In the Land of Magic Soldiers

by Daniel Bergner

My mother recommended this to me. Bergner tells the stories of several people, white and black, who love Sierra Leone and stayed with it through the horrors of the civil war. The Kortenhovens came to Foria from Grand Rapids as missionaries of the Christian Reformed Church. Neall came as a mercenary from South Africa ("He's a bit of a nutter," Captain Smith, the British spokesman said, . . . "But he single-handedly saved Freetown.") Lamin Jusu Jarka saw friends burned alive by RUF fighters, and C.O. Cut Hands chopped off Lamin's hands. Michael Josiah studied medicine at what was left of the national university, learned microbiology and physiology and wears a magic bullet-repelling belt from a Kamajor priest: his goal is to unite modern medicine with traditional magic and make Sierra Leone a center of healing for the world.

Race matters here. Many Sierra Leoneans wanted the British to recolonize them. But even the proud Lamin, eager to see the British gone and natives ruling themselves again answered "what made you fall in love with your wife?" with

"Well," he said, sounding almost surprised that I should need to ask, "you can see her color. She resembles as if she is a white woman. So I love her for that."

And yet race isn't really the issue. Bergner gets all the pieces together, but doesn't make the connection. On the one hand you have the discouraged British officers, whose initial enthusiasm eroded to almost racist defeatism ("They have the attention span of goldfish." "I'm not saying they're subhuman, but . . . "). On the other you have devotion to family, and the amazing way Joseph was able to rebuild a wreck into a school in three months.

The difference isn't racial, but cultural. To make Western machinery work you need a hierarchy of obedience. (To put down a prison uprising, the commander calls on a local officer to go get gas masks and other gear from storage. He goes off, finds a project more important to him, and never comes back.) You need a kind of abstract group-think, in which principles are more important than comfort.

The tribal attitudes are different, and in some ways more individualistic. The net of group obligations is different, more "personal." Magic and the spirits of things play a very large role as well. I am not expert enough to give a complete explanation, or to tell an accurate enough story; but if your life centers around placation of unknowable powers you won't ask a lot of questions or even assume you'll completely understand when faced with apparently unknowable powers centered in human beings: white men.

He spotted the 14.5 and 12.7 machine guns on trucks along the road. "Target visual," he told his crew. He rolled tight, banked hard, dived down, dozens of rebel soldiers running, scattering, looking from the air like "long swastikas," he thought, one arm and one leg bent and raised. He touched the black button. The gunship trembled, volcanic. Shrapnel dropped bodies without drama; the soldiers appeared simply to fall, as if tripped. "It's actually a bit of an anti-climax," Neall explained. He destroyed the trucks with their mounted guns. "It's not like the movies. When the rocket hits the vehicle there's no flash or cloud of smoke. Nothing shoots hundreds of feet into the air. I suppose if you hit the petrol tank it would be quite nice, but I've never had that privilege. You get a slight fire because there is some fuel around. And pieces start falling off the vehicle."

"If you can't take a joke," Neall muttered triumphantly in the cockpit, veering away from the rebel maimed, the rebel dead, "don't join the army."

And there's Komba:

Komba didn't show a great deal of remorse with me. He told me of a raid he and his boys had carried out for food-finding. There had been a man caring for a small child, and Komba had spared him, setting him free from the line of villagers who would be marched away at gunpoint, bearing looted goods to the West Side Boys' encampment. Later Komba and his crew had raided the same village. The man had launched himself at Komba, trying to wrestle away his gun. This Komba felt as a betrayal. When his boys finally pinned the man down, Komba told them not to shoot. "I operate on him with me ax," recalled the opening, the eating, as vindication.

. . . . (half the book later)

But now, if you needed your car fixed in the King Tom area of Freetown, you might easily have turned into a particular garage, and seen Komba leaning under a hood.

You couldn't have seen anything of his past. You wouldn't have seen anything out of the ordinary, only a young man, perhaps nineteen, among six or seven other apprentices, without tools, gazing longingly at engine parts, wishing they had the equipment and knowledge to fix them. The garage boss had little incentive to train them. . . . But the boss offered his teaching, and the chance to practice with his wrenches, at rare intervals. The education had the pace of a spiritual journey, led by a charlatan. Once each month, maybe, he imparted the workings of a single component. At this rate, Komba could declare himself a mechanic in about a decade. So far, he was sticking with it. More than a year had passed, and most days I went to look for him, he was there, waiting to learn.

Frustration, determination, and horror. This isn't a book for everybody.