Before Before
A Story of Discovery and Loss in Sierra Leone
Sierra Leone has often been sensationalized as a place of extreme violence and suffering — child soldiers, Ebola, environmental catastrophes, and alarmingly high maternal and infant mortality rates. Before Before: A Story of Discovery and Loss in Sierra Leone captures daily life in a different country, one that author Betsy Small first encountered as a Peace Corps agriculture volunteer in the country’s diamond district between 1984 and 1987 and then reconnected with decades later.
Living in Tokpombu, a remote rainforest community of forty rice-farming families, Betsy faced struggles that changed her forever as she witnessed growing tensions between the young and the old, the timeless traditions valued by the elders, and the allure of the diamond mines to the younger generation.
Before Before offers a unique portrait of everyday lives, with a particular emphasis on women and girls before the brutal conflict of 1991 tore the country apart. Betsy invites reflection on the complicated landscape in this sometimes overlooked West African nation.
The story of Before Before spans three decades. Readers learn that the hunger to forge connection persists — a powerful antidote to indifference, intolerance, and even violence.
Before Before is part of the Law, Meaning, and Violence Series, books that explore the way meanings are constructed in law's narratives, that measures the connections among those narratives and institutions and practices of law, and that explore the ways those narratives, practices, and institutions embody and give voice to power and violence. While this series is interested in books that take existing definitions of law seriously and explore them vigorously, these works expand and transcend existing definitions by either putting state law in context, by exploring new possibilities for world-creating normative orders, or by examining the lawlike elements of social practices. Series Editors: Martha Minow, Harvard Law School; Austin Sarat, Amherst College
Reviews
“When JFK established the Peace Corps he had modest expectations of fostering mutual understanding between Americans and people of other nations and cultures. He underestimated the impact it was to have on those of us who served. Betsy Small’s masterpiece tells that story. In a small village in Sierra Leone, she finds her resilience, empathy, understanding and grit. In the Krio and Kono languages Learn and Teach are interchangeable—a fitting metaphor for this extraordinary book.”
“Betsy Small’s beautiful writing transforms you straight to the sights, sounds and smells of Tokpombu, and immediately brought me back to my years in the Peace Corps in the Dominican Republic. Before Before is a vivid account of what we all learn intimately as volunteers: we set out to share and teach but return as the ones truly taught.”
“In Sierra Leone, we have many sayings—Wan an bangul noh bah shake (It takes many bracelets on a wrist to make a beautiful sound) is an example. The stories and memories invoked in Before Before are illustrative of this core belief—that it takes many voices to tell a story. These chapters not only tell stories of Sierra Leone from a whole new perspective, but they weave an intersection between what people want to hear and what they may not yet understand.”
“Before Before tells about a village twelve miles away from where I taught Secondary School. The people in her stories are my people and her stories and photographs are living proof of what life used to be and gives a reference point for the current generation whose history is missing. It means the world to the people of this village and me that Betsy did not forget.”
“Riveting, revealing, and brimming with stopping beauty and cruelty, Before Before is not just a great book, but an essential one for these times. It’s a model of compassion and of humility, and of brilliant story-telling that both honors and chastens humanity.”
“This is a story that can unify us as human beings —what we need now in our conversations about immigration, divisions of race and religion and gender around the world. If you care about America’s conversations in the world, and your Constitution, America’s ‘before’ story, please read this book.”
“Before Before: A Story of Discovery and Loss in Sierra Leone offers a rich and compelling ethnographic account of life in a Kono village in eastern Sierra Leone in the 1980s before the onset of the Sierra Leone civil war in 1991. It represents one of the best recollections of life in pre-war Sierra Leone and it should be preserved to help future generations appreciate what life was like in Sierra Leone before the war.”
“Written with elegant and vivid prose, Betsy Small’s timely and important memoir, Before, Before: A Story of Discovery and Loss in Sierra Leone transports us to the farming village in West Africa in 1984, where she landed as a newly-minted Peace Corps Agriculture Volunteer only a few years before the country and its people would be unimaginably scarred by civil conflict and disease. The extraordinary depths of research, self-reflection, and care that Small plumbed to bring this story to the page of not only the community she encountered then, but also the unbreakable connections that remain 40 years later, despite all that has changed, are what make this book immeasurably compelling. A must-read for all who seek to understand how our shared humanity is stronger than the forces that strive to tear us apart. ”