On Thursday, October 24, Ishmael Beah will give the second lecture in the 21st Annual Distinguished Speaker Series at the University at Buffalo. Beah, 26, is an increasingly popular author and human rights activist who has lobbied in opposition of allowing governments to use child soldiers in times of war and peace. According to Newsweek, approximately 300,000 children are part of armed forces around the world. His book, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Child Soldier, has been highly reviewed and well received in the English-speaking world.
While following Michael Moore’s speech is no easy act, Beah’s early life as a young refugee and child soldier in the forests of Sierra Leone, as well as what Beah calls his “second life” as a survivor of these intense tribulations of the war, have provided Beah with a stimulating and heartwarming perspective for his lectures and writings. Even The Daily Show host Jon Stewart put his sarcastic wit aside, calling Beah’s memoirs “the most moving and remarkable story that I think I have ever read,” and admitting, “It made my heart hurt.”
Claude Welch, a SUNY Distinguished Professor on the Human Rights Watch/Africa board and author of the acclaimed book Human Rights and Development in Africa, recognizes the necessity and importance of Beah’s upcoming talk.
“He is of a student generation, he has gone through experiences that hopefully no one else will ever go through, but we need to hear them, to understand them. He is an authentic voice, not a fictional voice.”
While the environment in Sierra Leone is in many ways different from the one in the United States, the activities in which Beah participated were similar to those of many children growing up in the 1980s. He hung out and made jokes with his friends, participated in athletic activities like swimming, and he listened and danced to rappers like the Sugarhill Gang and LL Cool J.
In 1991, the political situation in Sierra Leone led to violence. The All Peoples Congress (APC) party was the only party in Sierra Leone since 1978, when Siaka Stevens, the Prime Minister of Sierra Leone and leader of the APC, amended the constitution and banned all other political parties. The one-party government, as is often the case, led to the formation of shadowy and violent dissident groups.
The Revolutionary United Front (RUF) was one of the radical and militant groups that was opposed to what they perceived as the government’s corruption and mismanagement of Sierra Leone’s diamond resources. In 1991, the RUF launched a brutal coup that tried to gain control of the country from the outside in. The RUF took control of many villages in Eastern Sierra Leone by killing and scaring some of the men, women, and children villagers out, recruiting some of the male adults and children into their ranks, and using the resources in the villages to sustain their forces.
While the government quickly amended the constitution in 1991 to allow other political parties to participate in the public’s affairs, the war sizzled throughout Sierra Leone until 2002. With the arrival of war and the brutality and fear that came with it, the rule of law and the shared values of the people of Sierra Leone was lost. A Sierra Leone elderly native, who asked Beah to refer to him as “the old man,” said after the violence broke out, “...this country has lost its good heart. People don’t trust each other anymore.”
Beah, however, had only heard rumors and hearsay of the civil war in Sierra Leone during the first two years that it rampaged. It did not touch his village, Mattru Jong, until 1993 when the RUF had attacked. The day the RUF attacked, Beah and his friends were out of town. When they got word of the attack, they cautiously went back to Mattru Jong to find that it had been deserted by the living and inhabited by the dead. Beah, who was 12 years old at the time, describes his response in his book:
I ran away, along paths and roads that were littered with dead bodies, some mutilated in ways so horrible that looking at them left a permanent scar on my memory. I ran for days, weeks and months, and I couldn’t believe that the simple and precious world I had known, where nights were celebrated with storytelling and dancing and mornings greeted with the singing of birds and cock crows, was now a place where only guns spoke and sometimes it seemed even the sun hesitated to shine. After I discovered that my parents and two brothers had been killed, I felt even more lost and worthless in a world that had become pregnant with fear and suspicion as neighbor turned against neighbor and child against parent.
During his time in the forest, Beah developed a psychological condition that prevented him from distinguishing between fantasy and reality. After wandering through the forests of Sierra Leone, initially with his friends and remaining brothers, and later with another group of young boys from his village, the boys made it to a village that the government soldiers turned into a base. While Beah didn’t trust the military too much, or anyone for that matter, he and his fellow travelers entered the village and stayed because the military provided them with a steady source of food, a place to sleep, a sense of security, and much needed social interaction.
After a few months, the RUF ambushed and surrounded the village, killing many of the government’s soldiers in the process. Considering the threat of defeat, the military asked Beah and the other boys in the village to join the army, and Beah, 13-years-old at the time, agreed. After his first taste of combat, Beah writes, “The sight of blood and the crying of people in pain, triggered something inside me that I didn’t understand, and made me lose compassion for others. I lost my real being. I lost my sense of self. After crossing that line, I was not a normal kid. I was a traumatized kid.”
The activities of this “traumatized kid” in the war are expressed in vivid detail in his book and in his essays. During the war, Beah, who felt alone in the anarchy, became addicted to amphetamines, pot, and “brown-brown” (a mixture of cocaine and gun-powder). This, along with the propaganda that the military superiors had told him and the other boys about the RUF in order to brainwash them, turned Beah into a savage. Dr. Welch describes Beah’s account as “the kind of depravity to which persons can be influenced, can be pushed. You had situations there in which selected adults had total control over these child soldiers.”
The villages that we captured and turned into our bases as we went along and the forests that we slept in became my home. My squad was my family, my gun was my provider and protector and my rule was to kill or be killed. The extent of my thoughts didn’t go much beyond that. We had been fighting for more than two years, and killing had become a daily activity. I felt no pity for anyone.
After two years of fighting on behalf of the government of Sierra Leone and “killing too many people to count,” the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) rescued Beah, 15-years-old at the time, from the fog of war. UNICEF brought Beah to Benin Home, which was a rehabilitation center for child soldiers.
Dr. Welch describes the difficulty encountered by rehabilitation workers in relating to these victims of tragedy. “They’re working with very hard cases, these are young men and women whose psychology has been profoundly traumatized by years of experiences for which the aid givers have no or very little direct experience,” he said.
During the first days at the home, Beah was still in the “kill or be killed” mentality. When Beah and the other children who served in his unit encountered children that fought on the side of the opposition, they got involved in a fight in which six people were killed.
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 nearby. A few days earlier, we could have decided whether they would live or die.
After a while, Beah started to gradually accept the rehabilitation process. His addiction to drugs started to subside, his anger fits started to decrease in frequency, and his emotional baggage started to get unpacked. As this process occurred, Beah started to regain the humanity and moral compass that had been stolen from him. He became well enough to be allowed to leave the Benin Home and stay with an uncle of his that lived in Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone.
In 1998, when the war came to the capital and the government military joined forces with the RUF, Beah left Freetown in order to avoid getting sucked back into the war. After spending time in New York City with his foster mother, Beah enrolled in Oberlin College. After graduating in 2004 with a B.A. in political science, he has worked with Human Rights Watch in attempts to persuade governments and individuals around the world to cease using children as soldiers. Since the publication of his book, he has become the unofficial poster boy of this cause.
The standards against use of child soldiers in armed conflicts are hard to implement in countries like Sierra Leone, especially during civil war. “They can’t be imposed, they have to grow from within, but I think they can be facilitated. The international community can say, ‘Alright, use of child soldiers in this fashion is a war crime,’” Dr. Welch said.
While Beah was regaining his lost humanity in the rehabilitation center, he would listen to, write down, sing, and memorize Bob Marley lyrics. On the 24th, UB will get to hear Beah’s own “Redemption Song” that he has been echoing throughout the world. Beah will ask the audience to “help to sing these songs of freedom,” and hopefully they will listen.
Daniel Tirfagnehu is a junior Philosophy major and a features writer for Generation.
