulate, the book nevertheless does not dwell on the barbarism only; much of it deals with his family life, his initial escape from roving bands of rebels, the months spent roaming the forest with a group of friends and how, incredibly, life went on while war raged nearby. But the most fascinating story is that of his rehabilitation, from a brutalized teenage drug addict and killer into a boy coming to grips with the loss of his family, friends and way of life.

Sudden violence, a long fight

“I wanted to give a context to the madness,” he says of his book. “For most people, the first time they’ve heard of Sierra Leone was because of the madness, how civilians were having their limbs amputated. But there was a society before, and there is one after. There was a culture that was intact, but it disintegrated because of the madness.”

The madness is the onset of sudden, arbitrary violence, the scarification and mutilation of innocents with hot bayonets, the wholesale slaughter by burning, shooting, beheading and disembowelment, rape, constant drug use—a potent combination of marijuana and brown brown, a mixture of cocaine and gunpowder—and the very concept of sending armed children, some as young as seven, out into the forests of Sierra Leone to kill everyone and anyone they can find, including other child soldiers.

A side-product to the violence was the breakdown of Sierra Leone’s social structure. Before the war, Beah—a “troublesome boy,” as he describes himself—and his friends lived lives that were as ordinary as any other: they went to school, they played soccer, they listened to American hip hop (in particular LL Cool J, Naughty by Nature and Heavy D) and had formed a dance troupe. Everyone knew him in his village. Other than being an especially mischievous boy whose parents had separated, he was typical in every way.

It all changed when the war came in 1993. He fled at the sound of approaching gunfire, became separated from his family, saw friends die and lived a nomadic life until he came into a village and was forcibly recruited into the army. (Not the rebels, the notorious RUF, led by Foday Sankoh and which had garnered an international reputation of unparalleled, pitiless ferocity—although Beah says both sides were pretty much indistinguishable. “The rhetoric is the same—‘These people are responsible for killing your families, avenge them’—the enemy is the only thing that’s different.”)

For two years, from age 13 to 15, he fought in the forests, becoming numb to the death around him and meting it out with skill—he writes that he was promoted “junior lieutenant” of his squad for his ability to slice a prisoner’s throat. “After a few initial months, you get to know what you are being put into,” he says. “But after a while, it just becomes another day.”

The process, he says, was systematic. “When you destroy what the child knows—his family, his village, his social structure—when the kid loses everything, the only thing left that is organized are these groups.”

A drawn-out pain

Until those groups are taken away. Like everything else in the war for Beah, its end came suddenly. One day, he is called to stand in ranks with the other soldiers and is handpicked by white people to jump on a UNICEF van. They are trucked to Freetown, the capital, and placed in a rehabilitation centre run by Catholic priests. That story is in many ways much more remarkable than his war stories. His initial bewilderment, hostility and mistrust of adults, to say nothing of his nightmares and recurring migraines, were outward manifestations of his turmoil. “We learned to distrust adults,” he says. “We lost our families, then we became part of these surrogate families [the armed groups], and then we are deceived again,” he says. “It was hard for us to believe that they were not trying to manipulate us.”

But as Beah healed, so did the country. The fighting ceased (although it would flare up again in 1997 and not fully cease until British soldiers intervened in 2000), and a sense of battered calm returned. “There was a strong sense of forgiveness,” he says. “People were adopting children who had killed their families. People have an incredible resilience. It’s a human trait, but it does depend on where you are.” He says traditional pillars of Sierra Leonean society—respect for elders, respect for life, a strong sense of community—helped the country repair itself, just as Beah repaired his mind.

Beah is the first person to admit how lucky he is. He survived the initial attack on his village, encounters with terrified but armed villagers and two years of near-constant warfare. He survived a coup in Freetown, and was not recruited back into the armed forces when rebels attacked the capital. He made it out of the country and, thanks to a sponsor, made it to the United States, where he finished high school and attained a bachelor’s in political science at Oberlin College. He’s thinking of pursuing a master’s degree and a JD in international law, and plans to continue campaigning for human rights. He still listens to hip hop, but his tastes now are more Talib Kweli, OutKast and K’naan—“stuff with poetry in it,” he says.

Guns close to home

On Monday night, Beah is reading from A Long Way Gone to a packed audience in the cavernous Leacock 132 room. The audience is composed mostly of young university students, but grey hairs are evident here and there. Senator Roméo Dallaire, the former general and commander of the doomed 1994 UN mission in Rwanda, introduced Beah and offered some facts of his own: there are between a quarter-million and 300,000 child soldiers in the world today, fighting on every continent. An estimated 40 per cent of them are girls, used as sex slaves, bush wives, cleaners, porters and, in some cases, fighters. There are 650-million small arms in circulation, with over one million being added per year.

These weapons, he says, are rugged: a Soviet-made AK-47 can stay in circulation for 50 years. It’s time for you, Dallaire tells the young audience, to stand up, put your money where you mouth is and tell politicians you want concrete action taken against the proliferation of light weapons and child soldiers. The audience applauds.

On Sunday, I ask Beah about any similarities he saw between the violence in Sierra Leone and the violence endemic to the United States. “There are some similarities, but our war was not policed in any way,” he says. “We didn’t live in a functioning society.”

Beah insists there is nothing particularly special about him—he just benefited from some very good luck. “I’m not in any position to understand life,” he says. But, “People are coming to learn that maybe those problems [in Sierra Leone and elsewhere] should be our problems, because we’re not so very far away.”

A LONG WAY GONE, BY ISHMAEL BEAH,
DOUGLAS & MCINTYRE, 229PP HC, $26.95