The Caveman’s Corner

This review is also doubling as an essay for college. The book is a memoir by Ishmael Beah of his time as a refugee and then child soldier in the civil war in Sierra Leone from around 1992 to 2003. Sorry the text has been so weird on my last few posts, but they’ve been copied in from Word and the font is different. I don’t suppose it’s very professional of me not to figure out how to integrate it better.

You recognize Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Child Soldier as a powerful and compelling book almost immediately. Considering Beah’s story, how could it not be? So, I think it misses the point a bit to focus simply on its emotional impact. What Beah has to tell us about the nature of violent conflict, and the human victims and agents caught up in it, seems much more important. The very phrase “child soldier” encompasses an inevitable and uncomfortable confusion of victim and perpetrator that strains usual perceptions of modern warfare, and the book explores thoroughly this ambiguity. Beah is the victim of horrible crimes, and that is undeniable. And one of the greatest of these crimes is his transformation, though drugs, manipulation, and fear, into a perpetrator of crimes as horrible as any he suffers. Crimes in this world, where victims of crimes make criminals out of their own victims, develop an identity of their own, independent of perpetrators. This makes those crimes both tenacious, and their redress, in the Western legal tradition, for the most part impossible. If the natural approach to crime, justice, involves the meeting out of retribution to criminals, then this approach suddenly becomes both worthless practically and ‘unjust’ morally. People begin to no longer be to blame. It becomes simply the War and it works not only against individuals but against the whole structure of society.

Almost as much as it is a story of personal struggle, A Long Way Gone is a story of a culture in violent flux. The theme of culture change, both past and present, permeates the book, just as it permeates life in the postcolonial world. The society of Beah’s birth appears at first blush to be one of a ‘traditional’ West African village. Men and women continue in their traditional roles, respected elders make social decisions, men chew kola and tap palm wine, and children are dedicated in traditional-seeming ceremonies. And yet the village’s economy relies on a Western mining company. Villagers listen to the BBC and send their children to schools where they read great English literature. And it isn’t a shaman who leads the villagers in their traditional ceremonies, but a Muslim imam, the product of cultural exchange far predating European contact and colonialism, when indigenous cultures were generally assumed to have been ‘spoiled.’

Culture change didn’t begin with colonialism and it certainly didn’t stop with its end. The forces unleashed on postcolonial states by their departing masters dug themselves into the societies of these new nations in powerful and unpredictable ways. The conflict between the RUF and the ACP government of Sierra Leone though the 90s was just such an example of post-colonial conflict utilizing the technology of the West, sparked by, and fought in the language of, Western concepts like electoral democracy and socialism, and yet neither an indigenous ‘mimicry’ of the West nor Western words simply grafted onto ‘traditional’ indigenous conflicts. Instead, post-colonial conflicts seem to be something unique, made unique not only by how they are fought and why, but how they are perceived both by those fighting them and by outside observers. Child soldiery is a central instance of this uniqueness. Child soldiers are a new thing to warfare, and yet they’re not. Teenagers and younger have engaged in battles throughout history. But in the modern world, when conflicts are both made more brutal by technology and perceived as more brutal by Westernized cultural mores and beliefs about children and childhood, the whole perception of fighting by children has fundamentally shifted from its earlier taken-for-granted place in warfare.

This is an almost effortless assumption of a modern idea, one of a few noted in A Long Way Gone, by a non-Western post-colonial culture. What’s remarkable is that it isn’t marked by the sort of pains that notions like democracy or secularism usually seem to face in this context. I can jump about as far as a person can to find another example of effortless, wholesale adoption of a system thoroughly Western in a non-Western society: the modern war machine. It is a remarkable fact that practically every state fighting force on earth is organized around the same, European, lines. Modern armies are, in the almost universally held ideal, meritocratic, emphasize the achievement of ‘rational’ tactical goals, and are held together by a network of authority and duty with ultimate loyalty supposed to be given to the central state. This is a far cry from, say, the feudal armies of the European Middle Ages or the focus in Aztec warfare on individual achievement in capturing prisoners for sacrifice. The rationalization of tactics is particularly strong. Societies that must go to almighty lengths to come to terms with Western science seem to embrace thoughtlessly the notion that war fighting can be understood in many of the very same terms by which science seeks to understand the universe.

Returning to the idea of catastrophic culture change wrought by the civil war, this too is also unique in respects to its post-colonial, Mende, West African context (whichever distinction is more important). Change and societal disintegration is apparent very literally: the burning of villages, the massacres of civilians, the disruption of local economies. These effects of total war are relatively universal. In these terms Sierra Leone in 2000 could be Belgium in 1918. But Beah suggests other ways in which the civil war might impact his country in ways perhaps more unique to its cultural environment. You notice in A Long Way Gone a contrast between a fragile culture of social conventions which the war is destroying, and an apparently more durable sort of individual culture a people may carry with them (particularly stories). People in Sierra Leone no longer trust each other, as various individuals Beah encounters continually lament. Elders are no long accorded the respect they once were, as is vividly demonstrated by the rebels’ treatment of an old man they have captured and torment. In these times, it is the young and the armed who hold the power. All the glue of Mende society, that held it fast through all the changes it has endured, has been ripped apart from within.

Yet throughout all the chaos, people still remember their stories, and lament the loss of respect accorded their mores. People’s memories remain intact, and cannot be touched by even the most vicious force. But will the Mende be able to get back a point again when their memories can be transformed back into a society? Even still, as the war spares these more intimate artifacts of culture, it has also destroyed, perhaps forever, their context. Will the story of bra spider maintain the same meaning to generations of Mende born into a world ravaged and depopulated by a decade of violence and mass migration? When a people must look upon their own stories with the same alienation that we must, then surely the war has claimed another casualty. And here we return to the notion of ‘justice.’ Who’s to pay for the destruction of a culture when the perpetrators are both the victims of others and victims of themselves? It seems in this case, besides prosecuting those few who lead and make the decisions that put children (and others) in the position of committing crimes, the system is the only thing that it becomes useful to blame. This is something very hard for governments, fighting crime instead of criminals, but if the developing world is to be spared horrors like those described by Ishmael Beah, it appears the only way forward.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 16th, 2008 at 8:57 pm and is filed under Book Reviews, Sociocultural Anthropology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.