...Africa in Cinema- Final Paper Professor Rice May 2010 Child Soldiers in Sierra Leone This semester, the topic of Child Soldiers presented a very interesting dilemma that several countries in Africa continue to face today. Sierra Leone, in particular, has struck an interest because of the many films and readings that try to depict this story of the civil war. In class, we have viewed two films representing the problems with child soldiers in Sierra Leone which include films titled Blood Diamond and Ezra. Both films represent opposite sides of the spectrum, as Blood Diamond shows the Western view of child soldiers and Ezra represents the first African view of child soldiers. Before discussing the two films, there are also two articles that depict the issues of child soldiers in great detail. In the first article by A. B. Zack-Williams titled, “Child Soldiers in the Civil War in Sierra Leone,” the author describes the reasons behind children even joining rebel based armies such as the RUF, why children are chosen as soldiers against their will, and the examination of policies that are yet to be instilled on this matter. The first valid point that the author makes is the purpose of the RUF (Revolutionary United Front). The focus of this organization is to seek a better life for the people in Sierra Leone. They feel as if their lives have been wasted because of poor housing, malnutrition and no opportunity to succeed and that the government is to blame. With that said...
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...Gender and Transitional Justice An Assessment of the Contribution of Transitional Justice Mechanisms in Addressing Gender-Based Violence in post-Conflict Sierra Leone Introduction Sierra Leone, a relatively small country with a population of just over 6 million people, has been the focus of considerable attention due to the recent Ebola epidemic and, prior to that, the decade-long civil war (1991-2002) (Mills, Nesbitt-Ahmed, Diggins & Mackieu, 2015, p. 4). After the war, the transition from civil war to peace witnessed a number of landmark procedural innovations with widespread implications for gender justice. The decade-long conflict had shattered the West African country, displacing more than one million people and leaving more than two hundred thousand women and girls dealing with the aftermath of sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV). Then, in 1999, the Lomé Peace Agreement traded amnesty for peace, making provision for the creation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Sierra Leone to work parallel to the Special Court of Sierra Leone (otherwise called the Special Court or the SCSL) in order to prosecute those who bore “the greatest responsibility” for mass atrocities committed during the civil war. While there is a growing consensus that truth and reconciliation commissions as a transitional justice mechanism can be effective tools “in the construction of a post-conflict society that is more democratic and more respectful of human rights” (Wielbelhans-Hrahm...
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...Africa and his service in the RAF, covers much of the buildup to World War II. In the book mention is made of the 20th century British Empire. The 20th century British Empire plays a large role in the memoir as Dahl says about that "Please do not forget in the 1930s the British empire was still very much the British empire, and the men and women who kept it going were a race of people that most of you will never encountered and now you never will."(1). In fact, the 20th century British Empire has a huge role because the British Empire were participants in World War II and is where Roald Dahl was born and raised. To begin with, the British empire was brought up in the book because it is originally where Roald Dahl was born and raised. He was born in Llandaff, Wales on September 13, 1916. "Born in Llandaff, Wales on 13th September 1916 to Norwegian parents Harald Dahl and Sofie Magdalene Hesselburg"("About Roald Dahl"). This evidence can prove that the British empire is where Dahl was born and raised. To conclude, Roald Dahl's birth in the British empire makes it very important to mention in his memoir....
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...Ishmael Beah All around the world, children have no choice but to fight in war in order to stay alive. Ishmael Beah, once one of these children, now acts for those who think they have no choice but to fight. Being the author of a book titled A Long Way Gone provides a platform that allows Beah to provide a better life for those in combat during their youth. This motivational memoir is about Beah’s time as a child soldier himself. Ishmael Beah has used his firsthand experiences of war and death to gain an education as well as a place in the world of advocates and entrepreneurs. Ishmael Beah had a pretty normal childhood. Well, about as normal as a childhood could be for one living in the midst of a civil war. Born November 23, 1980, Beah grew up in Sierra Leone. When he was 12 years old his country was...
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...A Long Way Gone In the book, “A Long Way Gone,” the main character Ishmael goes through some tough situations and how they deal with it. Ways that Ishmael went with Adversity is how he looks at someone else as a different person, how he comes to having himself with a shelter in different situations.Ishmael overcomes things without them letting it pull him down. One way that Ishmael deals with adversity is how he comes together to make himself a shelter. He has nothing else he can do when he’s walking around, traveling by himself. He said, “That was when i finally came to accept that i was lost and it was going to take a while to get out of where I was.” While other people may be struggling he finds his ways in these woods that he can make himself a better shelter, knowing that he is going to be staying there for awhile. “I decided to make my new home a little bit more comfortable by adding leaves to the weaved branches to make them less hard to sleep on.” Ishmael said. He finds different ways to make his position better than it could be so that he doesn’t have to deal with the worst that other people could be dealing with.(Beah, 50) Another way that Ishmael deals with things in a different way than others is towards the end of the book Ishmael needed to get things off of his mind. Ishmael had no way that he could, he knew nobody around where he was except his close friends that Ishmael didn’t want to talk to. Ester said to Ishmael, “Think of me as your family, your sister...
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...This book, A Long Way Gone, tells a biography of Ishmael Beah. Ishmael Beah starts out as an innocent boy who is fascinated with rapping with his friends. When he is 12 years old, his village is attacked by rebels while he is performing in a rap group at school. Among the confusion, violence and the air of uncertainty of the war, Ishmael and his brother, Junior, and his friends wander from villages to villages in a desperate search of food and sanctuary. Their daily struggle for survival causes them to commit acts that they have never believed themselves capable of, such as stealing food from the younger children. Eventually, Ishmael is conscripted as a solider by the army and he becomes a killing machine who enjoys horrible violence. The...
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...Guns give people immense power, the sort of power you wouldn’t want anyone to be able to possess; the power to hurt, destroy, and manipulate those around them. The book A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah, follows the story of young Ishmael Beah during the war in Sierra Leone. It tells step by step the events that led up to Beah being captured and forced to fight in a war at the mere age of thirteen. Those with the most power in this war were the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), they attack villages looking for people to force to fight alongside them but if you were to refuse or if they thought you were not good enough, they would kill you. “The rebels fired their guns toward the sky, as they shouted and merrily danced their way into...
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...like light skin, blue eyes, and blond hair. Asians also have genes selected for light skin, but they are different from the European ones. Europeans and Asians are both bleached Africans, but the way they got bleached is different in the two areas,"(Roach, 2007). Researchers have found that in fact, 7% of human genes are undergoing rapid evolutionary changes very recently(Roach, 2007). Which also supports Charles Darwin's theory that evolution happens faster in greater and larger populations. Some examples of genetic evolutions that have occurred include genes that suppress body odor and dry ear wax that are spreading rapidly in Asia, and in Africa a speed-up is found in genes that give them a tolerance towards malaria, and as well as research that shows that as shortly as 8000 years ago is when europeans developed “lactose tolerance” which allows grown adults to consume milk (Roach, 2007). In retrospect, Ishmael shows how today’s society is leading itself to its inevitable downfall, but the small minority of the population could be the salvation of mankind. Although Ishmaels opinion of how evolution has come to a halt is mostly false, His theories portrayed in this novel exceeded my expectations for the story development. ...
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...The book that my group has chosen to read is A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah, which portrays Beah’s experience of being a child soldier and being present in the middle of a civil war. I feel that the first third of the book is mainly Beah trying to set the bedrock for what is to come, which I liked very much as it gave me the chance to connect to the emotions displayed by Beah. His initial character reminds of a child forced to grow mature beyond his own age due to circumstances. It is almost like we can watch him develop which is quite similar to Elie Wiesel in Night as we also watch him mature through his experience in the concentration camp, that altogether enhances the story. Their vehement emotions, which begun...
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...The term child soldier refers to the group of children in Sierra Leone who were forced to fight in Sierra Leone’s civil war. Shepler (2005) says that “murder, rape, and looting, amputations by machete were carried out by youth recruited for just such acts” (p. 197). Since the end of the civil war, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have been stepping in to reintegrate the former child soldiers into Sierra Leonean society. These NGOs work to detraumatize and help the children become part of the society again, and help the society learn to accept the former child soldiers despite the horrors that have been committed against the community. NGOs like to use a technique called “sensitization” to achieve these goals (Shepler, 2005, pp. 200-201). In implementing this technique, NGOs focused on teaching the Sierra Leonean people what child rights were and what they meant. An As an example that Shepler (2005) gives to illustrates how child rights were used and the way the NGOs sensitization techniques were implicated and used is as the community built the school (p. 201). In one village, the community as a whole used their funds to build a school for the children of that village. It was then used to educate not only the children of the village, but former child soldiers who were brought there by NGOs in order to reintegrate them into the community and to help them exercise their child rights, one of which being the right to education. The community did not like this,...
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...challenges prevent Ishmael from reaching safety and living a normal life back in Sierra Leone. Most of the time, the main character is facing challenges that are caused by other people. These people, like Ishmael, are trying to get away from the war that has caused chaos in the country. Children and teens around his age were most likely to be thrown into the war to fight either on the Sierra Leonean government’s side or the rebels, the Revolutionary United Front. The people that saw Ishmael and his friends, they tried to kill them because they could have been rebels. All of the problems he faces prevent Ishmael and his friends from getting somewhere safe. First, we see Ishmael running away from his home in Sierra Leone. Once a peaceful village full of music and laughter , then was brutally attacked by the...
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...upside-down, in the shock of the first few months’ experience with the civil war, he was not yet ready to change with the mercurial situations he finds himself in. The civilization he once knew as “home” was being rendered by attacking rebels, the land was unrecognizable by complete and utter violence. Former priorities were set aside in favor of mere survival. This specific quote captivates and sheds light on the multifaceted damage done by civil war and terrorism. As a victim of the violence, he was a young man who had lost his family and his way of life and was in turn considered dangerous by most civilians he encountered. Beah suffered from more than just simple physical pain. The anguish of losing his family and friends was compounded by the uncertainty each day brought. Beah explains, “One of the unsettling things about my journey, mentally, physically, and emotionally, was that I wasn’t sure when or where it was going to end. I didn’t know what I...
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...Hundreds of thousand of children have been forced to become child soldiers. A Long Way Gone and Lord of the Flies both share an essence of innocence that they are forced to let go of. A Long Way Gone portrait Ishmael Beah’s young life in Africa as a child soldier. Ishmael, while away from his village he learns it had been attacked by rebels and cannot return home. When the rebels arrive at the village Ismael has been staying in, he and manages to evade the rebels but must be nomadic. However, when he seems to find peace in a military occupied village, the rebels arrive and Ismael joins the fight to protect himself, becoming a child soldier. After a couple more battles UNICEF comes to take the boys to Freetown in order to be rehabilitated and educated. Esther serves as a role model for Ismael until he finds his uncle who lives in Freetown. When Ishmael's Uncle dies he is brought in by Laura whom he met in New York while presenting for the UN. Lord of the Flies begins with Ralph meeting Piggy and attempting to establish order after crash landing on a Island with no adults. Hardly able to establish order, an older boy Jack and his choir arrive. The choir and Jack are entrusted the role of hunters. After several failed hunts Ralph and Simon tend to a fire in order to get the attention of passing ships. In the middle of the night a battle breaks out over head the leads to a plane being shot down. The pilot ejects, however the pilot was already dead. His parachute leaves an eerie shadow...
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...Don’t Call Me Ishmael In the novel Don’t Call Me Ishmael by Michael Gerard Bauer, one of the characters, James Scobie is represented as an intelligent and quirky, fearless and confident student. But as we read on we find out that there is a secret that stops Scobie from feeling fear and it comes back later in the story as a repercussion which results in Ishmael and the rest of the debating team having to improvise. Scobie is an intelligent but unusual sort of character as he is extremely smart but has an unusual habit of screwing up his face and doing abnormal things involving his face. From the moment he arrives at St Daniels he is described in hurtful and unflattering words. The face that Barry Bagsley made when he saw Scobie walk into the class was “like a kid that had just been given a Christmas present” (p57). Bauer uses metaphors such as “with his face writhing and his tongue popping in and out like a moray eel” (p59). The use of metaphors such as these give the reader an image of Scobie and how and what he is doing with his face. Scobie shows us his intelligence at the first debate when he is up for 3rd speaker and wows the crowd with an astonishing speech that wins the debating team their first debating win. “By the time he had finished there was no need for an adjudicator’s decision” (p142). “When Scobie spoke it was like a person turning on a bright light in a dark room” (p142). James Scobie doesn’t seem like the confident type of kid that would stand up in front of...
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...where he was forced to be a child soldier, marching through enemy territory, gunfire, rain and even overcame the death of his family. Though it is something I would never wish upon anyone, the violence that Ishmael went through in a way helped shape him into the person he is today. The violence that he endured not only left him with long lasting damage, affecting him with emotionally and physically, but also the community and the people around him. Throughout the story, he describes in detail about the scars that war and violence left behind. The story starts of telling about his background, telling us that when he was 12 years old, he was forced into being a child soldier. He tell that the reason they, the people turning children into soldier, use young children is because at their age they are easily able to be brainwashed. As a child soldier, Ishmael was taught to have hatred towards the rebels, the people who they were fighting against, and that in order to win the war, he would have to kill them all. And throughout his journey, as a child soldier, Ishmael saw the death of as many as a thousand and to him the sad part was that a portion of that thousand was because of him. In the book he says that, “Whenever I look at the rebels during raids, I got angrier, because they looked like the the rebels who played cards in the ruins of the village where my parents were I had lost my family. So when the lieutenant gave orders, I shot as many as I could, but I didn’t feel any better”...
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