"Flame" articles: Review of Daniel Bergner's book "In the Land of Magic Soldiers"

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Our church's new Sierra Leone-Plymouth Partnership (SLPP) asks us as a congregation and as individuals to look more closely, as through a magnifying glass, at the small West-African country of Sierra Leone. In doing so, we have much to learn not just about this country but also about Africa, the Third World, and our own humanity. Daniel Bergner's award-winning In the Land of Magic Soldiers: A Story of White and Black in West Africa (New York: Picador, 2004. 216 pp, $14; available for checkout from the Church Library) can help.

I used this nonfiction book last spring to teach two sections of first-year college research writing, and almost every student felt Bergner's book not only thoroughly grabbed their attention but also developed in them an important new understanding of Africa and victims of war. The Los Angeles Times calls the book "beautifully written…, magical"—a feat of literary journalism rare in our times. However, fair warning should be given: the book is sometimes emotionally wrenching in its descriptions of the terrible 1990s civil war that tore apart the country.

This is, in fact, Bergner's intent: to examine this civil war and its aftermath. Almost immediately, in chapter two, he describes in simple, stark prose how middle-aged villager Lamin came to have his hands chopped off. But Bergner, a friend of Blake School (Minneapolis) headmaster John Gulla—they taught together in New York City in the 1990s—carries out his journalistic mission with a stubborn Midwestern-like insistence on balance. We hear many stories: the Kortenhoven family, missionaries originally from Michigan; British Army Captain Sam Rosenfeld; white mercenary Neall Ellis; Komba, one of many kidnapped and brainwashed child soldiers; Michael, a would-be Sierra Leone medical student looking for a cure for AIDS; and others.

Kirkus Reviews calls Bergner's story "a remarkable journey into hell." It is one in which, says the London Sunday Times, "author and reader are irrevocably changed."

Interwoven in Bergner's accounts is a brief history. The capital, Freetown, was known as the "Athens of West Africa" in

its British colonial days. The country, rich with resources, was one of the first in Africa to gain independence in the 1960s-1970s. In the 1990s, though, a combination of desire for government reforms, power plays for the country's richest resources (in this case, diamonds), and civil conflict in neighboring Liberia (as dramatized recently in the Nicolas Cage movie Lord of War) all helped to create a strong rebel movement in Sierra Leone.

The rebels proved ruthless in their tactics, especially in their use of child soldiers. Child soldiers—as young as ten or twelve—are an increasing phenomenon in third-world conflicts. In Sierra Leone, males children were killed if they refused to join, beaten, drugged, and required to chop off villagers' limbs and slay entire villages. Females became work slaves and "combat wives" for the troops.

United Nations forces halted part of the bloodshed in Sierra Leone, but it was the British, invited to return and welcomed by almost all, who stopped the war in 2001. Sierra Leone is now peaceful again, but Bergner's stories uncover the open wounds and terrible scars on the country's soul. This was a world that for awhile seemed to go mad—a time some Sierra Leoneans call "the decade that God forgot."

If Bergner's book has a weakness, it is its lack of information about pre-civil war Sierra Leone and Freetown. The kinder, gentler Freetown, for example, is the capitol that author Graham Greene (Orient Express) loved so much when he lived there during World War II as a British spy. And the kinder, gentler countryside is the peaceful, hardworking village life that our own SLPP Coordinator, Jeff Hall, came to know in his Peace Corps years in the 1980s.

Otherwise, Bergner's book is an uncompromising, disturbing, and beautiful testament to the spiritual and physical condition of Sierra Leone—and, by inference, other third-world countries where common decency and love have, for a time, been abandoned. Bergner himself, in the book's end, seems uneasy with his findings. But most of my students and I felt a clear sense of hope, especially with the war over. We had discovered the basic goodness and intelligence of African people who, under other circumstances, could just as easily have hailed from our own American villages and towns.

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This book is available for checkout from the Inver Hills College Library, and almost all major libraries.