Here Sierra Leone seems to defeat all who touch it. A missionary couple spends 20 perilous years in the bush, only to end up without real friends. British specialists assigned to remake the nation’s military and police confess their disillusionment. “There’s no way to train these people in six months or three years or five,” one says. A South African mercenary tells how he’s hooked on combat, and touts the “social life”–a beautiful local wife and a girlfriend, plus another wife back home. A leading human-rights figure calls the country a “moral garbage dump.” Traumatized former child soldiers revert to infantilism. Adults swear by sorcery. The author, caught in “the inexorable clutch of a nightmare,” also questions whether his own fascination is racist. It would make more sense to flee and forget the place, he suggests. But that’s not an option. Sierra Leone may be out of the news, but that makes its story all the more important.
