AUGUST 2008

ISHMAEL BEAH
A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier
Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 229 pp

Reviewed by Arthur Serota

Every great once in a while, a book comes along that changes the way society thinks about a fundamental social justice issue. That book, in 1852, was Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the anti-slavery novel by the abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe. It was a powerful force on the American and British conscience to end the African slave trade and slavery.

Recently, another book has come along that is forcing society to think about eradicating today’s greatest global scourge – child soldiering. That book, published in 2007 is A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by former Sierra Leonean child soldier Ishmael Beah. It is taking the world by storm, causing ordinary citizens around the globe to cease being indifferent and challenging influential decision makers to fish or cut bait.

Ishmael Beah Photo by John Madere

“A Long Way Gone,” is a classic which is likely to be recognized as one of the great literary accomplishments of the twenty-first century. It was nominated for the prestigious Quill Award in the Best Debut Author category for 2007. It has topped and stayed on best-seller lists for many months. Starbucks coffee shops featured and promoted the book, providing widespread early profile to both the book and Beah. The Sunday New York Times featured a magazine cover story on Beah just before the book was published. Publishers Weekly wrote: “Told in clear, accessible language by a young writer with a gifted literary voice, this memoir seems destined to become a classic firsthand account of war and the ongoing plight of child soldiers in conflicts worldwide.”

Beyond its high literary standing, Beah’s book is more than that. It tells the story of war and child soldiering from a child’s perspective and first-hand experiences. It doesn’t try to explain or analyze war or the war in Sierra Leone. This book is the story of children caught up in war as soldiers and Beah writes his story by retrieving his memory, thoughts and emotions when he was a child soldier and during his rehabilitation period. You may never be the same after reading this book.

The widespread use of children as soldiers is a relatively recent phenomenon, going back to the early 1980’s, and has become the modus operandi of how many wars are conducted today. This is because for many armies, children have become the soldier of choice. In today’s wars, the strategy is to terrorize, humiliate and punish civilian populations through brutal atrocities which force allegiance to a particular side out of fear. Many armies today are non-state actors: rebel forces, proxy armies, mercenary groups, and many national armies operate independently of civilian authorities. Children – girls as well as boys, some as young as eight - are the soldier of choice for many armies as they are vulnerable and easily intimidated. Children soon understand they are in a kill-or-be-killed situation and become blindly obedient. In fact, children quickly learn that to survive, you must become aggressive and get into it, that is to say, kill. Blindly obedient children commit the worst atrocities. Their survival depends on it.

In addition, children do not have to be paid – a major factor for non-state armies - and provide other services, such as being body guards, cooks, sentries, porters. Girls are particularly useful since they become soldiers and sex slaves. Children are impressionable, eager to impress their commanders and agile. Children are either abducted, forcibly recruited or, as war takes over the land, have no other options and seek protection. Children are often forced to kill members of their own families or neighbors as a strategy to deter them from thinking they can ever return home. Eventually for many, the commander becomes a surrogate parent and the unit becomes a surrogate family. Depending on the scenario, addictive mind-altering drugs, rituals, brainwashing, and the power of having control over other peoples’ lives are factors that take children from the normalcy of childhood to being “a long way gone.” Nevertheless, one of the themes of A Long Way Gone and one of Ishmael Beah’s mantras when he speaks throughout the world – one shared by this writer - is that “no child is born violent.” This is an important thought to keep in mind as you read this book.

Child soldiering is not an African phenomenon but a global dynamic. In Eastern Europe, children served as soldiers in the Bosnia-Herzegovina and Chechnya wars; in Asia, as many as 70,000 boys still serve as soldiers in Burma/Myanmar’s national army, the highest number in a government army worldwide. Thousands of children are in the ranks of rebel forces in Sri Lanka and Philippines. More than 70% of the combatants in Columbia’s 40 year war in South America are children and 20% of Bolivia’s army is under 16. On the African continent, child soldiering has been a major factor in many recent wars.

A gifted writer, Beah courageously tells his story, starting with humorous and touching anecdotes about the personalities and beauty of his family and friends and some of the traditions, strengths and assets of his community and culture. His grandparents bestowed upon him wisdom, traditional rituals and folk lore inherited through the ages. His parents were hard working and caring. His family and friends, school, sports, music and household routines centered his life. Ishmael Beah grew up well, nurtured by a loving family, enhanced by a cadre of childhood friends, and punctuated with the discoveries of childhood. In many ways, his first twelve years was an idyllic life, a wonderful childhood most African children experience.

On April 5, 2007, during a NewsHour interview with Jeffrey Brown televised on the Public Broadcasting Service, Beah spoke of his first twelve years in Sierra Leone: “I had a very simple, remarkable and happy life. I grew up in a very small town and so my life was made up of, in the morning, going to the river to fetch water…..bathing in the river, and then going to school and playing soccer afterwards… At the age of 8, I discovered hip hop music…my life was basically filled with those things, dancing, trying to mimic rappers, reciting Shakespeare, going to school, being mischievous, just like any regular boy.”

Indeed, hip hop entered Beah’s life in a very positive way. When he was eight, Beah and his older brother Junior and friends Talloi and Mohamed started a rap and dance group, motivated by having watched, for the first time, Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight,” the first hip-hop single to go gold. “Rapper’s Delight” is old school now and Sugarhill Gang, a pioneering American hip hop and funk group never topped the charts again, but it was watching and hearing “I said a hip hop, the hippie the hippie, to the hip hip hop, a you don’t stop….” spoken fast and to the beat that created within Ishmael Beah a love and attachment to this new style of music, lyrics and dance. It would turn out that hip hop was more than just an exciting part of Beah’s childhood. It also served as a key bridge, later, that helped Beah return to his normal self following his horrific ordeal as a child soldier in Sierra Leone’s national army. We’ll come back to that.

Most of what many people perceive about Sierra Leone today is based on the brutal 1991-2002 war. Nevertheless, Sierra Leone, a West African nation with about six million people, is a strikingly and naturally beautiful country, bordered by Liberia and Guinea and 300 miles of Atlantic Ocean seacoast. The coastline is comprised of silted lagoons, small islands and fishing villages, deep forests and nearby waterfalls, farmland, rocky peninsulas, pristine beaches, tourist havens and some of Sierra Leone’s urban centers. This includes the capital, Freetown, a major port city which sits at the mouth of the Sierra Leone River, an estuary fed in part by the famous Rokel River which forms Africa’s largest natural harbor as it flows into the Atlantic.

Sierra Leone has a rich pre-colonial history; its earliest people were the Bullom/Sherbro followed by the Temne and Mende peoples, among others, who arrived before both the Portuguese “explored” its coast and the British invaded, slaved and colonized. There are also the Krio, descendants of freed slaves and slave ships captured on the high seas.

Sierra Leone was once known for its entrepreneurial skills, educational achievements, as a center of trade, arts and crafts, and mineral wealth: titanium and iron ore, bauxite, gold and especially diamonds. The events leading up to the war - in which more than fifty thousand people perished, far more were maimed and mutilated and perhaps a third of the people displaced - are multi-layered and involve events in Liberia and “external factors.” (read: Western powers and companies). The pernicious manner in which European colonizers created boundaries and used divide-and-rule tactics throughout Africa primed many independent nations for instability and this includes Sierra Leone. Moreover, post-independence winner-takes-all politics, unresolved grievances, under-development, poverty, unemployment, corruption, the role of political and ethnic connections in getting jobs and scholarships, relationships between unsavory international entities and in-country elites, and a host of additional internal and external factors led Sierra Leone and Liberia on its border into brutal, co-joined wars. There is a highly useful historical chronology Beah has provided at the back of the book dating from 1462-2006. “In March 1991,” Beah notes, “A small band of men who call themselves the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), under the leadership of a former corporal, Foday Sankoh, begin to attack villages in eastern Sierra Leone, on the Liberian border. The initial group is made up of Charles Taylor’s rebels and a few mercenaries from Burkina Faso….Fighting continues in the ensuring months, with the RUF gaining control of the diamond mines in the Kono district and pushing the Sierra Leone army back toward Freetown.”

Charles Taylor was indicted on eleven counts of war crimes by the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) set up jointly by the United Nations and the Government of Sierra Leone. He is now in custody and on trial before the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, Netherlands where the ICC is based.

The seeds of war had been planted decades before, in the 1970’s, when the government began to under-fund education. This, together with other factors, including the ability or not to get a job which oftentimes depended on political and other affiliations, created a society of disaffected youth who had few prospects for education and jobs and no means to leave the country for greener pastures. Therefore, they had little vested interest in maintaining a system that failed them. Sierra Leone slid into madness in part because the leader of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) could appeal to disaffected youth who had been left behind by an inequitable education system with few prospects for jobs. There is a warning here for the entire world. It is not the need to regulate the diamond trade as Hollywood versions of war might suggest; rather, it is the urgency to ensure that youth have access to education and a means to earn a decent living. Otherwise, as in Columbia, Philippines, Liberia and Sierra Leone, increasingly alienated youth are potential recruits to take matters into their own hands. When the alienation boils over, war will come.

In A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier in the opening lines of Chapter 1, Ishmael Beah describes the coming of war in his land through the eyes of a twelve year old boy which he was:

“There were all kinds of stories about the war that made it sound as if it was happening in a faraway and different land. It wasn’t until refugees started passing through our town that we began to see that it was actually taking place in our country.”

In January 1993, twelve year old Ishmael Beah, his older brother Junior and their friend Talloi left home for the town of Mattru Jong to participate in their friend’s talent show. To save money, they decided to walk the sixteen miles and set out on the journey, their backpacks loaded with notebooks of lyrics they were working on, not knowing they would never return home.

Along the way, they chatted and joked, stopped at several rivers to swim, chased monkeys that tried to cross the main dirt road and stopped at Kabati village to visit his grandmother Mamie Kpana where they ate and rested. The next day, they learned that the rebels had attacked their home, the mining town of Mogbwemo and school had been cancelled until further notice. They decided to head back to their attacked home to try to find their families. The war had entered their lives.

After crossing the river, they ran across people fleeing the violence: “Nguwor gbor mu ma oo,” God help us, and screaming the names of their children. They saw children walking in their underwear, following the crowd, crying out for their mothers and fathers: “Nya nje oo, nya keko oo.” They walked for six miles, back to their grandmother’s village, now deserted. That evening, they saw dead people, and grown men crying.

Beah describes the unfolding tragedies as his childhood quickly disappeared:

“The wind had stopped moving and daylight seemed to be quickly giving in to night. As sunset neared, more people passed through the village. One man carried his dead son. He thought the boy was still alive. The father was covered with his son’s blood, and as he ran, he kept saying, ‘I will get you to the hospital, my boy, and everything will be fine.’ Perhaps it was necessary that he cling to false hopes, since they kept him running away from harm. A group of men and women who had been pierced by stray bullets came running next. The skin that hung down from their bodies still contained fresh blood. Some of them didn’t notice that they were wounded until they stopped and people pointed to their wounds. Some fainted or vomited. I felt nauseated, and my head was spinning. I felt the ground moving, and people’s voices seemed to be far removed from where I stood trembling.”

Beah and friends had to fend for themselves as Sierra Leone descended into madness. Hungry and traumatized, they ran from danger to danger, grieved for their families, tried to cope with the unfolding drama of war, fled rebel attacks, (during one attack, Beah saw his beloved brother Junior for the last time), dodged bullets, witnessed the grisly aftermath of massacres, watched people die and avoided death multiple times through their wits, cunning and luck. Where were they heading, Beah wondered? How would they wind up?

The answer came on the day they stumbled into the pointed guns of soldiers from the government army. Beah and his crew were taken to a village the soldiers had occupied as a base camp. At first they felt safe, no longer on the run. One evening, Beah recited Shakespeare with a commander who was reading Julius Caesar (Beah used to recite Shakespeare in the public square when his father requested). Soon, however, it became clear they would be forced to become child soldiers and become indoctrinated to wipe out the rebels who had killed their families and would kill again until killed and contained. Training started immediately with an introduction to the AK-47, capsules that would “boost your energy,” programmed hatred for the rebels and blind obedience. An early lesson in blind obedience? A commander announced that children should fight the rebels but if they chose not to, they were free to leave. The next day, after Beah and his friends had a chance to consider these options, the freshly killed, blood soaked bodies of a man and child were shown to everyone, indicating they had chosen to leave and this was the outcome. From thereon, the options narrowed.

After training, they went out on their first raid, loaded to the gills with ammunition. Beah recalls that he had never been so afraid to go anywhere in his life. He was thirteen years old. He could hear the sound of guns far away and the cries of people dying in pain. Beah continues:

“A splash of blood hit my face…I tasted some of the blood. As I spat it out and wiped off my face, I saw the soldier it had come from. Blood poured out of the bullet holes in him like water rushing through newly opened tributaries. His eyes were wide open; he still held the gun. My eyes were fixed on him when I heard Josiah scream. He cried for his mother in the most painfully piercing voice that I had ever heard. It vibrated inside my head to the point that I felt my brain had shaken loose from its anchor.

“Bodies had begun to pile on top of each other near a short palm tree, where fronds dipped in blood. I searched for Josiah. An RPG had tossed his tiny body off the ground and he had landed on a tree stump. He wiggled his legs as his cry gradually came to an end. There was blood everywhere. It seemed as if bullets were falling into the forest from all angles. I crawled to Josiah and looked into his eyes. There were tears in them and his lips were shaking but he could not speak. As I watched him, the water in his eyes was replaced with blood that quickly turned his brown eyes into red. He reached for my shoulder as if he wanted to hold it and pull himself up. But midway he stopped moving. The gunshots faded in my head and it was as if my heart had stopped and the whole world had come to a standstill. I covered his eyes with my fingers and pulled him from the tree stump. His backbone had been shattered.”

And then: “As I looked to where he lay, my eyes caught Musa, whose head was covered with blood. His hands looked too relaxed. I turned toward the swamp, where there were gunmen running, trying to cross over. My face, my hands, my shirt and gun were covered with blood. I raised my gun and pulled the trigger...”

In page after page-turning page, with courage and candor, Ishmael Beah shares how he went from being a gentle, playful “regular boy” to becoming, at the age of thirteen, a hardened, aggressive agency of war. By retrieving his thoughts when he was a child soldier, and not relying on hindsight alone, Ishmael Beah has created an opportunity for the reader to understand what it is like to be 12, 13 and 14, survive and absorb these ordeals, and change. How killing and survival are intertwined. How the more one is dehumanized, the more inhumane one becomes. This is a key part of the reading experience, how Beah’s personality and attitudes changed, how the role of power, identity, drugs, revenge, callousness and mistrust take over and how survival in a kill-or-be-killed environment works. How child soldiering works. What war is all about.

Equally important to learning how child soldiering works is understanding how rehabilitation works. Rehabilitation is essential because as a matter of human dignity, children who become child soldiers are entitled to be rehabilitated to the fullest. In addition, former child soldiers who are not rehabilitated are subject to being drawn into national armies, are targeted for recruitment by rebel forces or warlords or by racketeers to participate in criminal enterprises. Hence, society has an interest in the rehabilitation of former child soldiers, and the former child soldier has both an interest and a right to be rehabilitated. What rehabilitation is and how it works should not be taken for granted and thankfully, is given needed full attention by Beah in A Long Way Gone.

At the age of sixteen, after three years of heavy combat experience and having risen to the rank of “junior lieutenant,” Ishmael Beah, at first unhappily, winds up in Benin Home, a rehabilitation center on the outskirts of Freetown.

“It was infuriating to be told what to do by civilians. Their voices, even when they called us for breakfast, enraged me so much that I would punch the wall, my locker, or anything that I was standing next to. A few days earlier, we could have decided whether they could live or die.”

Beah and his former combat unit mates would physically attack the Benin Home nurses and staff when they came to talk about medical check ups and counseling. In addition to all else, especially anger and confusion for losing their status as soldiers, they were suffering severe withdrawal symptoms since they no longer had access to drugs.

One day, after deciding to break some glass windows and gashing his hand, Beah wound up in the attached hospital during which time, he was attacked by a migraine headache, a previous ailment he had suffered in the bush. A nurse took a special interest in him and showed him kindness. Her name was Esther. She let it be known she intended to be his friend and helper despite Beah’s lack of trust.

Again, sharing with the reader his unfiltered thoughts and emotions while at Benin Home lends an understanding of how painful and tenuous Beah’s rehabilitation process was, how long it took and how much patience and perseverance was required and how unconditional it needed to be. Wise, professional and tactful, Esther became one of Beah’s key bridges from child soldier to normal mid-teen. She also made it her business to figure out what were some of the key aspects of Beah’s happy childhood – Benin Home as a rehab methodology made it a point to find these things out - and realized he needed to reconnect with his music. One day she brought Beah a present. It was a Walkman, with a Run-D.M.C. cassette.

During this time, a field worker named Leslie with Children Associated with the War (CAW) befriended Beah and would spend time with him to discuss the history of Rastafarianism, Ethiopia and the meeting of the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon. Leslie also gave Beah a tape of Bob Marley’s Exodus album. Later on, Esther gave Beah a notebook and pen to write lyrics. As time went by, Beah would look forward to Esther’s visits and he sang for her parts of songs he had memorized. Memorizing lyrics started to replace thinking about the war.

Reconnecting with rap and reggae music during his rehabilitation at Benin Home is no small point Beah makes. Listening to Run-D.M.C., one of the early pioneers of new school hip hop (It’s Like That, - {That’s Just the Way It Is} ) was a bridge to artists, beats and rhymes Beah’s childhood rap and dance group enjoyed and performed, such as Eric B and Rakim (I Know You Got Soul). This bridge became a link between fond memories of pre-war childhood and being able to increasingly live more fully in the present.

After about five months at the center, Beah was returning more quickly to his former self. Beah’s creative juices started flowing. At an event for the center, he delivered a monologue from Julius Caesar followed by a performance of a play he wrote with Esther’s encouragement about the redemption of a former child soldier. This helped to make Beah admired at the center and the director, Mr. Kamara asked him if he would be willing to become a spokesperson for the center. A week later, he was speaking at events in Freetown about ending child soldiering and the role of rehabilitation.

“ ‘We can be rehabilitated,’ I would emphasize, and point to myself as an example. I would always tell people that I believe children have the resilience to outlive their suffering, if given a chance.”

After eight months in Benin Home, Ishmael Beah was repatriated back into society and went to live with his uncle from his father’s side of the family, a carpenter in Freetown. His uncle and wife and four children welcomed him with open arms and Beah went to live in their home. From the verandah, there was a beautiful view of the city and the ships in the harbor. He kept in touch with Esther and Leslie and was reunited with his childhood friend Mohamed. He also resumed school, St. Edward’s Secondary School in Freetown. Life was returning to normal and long talks with his uncle and routine family life were restorative.

In a competitive process, Beah was selected to serve as a representative of Children Associated with the War (CAW) at a U.N. conference in New York City to speak about child soldiering and the important role of rehabilitation. Beah’s participation with other children from countries around the world at the United Nations First International Children’s Parliament was the beginning of his developing international role as a spokesperson to end child soldiering and address the educational and rehabilitation needs of former child soldiers and all children affected by conflict.

He returned to his family and friends in Freetown, telling stories of his visit to New York City. He resumed his life as a high school student, living joyfully in the present in his new life, but this was not to last. Family tragedy struck again, and then, on May 25, 1997, the war came to Freetown when President Kabbah was overthrown by the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC), a military junta, which invited the RUF to join in the new government. Violence, looting and killings of civilians on the streets of Freetown convinced Beah it would only be a matter of time before he would be forced to return to his previous life, or be killed. In a series of arrangements and risks that would make a separate spellbinding book, Beah made it to Guinea where there was peace and then back to New York City to a storyteller, Laura Simms, he had met during the U.N. conference. Beah was adopted by Simms and finished high school at the United Nations International School. He went on to Oberlin College in Ohio where he started writing A Long Way Gone and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science in 2004. A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier was published in 2007.

In writing A Long Way Gone, Ishmael Beah has told his story, the story thousands of Sierra Leonean children trapped in the horrors of war, and the stories of millions of children who during the past quarter century have had their lives turned upside down and inside out by war and being turned into child soldiers.

It is a story that should motivate us to build a culture of peace and oppose war, wherever we are, and to prevent new wars. Child soldiering is a component of today’s wars. Child soldiering will not end until wars are prevented and until conditions which cause wars and armed conflict are proactively addressed.

It is also a story that should convince us deeply within our soul that no matter how severely a child has been stripped of his or her humanity as a child soldier, in Beah’s words, “children have the resilience to outlive their suffering if given a chance.” In other words, rehabilitation works.

Beah is a strong global advocate through speaking engagements, workshops and advocacy forums to end child soldiering and support the rehabilitation of former child soldiers. He also advocates for rehabilitative services for all children affected by conflict, child soldier or not. Children are traumatized by war in myriad ways: witnessing atrocities, loss of family and friends, displacement, fear and anxiety and child soldiering. Beah speaks for all children suffering from these ordeals today, and for the many youth who have suffered these traumatizing ordeals over the past decades.

A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier has made Beah one of the world’s most significant advocates for the rights and needs of children engulfed in war. In advocating for the rehabilitation of all former child soldiers and children affected by conflict, Beah is very clear that rehabilitation cannot achieve its goals in a short period of time, nor should it be governed by unrealistic budgetary limitations. He emphasizes that rehabilitation must be of sufficient length and quality to work. His own extensive rehabilitation at Benin Home proves the point.

On February 5, 2007 in Paris, France at an international conference on children and armed conflict which included France’s foreign minister and high level government officials from 55 nations, major witness Ishmael Beah urged delegates to support the rehabilitation of people like him. He pushed for governments to fund and keep funding programs to rehabilitate former child soldiers and for other children who are swallowed up in war and armed conflict. “No child is born violent.” Beah stated. “No child in Africa, Latin America or Asia wants to be part of war,” and he used himself as an example of “living proof” of how rehabilitation works.

Ishmael Beah has met with Nelson Mandela and Bill Clinton and walked the halls of power to advocate for an end to the root causes of child soldiering and to address the education and rehabilitation needs of children and youth affected by conflict. In writing A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, Beah has given us the knowledge we need to act responsibly for millions of children and youth in the world. Let us - former child soldiers and non-former child soldiers alike – act responsibly and embrace Beah’s vision and mission with our caring and the will to act. Now, when it is needed.

Ishmael Beah is earning the Nobel Peace Prize one mind at a time and is one of the most gifted writers of the 21st century. I cannot wait to read his next book.

For more information about A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, please click here. ________________________________________________________________________

Arthur Serota is Executive Director of United Movement to End Child Soldiering (UMECS) anchored in Uganda