Word: leonean
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...began. But such absences feel purposeful: By ignorning politics, Beah allows his story to transcend them. Writing as much a novel about ordinary life as war, Beah contrasts civilian and military life to define the two more precisely. He highlights the importance of family life and community in Sierra Leonean society, implying that the army had replaced his parents. He also emphasizes how deeply local culture penetrates his life, to the extent that it gives him a reason to continue living. The contrast works most effectively when military and civilian life meet in one place after Beah is taken...
...star. (I'll eat my hat if he does not meet Bono in the next 12 months.) Beah, 26, slight and handsome with a ready but wary smile, has written a memoir, and it's a doozy. Separated from his parents at 12 when rebel soldiers attacked his Sierra Leonean village, by 13 he was a child soldier and a drug addict. By 19 he was living in the U.S., at Oberlin College, in Ohio. In February he's starting on a book tour...
Beah was in a nearby town performing with a little dance-and-rap troupe in 1993 when his village was torched by rebel soldiers. After many months of privation and searching for his parents, he fell into the hands of the Sierra Leonean army. It offered protection for a while--and then conscription. Fueled by anti-rebel lectures, constant war movies, speed pills and "brown-brown" (cocaine mixed with gunpowder, which the soldiers sniffed), Beah became a killing machine. "That was your life," he says of his two years of endless fighting. "That's what you did unless you wanted...
...fence off the two-thirds of the country that has diamonds," he says, while insisting that efforts to stem the gems' flow have been effective. The precious minerals, says Kabbah, are not the only thing of value that Sierra Leone can offer for export. Like some 70% of Sierra Leoneans, he is a Muslim. But unlike nearby Nigeria, riven by sectarian violence, "in Sierra Leone there is no religious bigotry," Kabbah says. "This is one of the things of which we're very proud." Given the country's interfaith harmony, mineral riches, abundant natural resources and a once-vaunted educational...
...that those diamonds in your jewelry came from a cave in Sierra Leone, and were picked by a seven-year-old girl working as a slave to some warlord who then exchanged those diamonds for machine guns. The “blood diamond” trade that links Sierra Leonean children with American consumers is responsible for fueling a war that probably would have fizzled out five years ago if not for the diamond revenue. In Angola, the Unita rebels sustained their war for over 27 years thanks in large part to an annual blood diamond income of hundreds...