In the Land of Magic Soldiers : A Story of White and Black in West Africa

Rating:
Summary: a beautifully-written account of a country
Review: Daniel Bergner's book is a clear-sighted view of a country and its people. He has got to know the people there, and lets them tell their own stories in his book, from Michael the medical student with the cure for HIV; to Lamin active in rebuilding his country despite - and because of - his amputation during the war; to Western soldiers, aid workers and missionaries who have entered the country.

I think the book is uplifting: the people Bergner meets love their country and the descriptions of them and their country are written by a mesmerising writer. He may say things we (and him) do not always want to hear about Western intervention and the hangover of colonialism (which he never supports, contrary to other reivews: he just doesn't rubbish it without thought) but that makes them even more important to read.

This is a book which shocks, moves, uplifts and enthralls, and it has helped make Sierra Leone a country of individuals for me, rather than a UN statistic, which is why I love the book.

Rating:
Summary: Poorly researched
Review: Daniel's book is a work of fiction, so one should be forgiven for confusing where fiction starts and reality begins as he writes about the tragic Sierra Leone civil war.

Some of what he writes is so ridiculous that you wonder how someone could be so gullible. Most people in the know would find it downright laughable. Did he really believe the stories of the supposed medical school student who studied by day and fought defending the city by night, or the lone 'Zimbabwean - not Rhodesian - pilot who claimed that he stood between Freetown and capture by the rebels? He spoke to people, he got played and couldn't even tell.

Let's also get something straight; the British intervention in Sierra Leone was very limited. The Nigerians and Guineans in the form of the armed wing (ECOMOG) of the regional organization (ECOWAS) did most of the fighting since the war broke in the early nineties. The British came in 2000 to evacuate their citizens and stayed behind to retrain the national army and support the UN troops. By then the RUF was by and large broken. Most of their leaders had been jailed or killed. A peace treaty had been signed and was being implemented under the auspices of the UN. At no point did the British ever engage the RUF; the idea that they ended the war is utter rubbish. They only launched an operation to free some of their men who were held by a small splinter group called the West Side Boys. This is well documented and easy for any interested person to establish. The British were certainly not there when Freetown was invaded in 1999 - I wonder where the Zimbabwean pilot was - an event generally accepted as the climax of the war.

The Brits left Sierra Leone severely underdeveloped, contrary to the impression his book gives. This was not Kenya or then Rhodesia, nations they had no intention of leaving. Most of the infrastructural development took place AFTER independence. Life under colonialism was 'hell' unless you had a white skin or were a member of a tiny African elite. It was after they left that there was an explosion in the number of African graduate and professionals to the extent that African immigrants to the United States for example are among the most skilled if not the most or any immigrant group.

Daniel postulates that Sierra Leoneans have an inferiority complex. It's not worth replying to - did Daniel conduct the same opinion polls which he points out are worthless in a place like Sierra Leone? Would we like to be re-colonized? Well if you ask a populace just emerging from a devastating war, and with recolonisation offering the prospect of more resources to rebuild, what kind of answer to you expect? Why not take the money use it to develop and kick them out when you're back on your feet?

Nations have war. It's tragic and regrettable. On some level I guess Sierra Leoneans will always feel some shame about the mass amputations which were designed as a means of terrorizing the population. A primitive 'shock and awe' perhaps. It clearly wasn't a battle tactic - most of the victims were civilians . It was also really was a very very small percentage of the population that was affected. But yes it was a tragedy and even one was one too many.

Today Sierra Leone is a very safe nation. Many Sierra Leoneans have gone back, and many more are thinking of returning every day. Like any human tragedy there is a very inspiring story of national regeneration and rebirth. It's a pity that people like Daniel Bergner with a book to sell can't see it. If you want the truth, save your money, use Google and get some honest information.

Rating:
Summary: insight...history...
Review: some good insight into the mentalities of the people of seirra leone and some interesting history. it's about a reality of today that compares to a reality of 2000 years ago in it's brutality and ignorance. the author tries to play up the black/white race issue a bit too much, i guess in effort to create controversy? i applause the information, the "reporting", but it definetly could have been edited and written better.

Rating:
Summary: insight...history...
Review: some good insight into the mentalities of the people of seirra leone and some interesting history. it's about a reality of today that compares to a reality of 2000 years ago in it's brutality and ignorance. the author tries to play up the black/white race issue a bit too much, i guess in effort to create controversy? i applause the information, the "reporting", but it definetly could have been edited and written better.

Rating:
Summary: a beautifully-written account of a country
Review: The author is enthralled with his misconception that the locals view white men as dieties; he is also thrilled to ride in a heliocopter gunship next to a white racist mercenary, even while believing that the mercenary has fired weapons indiscriminatingly into crowds of blacks, "because of the sense of power...". The author views such characters as morally complex. Obviously, the author is a young, impressionable, ammoral whiteboy. And, unfortunately, the world is full of them. Too bad he doesn't seek the psychiatric help he so desperately needs.

Rating:
Summary: "War is my food."
Review: What a heartbreaking book this is. Sierra Leone at the time of this writing was painfully creeping out of a collapsed state, a nightmare world of omni-hostile gangs, rogue militias, soul-wringing atrocities: the whole awful image of an imploded African society. As one interviewee says, the culture had been drawn down to zero. What was the cause? What could the solution be?

Author Bergner could easily have perpetrated a standard piece of parachute journalism on this wretched backwater sorespot, but he didn't. He spent some quantity time here, and followed developments. He writes with journalistic vividness which only sometimes strains for an elegaic tone. Most of the time his material supplies all the drama necessary.

We meet a missionary family, fired up with a purposeful vision for social justice. We meet them again some time later, after all their good works have been reduced by the civil war and general lawlessness to ashes, and with their last project, a school, threatened with abandonment. It's a heart-rending example of how so much of the West's very best altruistic efforts in Africa have been dashed to spray in the end.

We also meet victims of the guerillas' amputation squads. One, a man named Lamin, somehow kept his equanimity, while a compatriot who suffered the same horrible fate lapsed into catatonia. Lamin's impressions of New York while there to be fitted for prosthetic hands are especially interesting.

A detachment of British Marines, reassuringly determined and competent in comparison the Keystone Kops-like UN troops who had been held hostage by rebels, set to work restoring order in the capital and training the remnants of the national army. But is this rescue or re-colonialization? The question troubles few natives, but Bergner scrupulously takes note of those troubled few.

More problematic is an expatriate Rhodesian mercernary, fighting rebels with an old Soviet attack helicopter, and being none too careful about avoiding civilians. The "correct" attitude is to loathe him--yet his fighting in the field saves the capital, and his money-favoring among locals eases a lot of hurt that would otherwise go uneased.

Bergner candidly admits the psychic indigestion that the racial connotations of the whole ugly mess stir up within him. He protests to some natives who all but quote Kipling and Joseph Conrad at him, insisting that whites are fully as capable of the degradation happening there as the rebels and gangs have been. But in Sierra Leone in the Nineties, it is the missionaries and the British trying to salvage this country, and not the other way around, and Bergner records his creeped-out reaction when he entertains the idea that the self-deprecating natives may be right. Some otherwise astute Western observers are frequently guilty of denying Africans their full measure of humanity, of capacity for good and evil. In their view, the Africans are just a deterministic mass of victims of colonialism, symbols of Western sin, with no moral agency of their own. The natives Bergner quotes will be as kryptonite to such readers.

The Ghanaian scholar George Ayittey, in his book _Africa in Chaos_, deplored the vampiric kleptocracies that took hold in so many African countries after the end of colonialism. He proposed trying to reconstitute some of the pre-colonial tribal structures that had allowed for relatively peaceful conflict management. But how could this approach work in Sierra Leone, which was not only as artificial an entity as most other sub-Saharan countries but also an experimental one, like Liberia?

What could the solution be? No answers here. This is an impression of this woeful land, not a proposal for remedies. One can only hope that, with the presence of the British and more competent UN troops, the wounds will begin to heal. Everyone who only knows Sierra Leone from the terse wire reports filed under "In Other News" should read this book.

Rating:
Summary: "War is my food."
Review: What a heartbreaking book this is. Sierra Leone at the time of this writing was painfully creeping out of a collapsed state, a nightmare world of omni-hostile gangs, rogue militias, soul-wringing atrocities: the whole awful image of an imploded African society. As one interviewee says, the culture had been drawn down to zero. What was the cause? What could the solution be?

Author Bergner could easily have perpetrated a standard piece of parachute journalism on this wretched backwater sorespot, but he didn't. He spent some quantity time here, and followed developments. He writes with journalistic vividness which only sometimes strains for an elegaic tone. Most of the time his material supplies all the drama necessary.

We meet a missionary family, fired up with a purposeful vision for social justice. We meet them again some time later, after all their good works have been reduced by the civil war and general lawlessness to ashes, and with their last project, a school, threatened with abandonment. It's a heart-rending example of how so much of the West's very best altruistic efforts in Africa have been dashed to spray in the end.

We also meet victims of the guerillas' amputation squads. One, a man named Lamin, somehow kept his equanimity, while a compatriot who suffered the same horrible fate lapsed into catatonia. Lamin's impressions of New York while there to be fitted for prosthetic hands are especially interesting.

A detachment of British Marines, reassuringly determined and competent in comparison the Keystone Kops-like UN troops who had been held hostage by rebels, set to work restoring order in the capital and training the remnants of the national army. But is this rescue or re-colonialization? The question troubles few natives, but Bergner scrupulously takes note of those troubled few.

More problematic is an expatriate Rhodesian mercernary, fighting rebels with an old Soviet attack helicopter, and being none too careful about avoiding civilians. The "correct" attitude is to loathe him--yet his fighting in the field saves the capital, and his money-favoring among locals eases a lot of hurt that would otherwise go uneased.

Bergner candidly admits the psychic indigestion that the racial connotations of the whole ugly mess stir up within him. He protests to some natives who all but quote Kipling and Joseph Conrad at him, insisting that whites are fully as capable of the degradation happening there as the rebels and gangs have been. But in Sierra Leone in the Nineties, it is the missionaries and the British trying to salvage this country, and not the other way around, and Bergner records his creeped-out reaction when he entertains the idea that the self-deprecating natives may be right. Some otherwise astute Western observers are frequently guilty of denying Africans their full measure of humanity, of capacity for good and evil. In their view, the Africans are just a deterministic mass of victims of colonialism, symbols of Western sin, with no moral agency of their own. The natives Bergner quotes will be as kryptonite to such readers.

The Ghanaian scholar George Ayittey, in his book _Africa in Chaos_, deplored the vampiric kleptocracies that took hold in so many African countries after the end of colonialism. He proposed trying to reconstitute some of the pre-colonial tribal structures that had allowed for relatively peaceful conflict management. But how could this approach work in Sierra Leone, which was not only as artificial an entity as most other sub-Saharan countries but also an experimental one, like Liberia?

What could the solution be? No answers here. This is an impression of this woeful land, not a proposal for remedies. One can only hope that, with the presence of the British and more competent UN troops, the wounds will begin to heal. Everyone who only knows Sierra Leone from the terse wire reports filed under "In Other News" should read this book.