Subtitled "Memoirs of a Boy Soldier," this book was an interesting and autobiographical look at Sierra Leone's Civil War. Overall, I thought it was well-written, but I'm not sure if I totally agree that the chosen format was the best way to go. The author decided to tell the story the way that he experienced it, and since he was 12 years old when his village was engulfed in the fighting, he really only understood the war as it personally affected him. He didn't know anything about the politics, and as a result, you the reader never really understand why they were fighting in the first place. (I suppose you could say that about all wars over ideology and selfishly wanting to hog resources, but that's a different story.) I ended up Googling the subject about halfway through the book, and it helped, but I think the book suffered a little bit from the lack of contextual info. On the other hand, Beah would have lost that aimless, innocent quality that leads him through the book. So I don't know - maybe an introduction would have helped? (After all, you can't just rely on what you learned from Blood Diamond, right? One of my most favorite movies by the way, and an inspiration toward that rough but mighty path that is journalism.)
I was also struck by how ridiculous all these wars in Africa have been - Darfur, Rwanda, and Uganda come to mind. It really makes you wonder what people are thinking. I don't think that there are any fundamental differences between Africans and Americans (and you can hardly lump one continent all together as sharing the same motivation), so what is it that possesses people to turn into total barbarians? What is it that possesses adults to drug young children and use them as weapons? Especially in these third-world communities that were formerly so family-oriented. I definitely don't think that we're inherently more civilized (hello, Hiroshima; hello, Guantanemo Bay), but there's something about the structure that we have built that keeps the general population from such base actions. It makes my head hurt trying to think what exactly the difference is.
I guess, too, that I always sort of saw these situations in terms of the good guys and the bad guys, and this book pretty much flips that naive idea on its head. In Sudan, Al-Bashir and his government are evil and the Darfurians are helpless victims just trying to fight back; in Uganda, Joseph Kony is enlisting child soldiers and the government is just trying to keep the madman at bay. Likely not true, I realize. In Sierra Leone, they're all just warped. Beah ends up on the government's side simply because he and his friends wander into their camp first; they easily could have been picked up by the other side. It was total chance, but regardless, the children on both sides end up drugged out of their minds, indoctrinated by Rambo, and spilling blood for reasons they couldn't tell you. They can't see that they're doing what people did to them - stealing their innocence, destroying lives and villages. And of course they can't - they're children. The whole thing just makes me so angry.
There's an interesting fable at the end of the book. One of the village elders would tell it to the children: "There was a hunter who went into the bush to kill a monkey. He had looked for only a few minutes when he saw the monkey sitting comfortably in the branch of a low tree...Just when he was about to pull the trigger, the monkey spoke: 'If you shoot me, your mother will die, and if you don't, your father will die.'" And then the children would have to figure out what they would do. Beah says that when he was a child, before the war, no one would ever answer, as all the children were sitting in the presence of their parents. But now, at the end of the book, he presents the answer that he silently came up with at age 7: "I concluded to myself that if I were the hunter, I would shoot the monkey so that it would no longer have the chance to put other hunters in the same predicament."
Huh. It's the same sort of question that you've heard was often presented to Jews during the Holocaust. But I'm a little troubled by Beah's answer...I think he's saying that you take the aggressor out so that the situation can never be replicated. But who's the aggressor here? It seems like you'd have to have taken out an awful lot of people in Sierra Leone to stop the madness...but isn't that what caused the madness. It's a troubling ending, but I guess it's easy to judge from my shiny happy American bedroom.
So what's the right answer? I always thought in this game of logic that the hunter was supposed to choose himself. But I guess that's not how it works out in real life.
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