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WEEK of April 14, 2008
@BFS! archives

Face to Face with Modern African History: Former Child Soldier Ishmael Beah Visits Upper School

by Jeffrey Stanley

Author Ishmael Beah spoke to the Upper School on March 11 about his book, A Long Way Gone, Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, an account or his experiences as a child soldier in Sierra Leone in the 1990’s. Child soldiers are a human rights issue in many conflicts in the world, but the Sierra Leone civil war in the 1990’s drew particular international attention due to the warring factions’ widespread and systematic transformation of kids into killers, perpetuating the war for years.

Students in Ed Herzman’s Modern African History class had read Ishmael’s memoir and an invitation was extended to the New York-based author and lecturer. After speaking to the Upper School student body, reading from his book and answering questions, he stayed afterwards to chat with the Modern African History students.

Ishmael was born in 1980 and grew up with his family in a relatively normal and stable community. “At the age of 12 a change happened,” he told the enrapt Upper School students. He described a program of “forced indoctrination” in which rebel factions brainwashed some kids, making the rebel group their new and itinerant family. “Usually, child soldiers become homeless because other soldiers have destroyed their villages and/or killed their families,” explained Ed Herzman after the lecture. “They are often drawn into war because they have no other place to go and they desire revenge against those who’ve put them in this situation.”

Ishmael’s own parents and siblings were indeed killed by militants and he was drafted into a rebel group for whom he fought for two years. He was eventually rescued by UNICEF workers and placed in a rehabilitation center in Freetown for eight months, he explained, after an uncle who could care for him was found. In 1996 Ishmael and some other former child soldiers were chosen to come to the United States to speak of their experiences. It was on this initial trip that Ishmael met Laura Simms, who later adopted him and became his American mother. He returned to the States to live here permanently in 1998, attending the United Nations International School (UNIS) and graduating with a degree in political science from Oberlin College.

Among his first frustrations as a high school and then college student in the United States was how little Americans seemed to know about the Sierra Leone conflict. “The war had been going on for seven years. And when it did start to emerge in the media here, there was a sense that it was finished, that it had always been violent. I wanted to show that there was hope, that recovery was possible,” he said. “In my book I wanted to created that necessary human connection.”

He told the students that he hoped his book kept alive in people’s minds that child soldiers are still being used in the world and that they are not beyond help. “There’s a sense that they are finished. I want to show that the human spirit is wonderful and that recovery is possible.” He credited UNICEF workers for their patience and relentlessness in helping him and his cohorts return to some semblance of healing and normality after their experiences as drug-addicted, heavily manipulated killers. Many would have written these young men off as “finished,” beyond recovery and suitable only for a life behind bars, Ishmael explained, but that’s not always the case.

Ishmael Beah is a charismatic speaker and his story, grim as it was, contained moments of humor and hope. He reminded students that the transition to Western life was in some ways less difficult than they might imagine. “We had been a British colony and I grew up reading Shakespeare,” he said. “The educational system in Sierra Leone was very strong. I also grew up listening to hip-hop, “back in the ‘80s when it was still good,” he said. “From hip-hop I learned words like clandestine and soliloquy.” He also talked about stepping off the plane in New York and seeing snow for the first time. “I knew the word snow from Shakespeare and Christmas films. I thought, maybe it’s Christmas all the time here.”

During the Q&A students peppered him with questions. Ishmael stayed late to continue answering them. “I’m always eager to talk to young people because they’re so much more sincere and they don’t sugar coat questions,” he said. “I like that.”

“What was the worst place you had to hide?” asked one student.

“Actually the worst place was in Guinea, next door to Sierra Leone. When you’re a refugee in a country that doesn’t want you, you ask for something in English and they raise the price,” he said. “Also you have a fear that the police will arrest you and send you to the refugee camps where nobody wanted to be at all.”

“Can you explain the conflict?” asked another student.

“I didn’t start because of diamonds,” he explained, contradicting the popular conception of the conflict. “It started because of political corruption. The RUF started the war but then began attacking civilians, doing the same thing as the government. Different factions started springing up. Then the violence became a way of life. If someone has a gun and you don’t, they can take your food.”

“What did you think of the movie Blood Diamond?”

“I liked it but I have an issue with it. In the end the father finds his son and shakes him a few times and says, ‘You’re good, you’re my son!’ and then the kid is fine. It creates this perception that all you have to do is shake a child soldier and tell him you love him and he’ll be cured, and that if he’s not cured then he’s finished. If someone had tried that on me and then given up when it didn’t work I wouldn’t be standing here right now.”

He said he hoped with his book to instill in the students a desire to learn more about the world. “We don’t need to wait for a conflict to happen in order to learn about that place. If we learn about them before that then maybe we can mitigate the conflicts,” he said. He placed much of the onus for change on academia. “At Oberlin we didn’t have to wait until 9/11 to learn about Middle Eastern culture,” he said as an example.

He left the students with a parting thought on war, a twist on the truism that in order to turn soldiers into killers one must teach them to dehumanize the enemy. “In war,” he said, “You don’t dehumanize the enemy. You must dehumanize yourself.”