Betsy Small

Before Before

Why would Americans think that a West African country, such as Sierra Leone, most often known for its tragedies, has cultural, political, and spiritual lessons to offer?

One evening, in Tokpombu village, twelve-year-old Sahr Kondeh asked me, “Did America make that star?” He was pointing to a satellite passing overhead. Considering his intimate familiarity with the night sky, identifying a satellite was easy for him. We, the Peace Corps, were easy to spot too. We were tucked into the country’s remote villages with the intention of bringing the light of new information to farmers eager to engage with the world beyond.

But our good intentions were clouded by too many centuries of exploitation, among them: the tortures of enslavement, foreign occupation, and the betrayal by the nation’s leaders. 

1984: The year of George Orwell’s dystopian novel

I left for Sierra Leone in 1984, the year of the title of George Orwell's dystopian novel and the launch of the Apple Mac. We came to know the world then firsthand, through experience. Few could have imagined that connections among us would accelerate with such velocity and Orwellian risk. 

At 21, I had naively crafted a belief from the restless suburban terrain of my youth that I could push the boundaries and remedy the distortions that diminished our lives. But that was not to be. I quickly realized that the essence of this experience would be to overcome my personal limitations and learn to listen in new ways. 

I first came to know Tokpombu as a place where forty families, Christians and Muslims, lived together harmoniously. The Peace Corps had assigned me to help farmers in the country’s diamond district improve their rice yields with new technologies. Months after my arrival, I learned that the new farming methods disrupted reliable agricultural rhythms that had sustained this community for generations. 

On many evenings, with kerosene lamps flickering, I sat with the village elders. They expressed their dismay and frustration with the government’s corruption and its shady international business alliances, which did not just enable the extraction of the country's buried wealth, but also undermined trust between generations. 

Ma Sando, Sahr Kondeh’s mother, took me under her wing and helped me break through the shell of my culture, reminding me, "Sabi no get worry." Knowledge does not worry. She described how wisdom comes from the unbroken chain of living on the same land among the same people. “Our wealth is each other, not the diamond.”

1991: Violence erupts

In 1991, four years after I had left, violence erupted in Sierra Leone. The country plunged into civil chaos for the next eleven years, fueled by an insatiable global hunger for diamonds and a slow-to-respond and ill-informed international community. After the fall of the Soviet Union, illicit arms dealers swapped automatic weapons for gems, and some western manufacturers expressly retrofitted these same weapons for use by children. 

Rebel soldiers launched unimaginably brutal attacks on Tokpombu, which was unfortunately situated on the trade route between diamond miners and their buyers. These bandits dubbed their ambushes “Operation Go Pay Yourself” and “Operation No Living Thing.”

They decimated village life and destroyed the cultural and spiritual heritage of the people. Survivors of this manmade disaster abducted stargazing children: Daughters became weapons of war as “bush wives,” and sons morphed into drug-fueled killers. 

Living in Tokpombu before the “Blood Diamond War,” I had worked alongside families, sharing the joyful cadences of daily life and the anguish of grief over illnesses and often loss.

2013–Today: America is an idea that can fall from the sky, like a satellite

In 2013, just before the Ebola outbreak, I returned to Tokpombu to see my old friends. They showed me the charred remnants of my former home. They spoke of a collective truth: Forgiveness is the only way forward. “No bad bush no dey foh trow away bad pikin.” There is no bad forest to throw away a bad child. 

Over time, my friends’ resilience and strength have encouraged my sense of responsibility to promote healing and rebuilding in Sierra Leone. The historical connections between Sierra Leone and the United States are too strong to overlook. It is tragically ironic that the first lucrative industry in the Carolinas and Georgia relied on abducted and enslaved rice farmers from Sierra Leone, whose captors paid high premiums for their expertise.

Today, as the U.S. government seeks to extend its dominance and shift its alliances, it sows seeds of intolerance and indifference, which buries our essential past. The obvious root of Sierra Leone's state failure was greed over its extractive industry and a complicit international community. Its more insidious root was incoherence — a disconnect between the past and the present. 

In a world with more than 120 million forcibly displaced men, women, and children, many traditions and countless stories of “before,” will be forever lost. I am witness to this one.