This is how wars are fought now: by children, hopped-up on drugs and wielding AK-47s. Children have become soldiers of choice. In the more than fifty conflicts going on worldwide, it is estimated that there are some 300,000 child soldiers. Ishmael Beah used to be one of them. What is war like through the eyes of a child soldier? How does one become a killer? How does one stop? Child soldiers have been profiled by journalists, and novelists have struggled to imagine their lives. But until now, there has not been a first-person account from someone who came through this hell and survived.In A Long Way Gone, Beah, now twenty-five years old, tells a riveting story: how at the age of twelve, he fled attacking rebels and wandered a land rendered unrecognizable by violence. By thirteen, he'd been picked up by the government army, and Beah, at heart a gentle boy, found that he was capable of truly terrible acts.   This is a rare and mesmerizing account, told with real literary force and heartbreaking honesty."My new friends have begun to suspect I haven't told them the full story of my life. 'Why did you leave Sierra Leone?' 'Because there is a war.' 'You mean, you saw people running around with guns and shooting each other?' 'Yes, all the time.' 'Cool.' I smile a little. 'You should tell us about it sometime.' 'Yes, sometime.'"

First discovered in 1930, the diamonds of Sierra Leone have funded one of the most savage rebel campaigns in modern history. These "blood diamonds" are smuggled out of West Africa and sold to legitimate diamond merchants in London, Antwerp, and New York, often with the complicity of the international diamond industry. Eventually, these very diamonds find their way into the rings and necklaces of brides and spouses the world over. Blood Diamonds is the gripping tale of how the diamond smuggling works, how the rebel war has effectively destroyed Sierra Leone and its people, and how the policies of the diamond industry - institutionalized in the 1880s by the De Beers cartel - have allowed it to happen. Award-winning journalist Greg Campbell traces the deadly trail of these diamonds, many of which are brought to the world market by fanatical enemies. These repercussions of diamond smuggling are felt far beyond the borders of the poor and war-ridden country of Sierra Leone, and the consequences of overlooking this African tragedy are both shockingly deadly and unquestionably global. Updated with a new epilogue.

Even by SAS standards this is the story of an outstanding warrior.On the point of being demobbed from the SAS, Fred Marafono was recruited by David Stirling for his private security company. After Stirling's death, Fred found himself in the midst of Sierra Leone's Blood Diamond wars, and formed an unbreakable bonding with the country's champion of democracy, Chief Hinga Norman, whose leadership and tragic death are integral to the story.Fred was recruited by Simon Mann for the finest of all private military companies in Africa, Executive Outcomes. Fewer than two hundred of them defeated the rebels in their strongholds. Through political weakness, Executive Outcomes were made to leave the country, and chaos ensued. Committed men like Hinga Norman and British High Commissioner Peter Penfold saw that in the absence of military commitment from the west, only high caliber mercenaries would win the fight to restore democracy: three of them kept a vital air bridge open - 'What God abandoned, these defended'. Fred's final action was supporting the SAS in their brilliant hostage release, 'Operation Barras.'Peter Penfold sums it all up in the book's foreword, writing of the, 'confidence, trust and admiration I have for this remarkable man.'

Brutally honest and devoid of hyperbole, this is Roelf van Heerden's Executive Outcomes. / Unapologetic, unassuming and forthright, the combat exploits of Executive Outcomes (EO) in Angola and Sierra Leone are recounted for the first time by a battlefield commander who was physically on the ground during all their major combat operations. From fighting UNITA for the critical oil installations and diamond fields of Angola to the offensive against the RUF in Sierra Leone to capture the Kono diamond fields and the palace coup which ousted Captain Valentine Strasser, van Heerden was at the forefront. He tells of the tragedy of child soldiers, illegal diamond mining and the curse of government soldiers who turn on their own people; he tells of RUF atrocities, the harrowing attempt to rescue a downed EO pilot and the poignant efforts to recover the remains of EO soldiers killed in action. Coupled with van Heerden's gripping expose', hitherto unpublished photographs, order of battle charts and battle maps offer unprecedented access to the major actions as they took place on the ground during the heydays of EO.

In The War Machines, Danny Hoffman considers how young men are made available for violent labor both on the battlefields and in the diamond mines, rubber plantations, and other unregulated industries of West Africa. Based on his ethnographic research with militia groups in Sierra Leone and Liberia during those countries’ recent civil wars, Hoffman traces the path of young fighters who moved from grassroots community-defense organizations in Sierra Leone during the mid-1990s into a large pool of mercenary labor.Hoffman argues that in contemporary West Africa, space, sociality, and life itself are organized around making young men available for all manner of dangerous work. Drawing on his ethnographic research over the past nine years, as well as the anthropology of violence, interdisciplinary security studies, and contemporary critical theory, he maintains that the mobilization of West African men exemplifies a global trend in the outsourcing of warfare and security operations. A similar dynamic underlies the political economy of violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, and a growing number of postcolonial spaces. An experienced photojournalist, Hoffman integrates more than fifty of his photographs of young West Africans into The War Machines.

Compared with Kosovo and Iraq, the recent Western intervention in Sierra Leone has been largely forgotten. When the State Fails rectifies this, providing a comprehensive and critical analysis of the intervention. The civil war in Sierra Leone began in 1991 and was declared officially over in 2002 after UK, UN, and regional African military intervention. Some claimed it as a case of successful humanitarian intervention. The authors in this collection provide an informed analysis of the impact of the intervention on democracy, development, and society in Sierra Leone. The authors take a particularly critical view of the imposition of neo-liberalism after the conflict. As NATO intervention in Libya shows the continued use of external force in internal conflicts, When the State Fails is a timely book for all students and scholars interested in Africa and the question of "humanitarian intervention."

The Krio of Sierra Leone—often erroneously called ‘Creole’—are a people with a unique tradition and history. Their ancestors, the first colonists of the Peninsula on which Freetown stands, were black people brought to Africa from London, Nova Scotia and Jamaica, and ‘Liberated Africans’ freed from slave ships intercepted on their way to the Americas. Never a large group, the Krio people were at first favored subjects of the colonial rulers, and received the full force of the evangelistic and educational outreach of the English-based missionary societies. Soon they had produced an elite echelon of professionals, academics, clergymen and business entrepreneurs very much in the white man’s image. The middle and late nineteenth century was their heyday.     Wyse has set out to interpret the history of the Krio from their earliest days as a collective entity to the present, to chart the graph of their rise and decline as a political force, and to examine the characteristic ethos of the people as expressed in their social, economic and above all educational aspirations, and in the careers of leading political and intellectual figures. The important role of the humbler Krio traders and market women in financing the education of their offspring in each generation is stressed, and the author meets the often-voiced criticism of the Krio head-on by frankly examining the weaknesses of his people, along with their strengths.

An intimate and moving portrait of a family combined with an account of the events which swept through Africa in the post-independence period. Aminatta Forna's intensely personal history is a passionate and vivid account of an African childhood -- of an idyll that became a nightmare. As a child she witnessed the upheavals of post-colonial Africa, the bitterness of exile in Britain and the terrible consequences of her dissident father's stand against tyranny. Mohamed Forna, a man of unimpeachable integrity and great charisma, was a new star in the political firmament Sierra Leone as the country faced its future as a fledgling democracy. Always a political firebrand, he was one of the first black students to come to Britain after the war. In Aberdeen he stole the heart of Aminatta's mother, to the dismay of her Presbyterian parents, and returned with her to Sierra Leone. But the new ways of Western parliamentary democracy were tearing old Africa apart, giving rise only to dictatorships and corruption of hitherto undreamed-of magnitude. It was not long before Aminatta's father languished in jail as a prisoner of conscience, and there was worse to come. Aminatta's search for the truth that shaped both her childhood and the nation's destiny begins among the country's elite and takes her into the heart of rebel territory. Determined to break the silence surrounding her father's fate, she ultimately uncovered a conspiracy that penetrated the highest reaches of government and forced the nation's politicians and judiciary to confront their guilt.

As a child Aminatta Forna witnessed the upheavals of postcolonial Africa, danger, flight, the bitterness of exile in Britain, and the terrible consequences of her dissident father's stand against tyranny. Mohamed Forna was a man of unimpeachable integrity and enchanting charisma. As Sierra Leone faced its future as a fledgling democracy, he was a new star in the political firmament, a man who had been one of the first black students to come to Britain after the war. He stole the heart of Aminatta's mother and returned with her to Sierra Leone. But as Aminatta Forna shows with compelling clarity, the old Africa was torn apart by new ways of Western parliamentary democracy, which gave birth only to dictatorships and corruption of hitherto undreamed-of magnitude. It was not long before Mohamed languished in jail as a prisoner of conscience, and worse was to follow. Aminatta's search for the truth that shaped both her childhood and the nation's destiny began among the country's elite and took her into the heart of rebel territory. The Devil that Danced on the Water is a book of pain and anger and sorrow, written with tremendous dignity and beautiful precision.

The inspirational story of John Kizell celebrates the life of a West African enslaved as a boy and brought to South Carolina on the eve of the American Revolution. Fleeing his owner, Kizell served with the British military in the Revolutionary War, began a family in the Nova Scotian wilderness, then returned to his homeland to help found a settlement for freed slaves in Sierra Leone. He spent decades battling European and African slave traders along the coast and urging his people to stop selling their own into foreign bondage. This in-depth biography--based in part on Kizell's own writings--illuminates the links between South Carolina and West Africa during the Atlantic slave trade's peak decades. Seized in an attack on his uncle's village, Kizell was thrown into the brutal world of chattel slavery at age thirteen and transported to Charleston, South Carolina. When Charleston fell to the British in 1780, Kizell joined them and was with the Loyalist force defeated in the pivotal battle of Kings Mountain. At the war's end, he was evacuated with other American Loyalists to Nova Scotia. In 1792 he joined a pilgrimage of nearly twelve hundred former slaves to the new British settlement for free blacks in Sierra Leone. Perhaps the most prominent African in the antislavery movement of his time, Kizell believed that all people of African descent in America would return to Africa, as he had, if given a way. Back in his native land, he bravely confronted the forces that had led to his enslavement. Late in life he played a controversial role--freshly interpreted in this book--in the settlement of American blacks in what became Liberia. Kizell's remarkable story provides insight to the cultural and spiritual milieu from which West Africans were wrenched before being forced into slavery. Lowther sheds light on African complicity in the slave trade and examines how it may have contributed to Sierra Leone's latter-day struggles as an independent state. A foreword by Joseph Opala, a noted researcher on the "Gullah Connection" between Sierra Leone and coastal South Carolina and Georgia, highlights Kizell's continuing legacy on both sides of the Atlantic.