Sierra Leone Books

A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier

Ishmael Beah

Amazon Price: $13.20 List Price: $22.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Farrar, Straus and Giroux Amazon Marketplace: 349 new & used starting at $2.75

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Total reviews: 424 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

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My new friends have begun to suspect I haven’t told them the full story of my life.
“Why did you leave Sierra Leone?”
“Because there is a war.”
“You mean, you saw people running around with guns and shooting each other?”
“Yes, all the time.”
“Cool.”
I smile a little.
“You should tell us about it sometime.”
“Yes, sometime.”

This is how wars are fought now: by children, hopped-up on drugs and wielding AK-47s. Children have become soldiers of choice. In the more than fifty conflicts going on worldwide, it is estimated that there are some 300,000 child soldiers. Ishmael Beah used to be one of them.

What is war like through the eyes of a child soldier? How does one become a killer? How does one stop? Child soldiers have been profiled by journalists, and novelists have struggled to imagine their lives. But until now, there has not been a first-person account from someone who came through this hell and survived.

In A Long Way Gone, Beah, now twenty-five years old, tells a riveting story: how at the age of twelve, he fled attacking rebels and wandered a land rendered unrecognizable by violence. By thirteen, he’d been picked up by the government army, and Beah, at heart a gentle boy, found that he was capable of truly terrible acts. This is a rare and mesmerizing account, told with real literary force and heartbreaking honesty.

Blood Diamonds: Tracing The Deadly Path Of The World's Most Precious Stones

Greg Campbell

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Total reviews: 25 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

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Journalist Greg Campbell leads the reader down the international diamond trail of brutality, horror, and profit - providing an on-the-ground and in-the-mines story of global consequence.

First discovered in 1930, the diamonds of Sierra Leone have funded one of the most savage rebel campaigns in modern history. These "blood diamonds" are smuggled out of West Africa and sold to legitimate diamond merchants in London, Antwerp, and New York, often with the complicity of the international diamond industry. Eventually, these very diamonds find their way into the rings and necklaces of brides and spouses the world over.

Blood Diamonds is the gripping tale of how the diamond smuggling works, how the rebel war has effectively destroyed Sierra Leone and its people, and how the policies of the diamond industry - institutionalized in the 1880s by the De Beers cartel - have allowed it to happen. Award-winning journalist Greg Campbell traces the deadly trail of these diamonds, many of which are brought to the world market by fanatical enemies. These repercussions of diamond smuggling are felt far beyond the borders of the poor and war-ridden country of Sierra Leone, and the consequences of overlooking this African tragedy are both shockingly deadly and unquestionably global. Updated with a new epilogue.

A Dirty War in West Africa: The RUF And the Destruction of Sierra Leone

Lansana Gberie

Amazon Price: $23.35 List Price: $25.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Indiana University Press Amazon Marketplace: 24 new & used starting at $17.25

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Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

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"Provides important insider information concerning Sierra Leone’s recent war . . . and builds on [the author’s] established reputation as an insightful and courageous journalist." —William Reno, Northwestern University

A Dirty War in West Africa recounts Lansana Gberie’s harrowing experiences as a journalist during the decade-long civil war in Sierra Leone. Since 1991, this West African nation has been brought to its knees by a series of coups, violent conflicts, and finally, outright war. The war has ended today, but it is clear that things are hardly settled. Focusing on the group spearheading the violence, the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), Gberie exposes the corruption and appalling use of rape and mutilation as tactics to overthrow the former government. Gberie looks closely at the rise of the RUF and its ruthless leader, Foday Sankoh, as he seeks to understand the personalities and parties involved in the war. This sobering and powerful account reveals the domestic and international consequences of the Sierra Leone conflict.

Building Peace in West Africa: Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea-Bissau (International Peace Academy Occasional Paper Series)

Adekeye Adebajo

List Price: $14.95 By: Lynne Rienner Publishers Amazon Marketplace: 4 new & used starting at $71.52

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Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

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Among all of Africa's troubled regions, West Africa has gone the furthest toward establishing a security mechanism to manage its own conflicts. The ECOMOG intervention in Liberia in 1990-1997 was the first by a subregional African organization relying principally on its own personnel, money, and military material; and ECOMOG's 1998 intervention in Sierra Leone to restore a democratic government to power was equally unprecedented. Adekeye Adebajo explores these two cases, as well as the brief and unsuccessful intervention in Guinea-Bissau in 1999, in this study of regional peacebuilding efforts. After discussing the political, economic, and security contexts of West Africa since independence, Adebajo assesses the domestic and external dynamics of the three conflicts and examines the roles and motivations of the full range of actors. Dissecting the successes and failures of external intervention in each case, he draws crucial policy lessons for building peace through the ECOWAS Mechanism for Conflict Prevention, Management, Resolution, Pecekeeping, and Security.

How de Body? One Man's Terrifying Journey Through an African War

Teun Voeten

Amazon Price: $19.46 List Price: $24.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Thomas Dunne Books Amazon Marketplace: 31 new & used starting at $5.97

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Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

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In 1998, acclaimed photojournalist Teun Voeten headed to Sierra Leone for what he thought would be a standard assignment on the child soldiers there. But the cease-fire ended just as he arrived, and the clash between the military junta and the West African peace-keeping troops forced him to hide in the bush from rebels who were intent on killing him.How de Body? ("how are you?" in Sierra Leone's Creole English) is a dramatic account of the conflict that has been raging in the country for nearly a decade-and how Voeten nearly became a casualty of it. Accessible and conversational, it's a look into the dangerous diamond trade that fuels the conflict, the legacy of war practices such as forced amputations, the tragic use of child soldiers, and more. The book is also a tribute to the people who never make the headlines: Eddy Smith, a BBC correspondent who eventually helps Voeten escape; Alfred Kanu, a school principal who risks his life to keep his students and teachers going amidst the bullets and raids; and Padre Victor, who runs a safe haven for ex-child soldiers; among others.Featuring Voeten's stunning black-and-white photos from his multiple trips to the conflict area, How de Body? is a crucial testament to a relatively unknown tragedy.

In the Land of Magic Soldiers: A Story of White and Black in West Africa

Daniel Bergner

List Price: $22.00 By: Farrar, Straus and Giroux Amazon Marketplace: 32 new & used starting at $0.93

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Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

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A chilling, beautifully written narrative of African war

Sierra Leone is the world's most war-ravaged country. There, in a West African landscape of spectacular beauty, rampaging soldiers--many not yet in their teens--have made a custom of hacking off the hands of their victims, then letting them live as the ultimate emblem of terror. The country is so anarchic and so desperate that, forty years after independence, its people long to be recolonized. And the West wants to save it.

In the Land of Magic Soldiers follows both a set of white would-be saviors--a family of American missionaries, a mercenary helicopter gunship pilot, and the army of Great Britain--and also a set of Sierra Leoneans, among them a father who rescues his daughter from rape, loses his hands as punishment, then begins to rebuild his life; a child soldier and sometime cannibal; and a highly Westernized medical student who claims immunity to bullets and a cure for H.I.V.

A story of black and white, of the First World and the world left infinitely behind, of those who would nation-build and those who live in a land of fire and jungle, In the Land of Magic Soldiers is an unforgettable work of literary reportage by "a terrific reporter with a novelist's eye" (Peter Applebome, The New York Times Book Review).

Radiance from the Waters: Ideals of Feminine Beauty in Mende Art (Yale Publications in the History of Art)

Sylvia Ardyn Boone

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Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 2.5 of 5

Romanticizing Clitorectomy ? 2 out of 5 stars.
5 of 15 people found this review helpful.

I understand that this book was written in the late seventies, but still, trying to rationalize one of the central rituals of the Mende culture, the forced, surgical removal of the clitoris of teen and pre-teen girls as a pre-requisite of their entering the adult community, is horrifying. Did the author perhaps get too much sun as she was doing her field work for her Ph.d from Yale in this community? How can she not condemn this aspect of female life in Sierra Leone's tribal communities, and seem to condone,or ignore, this most extraordinarily monstrous practice around which the whole society is organized. Perhaps the book is an interesting study of standards of feminine beauty in in a west african community, but to me, as a woman, I just couldn't get past the fact that this miserable ritual is at the heart of their society. The book is well written and full of interesting and exotic information, and is worth reading if only to raise your blood pressure, be you male or female, as to the sorry state of women in the world even in this, the year 2000.

The Krio of Sierra Leone: An Interpretive History

Akintola J. G. Wyse

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The Krio of Sierra Leone are descendants of black people brought to Africa from Nova Scotia and Jamaica, and "Liberated Africans" freed from slave ships. They were at first favoured subjects of the British, and soon produced an elite of professionals, clergy and entrepreneurs in the white man's image. In their heyday they dominated the endigenous population. From the turn of the century the establishment of a "protectorate" in the hinterland, peopled by more numerous Mende, Temme and others eroded the Krio's privileged position. With the growth of nationalism in the run-up to Independence, relations between them and Sierra Leone's other peoples worsened, and the latter consolidated their grip on the country after the British left. The author has penetrated the character and ethos of his own people as expressed in their aspirations and the careers of their leading figures.

Black Man's Grave: Letters From Sierra Leone

Stewart

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Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

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The memoir and the movie have only scratched the surface. Black Man's Grave tells what happened to place the boy-turned-soldier in jeopardy and why Sierra Leone's diamonds acquired their bloody tinge. Meet the greedy politicians who hijacked a fledgling democracy, the rebels who brought them down, and the villagers who struggled to survive the country's chaotic descent. The cast includes Sierra Leone's "big man," Siaka Stevens; RUF leader Foday Sankoh, whose grandfatherly demeanor belied the viciousness with which he sought to impose his "revolution"; and one who aspired to the big man role, Charles Taylor from next-door Liberia. Taylor's support for Sierra Leone's rebel war expanded from initial hostility toward Stevens's handpicked successor into a commercial venture that supplied arms in exchange for diamonds. In an offshoot of that pernicious trade, links between Sierra Leone's diamonds and al Qaeda have been traced. The revelations of Black Man's Grave help us understand the frustrations that simmer throughout much of the third world and threaten a peaceful future.

The Devil that Danced on the Water: A Daughter's Quest

Aminatta Forna

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Total reviews: 10 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

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Aminatta Forna's intensely personal history is a passionate and vivid account of an idyllic childhood that became the stuff of nightmare. As a child she witnessed the upheavals of postcolonial Africa, danger, flight, the bitterness of exile in Britain, and the terrible consequences of her dissident father's stand against tyranny. Mohamed Forna was a man of impeccable integrity and enchanting charisma. As Sierra Leone faced its future as a fledgling democracy, he was a new star in the political firmament, a man who had been one of the first black students to come to Britain after the war. He stole the heart of Aminatta's mother, to the dismay of her Presbyterian parents, and returned with her to Sierra Leone. But as Aminatta Forna shows with compelling clarity, the old Africa was torn apart by new ways of Western parliamentary democracy, which gave birth only to dictatorships and corruption of hitherto undreamed-of magnitude. It was not long before Mohamed Forna languished in jail as a prisoner of conscience, and worse to follow. Aminatta's search for the truth that shaped both her childhood and the nation's destiny began among the country's elite and took her into the heart of rebel territory. Determined to break the silence surrounding her father's fate, she ultimately uncovered a conspiracy that penetrated the highest reaches of government and forced the nation's politicians and judiciary to confront their guilt. The Devil that Danced on the Water is a book of pain and anger and sorrow, written with tremendous dignity and beautiful precision: a remarkable and important story of Africa.