9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"War is my food.", February 2, 2004
This review is from: In the Land of Magic Soldiers: A Story of White and Black in West Africa (Hardcover)
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.
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11 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great Book., November 26, 2003
By A Customer
This review is from: In the Land of Magic Soldiers: A Story of White and Black in West Africa (Hardcover)
I applaud Bergner for writing about things as they actually were in Sierra Leone not so long ago (and currently ARE in surrounding countries), and not how those with some other agenda would have the reader believe that they are. An earlier reviewer encouraged would-be purchasers of the book to do a Google search on Sierra Leone instead of making this purchase. (Not a bad idea. At least the first part)..... I would also encourage would-be purchasers to first do a Google search--try "muti murders" for starters-- and only then buy the book, steeled for the read ahead and cognizant that the world Bergner so skillfully evokes is neither fabrication nor exaggeration. I give the book FIVE STARS, and recommend it to anyone unafraid to explore some hard truths about "modern" Africa.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Individual stories about the Sierra Leone Civil War., January 28, 2008
This book read well. I like the individual stories interspersed with the history of this troubled country. The stories of the Rhodesian mercenary, white American missionaries, Sierra Leonean amputee, and the medical student certainly were interesting. Whether I want to believe in a guerrilla soldier getting shot in the stomach or a person eating razor blades may be a stretch of the imagination.
The author recreates the terror and hatred of the Civil War. As he reminds us, much of sub Sahara Africa is in a downhill spiral, and the results in human terms is civil war, terror, tribalism, kleptocracy, and an early death to millions of Africans. Medically, there is little treatment for Africans of the many diseases rampant on the continent.
I liked this easy to read book. One reviewer raised the possiblity of this being fiction, but after reading similar stories of the Sierra Leone Civil War, I tend to doubt that accusation. A good, solid read.
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