The peacebuilding nongovernmental organization, Conciliation Resources, publishes an excellent series, named Accord. Each issue dissects an armed conflict. Paying the Price—the title of the 2000 issue focusing on Sierra Leone—provides a chronology of the war and presents verbatim (the multiple) peace agreements. It also includes a section with profiles of the key players in the conflict: politicians, warlords, and other protagonists. In We the Young Fighters, Marc Sommers makes a strong case for Bob Marley, John Rambo, and Tupac Shakur to be listed among the conflict’s key players.
Based on extensive interview material with ex-combatants and civilians in Sierra Leone and among Sierra Leonean refugee populations in neighboring countries and across well over a decade, Sommers unpacks the significant impact these three popular culture figures had on the 1991–2002 war in Sierra Leone and its often young and under-age fighters: Marley inspiring marginalized groups to “stand up for your right” from the 1970s and 80s onwards when Sierra Leone became an increasingly authoritarian state under the leadership of Siaka Stevens and into the decade of civil war; Tupac—arriving on the scene just after the start of the war—introducing his self-proclaimed “thug life” as a life style not to be ashamed of, arguing in his rap lyrics how the system was rigged against him, but never giving up his agency; and Rambo, the fictional Vietnam War veteran, waging a one-man war against hostile domestic state authorities, using nothing more than bush craft and his wits—all three act as a fascinating lens to understand the often puzzling conflict and extreme violence committed against innocent men, women, and children during the war in Sierra Leone.
The conflict in Sierra Leone has been the focus of numerous journal articles and monographs, with diverse understandings and interpretations, ranging from “greed” (read blood diamonds) to “grievances,” and from “neo-patrimonialism” to “neo-Malthusianism.” A key contribution of Sommers’s book is in showing how this conflict, like many other post-cold war new wars, is much more embedded in modern and globalized conceptual frameworks than some commentators would argue. Further contributions are in not just focusing on the various armed protagonists but also giving voice to their victims and reminding us about the horrendous atrocities that took place, and in understanding “youth” as young men as well as young women.
However, does it really need 400 pages to do this? At times it felt somewhat repetitive, and I could not fail to notice that I got a little bit tired about reading about Marley, Tupac, and Rambo again and again. With careful writing and editing the book could have easily been reduced to 250 or 300 pages without losing much of the arguments’ strengths. Of course, if one has collected so much data over such a long period as Sommers has, it becomes tempting to give as much of it a place in a book.
In a section called “an enduring debate” (78–84) Sommers scrutinizes and critiques interpretations and explanations of the Sierra Leonean conflict by various scholars, but his case for pop culture—exemplified by Rambo, Marley, and Tupac—as an explanatory framework remains somewhat unsatisfactory and limited, despite the numerous interview extracts. It made me look again at my own interview material with ex-combatants during and immediately after the war, conducted between 1996 and 2003. A simple word search for “Rambo, Tupac, and Marley” gave very few, if any, hits. This is not to criticize the validity of Sommers’s data—for sure it is because of my shortcomings as a researcher that I did not pick up on/ask about the relevance of these pop culture figures—but by zooming in on particular aspects there is always the risk of overstating their role.
Again, Sommers’s data is well triangulated, that is, both ex-combatants (from all factions) as well as civilians (including those that were captured and used as forced laborers or sex slaves) were interviewed. But we still need to be critical and dig deeper. For instance, Sommers, based on accounts by both fighters and civilians, points to the central role of drugs, and in particular marihuana—which in turn links with Marley—as an at least partial explanation for the atrocities committed. Apparently, drug use was rampant and nonstop, from morning to nighttime, with even food being laced with marihuana. But where did these drugs come from? The conflict was overwhelmingly a low-resource conflict, with weapons, ammunition, and food nearly always in short supply. After some initial rich pickings—a military depot or a hospital raided—scarcity rather than abundance dictated the conflict and the operations of the various warring parties. It may well be that all marihuana was grown locally, although that would require a significant level of coordination and control of farms and land for substantial periods of time. That is an example of a follow-up question worth asking when ex-fighters claim to have been constantly high on drugs, even if it is only to rule out the explanation that ex-fighters in postwar Sierra Leone exaggerated (forced) drug use as an excuse and explanation for the atrocities they committed.
