It was at Freetown Airport, which even before the civil war could be reached only with some difficulty, that I learnt that there was such a product as Johnny Walker Blue Label, about ten times as expensive as the Black Label variety. Since Sierra Leone was conspicuously impoverished and broken-down, I would have guessed from the offer for sale of this ostentatiously expensive luxury (if I hadn’t already known it by other experiences) that the country was in the hands of a rapacious and vulgar elite.
The civil war broke out soon afterwards. It seemed that the participants were determined to prove that Gerard Manley Hopkins’ line,’ No worse, there is none’, could have no application in human affairs. The spectacle of mass amputation of legs, hands and arms, often carried out by drugged, psychotic children, briefly caught the horrified attention of the world. At the time I thought — on purely general principles — that Mr Blair’s military intervention was mistaken, that what was happening in Sierra Leone was none of our business; but I now think that it was he, not I, who was right. A few hundred British troops put an almost instant end to a war that had lasted nearly ten years, and thus prevented incalculable suffering at small cost. What happens in the long run, of course, is another matter.
The author of this book, a journalist from Sierra Leone, tries to explain a conflict that, from a distance, seemed meaningless. The rebel group, the Revolutionary United Front, led by an embittered, semi-literate ex-soldier called Foday Sankoh, had no discernible political programme beyond hatred of the regime in power and a desire to take over. It committed terrible atrocities against the very people it was claiming to liberate, often with the connivance and participation of the country’s official but utterly disorganised and corrupt army.
Sierra Leone had long been ruled as a one-party state by the thuggish and kleptocratic Siaka Stevens and his handpicked successor, General Joseph Momoh. Bribery, corruption and violence against opponents were the ruling principles of the state. An entire population grew up unaware that things could be ordered any differently.
Unhappily for Sierra Leone, neighbouring Liberia had fallen into the hands of a psychopathic adventurer called Charles Taylor, who made Siaka Stevens seem like a man of Kantian iron principle. Taylor eyed Sierra Leone’s diamond mines with cupidity (they had long been looted by Sierra Leone’s elite, ably assisted by Lebanese traders) and he more or less called the RUF into being, upon the pretext that it was fighting a discredited, evil government. In essence, the war was about who got the diamonds.
Still, puzzles remain. There have been many wars fought for mercenary reasons, by mercenaries, but mass amputation is uncommon (the author, however, quotes a passage from Heart of Darkness to remind us that it is not quite unprecedented). The explanation given, that the RUF wanted to sow terror that was disproportionate to its true military potential — the propaganda not of the deed but of the mutilated — seems about as close as we are likely to get to an explanation, but yet we feel that it is not entirely satisfactory. I suspect that no wholly satisfying explanation will ever be found.
Before the arrival of the British, the United Nations and the Nigerians, with between 20 and 40 times as many troops, tried to impose order on Sierra Leone. However, the United Nations troops’ main function was to provide target practice for the rebels, while the Nigerians concerned themselves mainly with looting the diamonds, as any minimally experienced person would have expected.
This remarkable contrast in performance does not give rise in the author’s book to any deep reflection, which — had it occurred — was bound to be painful to him as an African, except that he advocates the establishment of a strong bureaucratic state in Sierra Leone. But he does not ask how and why the servants of that state should not be as corrupt and kleptocratic as they were under Siaka Stevens. The ‘nation-building’ efforts of foreign aid are based upon a laughably na