But while I was in Sierra Leone, I was interested in what some of my colleagues might think about it. Always eager to learn more, Sheik borrowed the book first and decried it with his typical passion as a fraud. Interestingly, the first reason he gave for not believing Beah's account was that the book was "too well written" to have been penned by a child soldier.
After Sheik, I lent the book to Muctaru Wurie, the man behind Kalleone's above-average web presence. I didn't actually do any work for JHR with Muctar; unlike many of the Kalleone journalists, he was older than me and was more focused on developing his web skills and his work for one of the telecommunications companies. But we spoke frequently on many topics, and it didn't take long to understand that he was a highly intelligent man and a very competent journalist.
When Muctar did exercise his journalistic chops, it was not for Kalleone, but writing for a very good quarterly magazine called Sierra Eye. In fact, as one of the main contributors to the magazine, he asked me to do a critical evaluation of their eighth overall issue.
I obliged, and sent him an email the day before I left on my Liberia-Guinea adventure, going through the publication in all aspects, including minutiae such as font and photo cropping choices. The mere fact I bothered talking about those things was a testament to its overall quality, as they would have fallen by the wayside in a critical evaluation of most Salone publications, where basics like 'having sources' and 'not fabricating quotes' were slightly more significant areas for improvement.
Needless to say, upon my return to Freetown after my two-and-a-half week trip, I was a tad surprised to have my email, which I had assumed would be shared only with the magazine's top brass, published as the featured letter to the editor in Sierra Eye's ninth edition.
Anyway, after Muctar's first reading of Beah's book, he shared Sheik's strong distaste for it, and asked if he could hold onto it a little longer, as he wanted to write an article about the book for the next issue of Sierra Eye. I agreed, and, in the end, the book remained behind in Sierra Leone, as the piece was not yet finished when it came time for me to come home.
But Muctar did pour a great deal of work into a fine investigation of the controversy surrounding A Long Way Gone and the merits of the book itself, ultimately publishing an in-depth piece entitled "A Long Way From The Truth". American blogger-journalist Janice Harayda called his piece "the first comprehensive investigation by a Sierra Leonean journalist" on the Beah story.
Much like the initial critique of Beah's story in The Australian, Muctar questions Beah's grasp of timelines. Through interviews with authoritative sources, such as those involved with the Truth and Reconciliation Committee, he finds that the SL army was not found to recruit child soldiers until 1997 and the mass flight of Sierra Leoneans from Mattru Jong due to rebel attacks didn't occur until 1995.
This calls into question Beah's assertion that he was recruited in 1993 during such an attack there, and leads Sheik to theorize that he was actually recruited by the Revolutionary United Front (RUF).
Other discrepancies include Beah's claim that he saw a dead child wearing a Tupac Shakur All Eyez on Me t-shirt before the album was even released, and his claim that Le 300 constituted "two months' salary". The latter in particular is blatantly incorrect to anyone who has been to Sierra Leone; that is less than half of a single fare for the poda podas, Freetown's cheapest mode of transport.
Another seemingly obvious slip-up concerns the speaker who announced the rebel coup:
It was the crooked and disjointed blend of Krio and English voice of the late Corporal Tamba Gborie, a junior army recruit, that announced the coup in the early hours of Sunday 25th May but Ishmael stated in his book that it was Johnny Paul Koroma who came on air to announce that Tejan Kabbah had been overthrown.
... Clearly, everyone who was here at that time knew that what was described as the most embarrassing coup broadcast of all time was delivered by the late Corporal Gborie, who was later convicted of treason and shot by firing squad.
These fairly obvious inaccuracies do make me question the publishers of Beah's memoir (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux) a little more and I certainly sympathize for the anger of both Sheik and Muctar about these errors being broadcast to arguably the widest international audience to ever read about their country.
But, barring the details of Beah's horrific experience being completely fabricated, I still have trouble judging him too harshly, just as I did a year ago. After all, as Muctar himself writes, the general details of his story align with the tragic realities of Salone's war, and they're realities I can't even fathom living through.
When someone with a true sense of the was in Sierra Leone look[s] at A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, the story of Ishmael's experience as a child combatant is neither strange nor too horrible in the context of what happened during the war.
There are stories wors[e] than his (see the Truth and Reconciliation Committee (TRC) Report at www.trcsierraleone.org). Truth is, kids who fought with the RUF have a more barbaric story to tell. From the way his war experience was told, it could have come from a genuine child combatant.
Editor's Note: I just came across this statement issued in January 2008 by Beah regarding The Australian's claims against him. Clearly, Muctar's piece shows there were a few errors, but I'm inclined to believe they were not malicious. (Updated on Wednesday, November 25, 2009)
