By William Boyd |Published: February 23, 2007



A Long Way Gone Memoirs of a Boy Soldier By Ishmael Beah 229 pages. $22. Sarah Crichton Books/ Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

What is it about African wars that is so disturbing? Why do they unsettle us so? We in the civilized West know all about bestial and mindless cruelty, as the events of 1939-45 graphically prove. And yet as we read about Darfur and Mogadishu today and recall Rwanda and Sierra Leone not long ago, or Biafra and Congo further back, we realize that these vicious, bitter African conflicts have left their trace on contemporary history, and on contemporary consciousness, in ways somehow different from the usual squalid reckoning that modern warfare encourages.

The great benefit of Ishmael Beah's memoir, "A Long Way Gone," is that it may help us arrive at an understanding of this situation. Beah's autobiography is almost unique, as far as I can determine — perhaps the first time that a child soldier has been able to give literary voice to one of the most distressing phenomena of the late 20th century: the rise of the pubescent (or even prepubescent) warrior-killer.

Beah was 12 when the civil war in Sierra Leone entered his life, in 1993. Sierra Leone, a former British colony in West Africa, suffered the usual post-independence rites of passage of corruption, unrest, military coups and gerrymandered elections. In the 1990s, civil strife in Liberia prompted the rise of the Revolutionary United Front, a ragtag liberation army headed by a former corporal, Foday Sankoh, who took over the diamond mines in eastern Sierra Leone and whose brutal militia (with a horrible penchant for amputating hands) moved on toward the country's capital, Freetown.

There is a historical chronology at the back of the book, but you will gain little idea of the internecine political struggle from Beah's account.

 In a sense, however, this is beside the point. A 12-year-old is conscious only of immediate circumstances, and in Beah's case the arrival of the rebels in his small town meant sudden separation from his parents and months of indeterminate flight from danger with a handful of other boys. These terrified youngsters wandered aimlessly along jungle tracks, starving and desperate, harassed and suspected as they scrounged for food and tried to make sense of what was going on. Finally they reached the Atlantic Ocean, but, once again, fearful villagers sent them packing, and they were eventually recruited into the Sierra Leone Army as boy soldiers.

Given rudimentary training, an AK- 47 and as many drugs as he could consume (amphetamines, marijuana and a toxic mix of cocaine and gunpowder called "brown brown"), Beah seems then to have gone on a two-year mind- bending killing spree, until he was rescued by some Unicef fieldworkers and sent to a rehabilitation center in Freetown. There, with counseling, care and attention, and the psychological ministrations of a kindly nurse named Esther, Beah's slow return to normality began, further augmented when he was sent to the United Nations with the task of explaining the lot of the child soldier to a concerned international community. He went to live in the United States, graduating from high school and Oberlin College. "A Long Way Gone" is his first, remarkable book.

It is interesting to try to comprehend what act of remembering is going on here. Who of us in our 20s could accurately summon up our day-by-day lives as preteens? As you read "A Long Way Gone," the details allow you to distinguish precise recall from autobiographical blur. Beah can remember the logo on the sneakers he is issued by the army. When he is captured by hostile villagers, he is released because he has a few rap cassettes on him (LL Cool J, Naughty by Nature, among others) and can mime the songs and dance to them. All this has the idiosyncratic ring of precisely remembered truth.

But with lines like these, the effect is quite different: "We walked around the village and killed everyone who came out of the houses and huts." Or: "After every gunfight we would enter the rebel camp, killing those we had wounded." The horror is duly registered, but its vagueness and generality don't add up to moments of lived personal history. Indeed, Beah's time in the army, and the accounts of the patrols and firefights he was caught up in, represent only a small portion of this book. And who can blame him? The blood-lust of a drug-crazed adolescent on the rampage with an assault rifle would challenge the descriptive powers of James Joyce.

Beah confesses to slitting the throat of a trussed prisoner, and writes lines like: "I angrily pointed my gun into the swamp and killed more people. I shot everything that moved." If these and similar passages are to be given credence, his personal body count must total many dozens. Such knowledge is shocking, but it's the reader's imagination that delivers the cold sanguinary shudder, not the author's boilerplate prose. It is a vision of hell that Beah gives us, one worthy of Hieronymus Bosch, but as though depicted in primary colors by a naïve artist.

However, perhaps this gives us a clue to the nature and effect of these terrifying African conflicts. I have been close to only one, in Nigeria from 1968 to 1970, during that country's civil war, known as the Biafran war. I was in my teens too, not much older than Beah, and far from the actual fighting. But at dusk one night with my father, our car was stopped at a roadblock on a back road in the bush by a unit of Nigerian soldiers. They were young, aggressive, drunk on beer, bored and ostensibly looking for currency smugglers. They waved their Kalashnikovs at us and angrily ordered us out of the car. We were roughly searched, the trunk was opened, and then my father cracked a joke and everybody laughed.

But for a few moments I was profoundly aware that anything might have happened to us: there was no control, no "rules of engagement," no chain of command. We were powerless; they had all the power. Night was falling, and there were no witnesses. It was a moment of pure potential anarchy that could have gone any way.

Beah's book confirms this feeling. The unbelievable violence and dread, the blood and death, seem — if this does not appear too awful an oxymoron — somehow guileless and innocent, random, unpremeditated. Is that what fundamentally disturbs us about these African conflicts? Beah tells a story of a messenger sent by the rebels. All his fingers had been amputated except his thumbs. In more peaceful times, Sierra Leoneans used to give one another a thumbs-up sign that meant "one love" (a gestural echo of the reggae song), and that is what the Revolutionary United Front called this mutilation. A joke is made: the cost is unimaginable.

Beah's memoir joins an elite class of writing: Africans witnessing African wars. I think of "Sozaboy," Ken Saro-Wiwa's masterly novel about a young soldier during the Biafran war, or "Machete Season," Jean Hatzfeld's book of blood-chilling interviews with Rwandan killers.

"A Long Way Gone" makes you wonder how anyone comes through such unrelenting ghastliness and horror with his humanity and sanity intact. Unusually, the smiling, open face of the author on the book jacket provides welcome and timely reassurance. Ishmael Beah seems to prove it can happen.

William Boyd is the author of nine novels. His most recent is "Restless."