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Tue 30 May, 2006 07:02 am
I am asking because (along with a number of similarly afflicted countries) we are bringing to Oz a lot of refugees from that country, and my work is bringing me into contact with them.
These are young people who have experienced quite unspeakable trauma.......kidnapping of young girls on a massive scale by various armies, with gang rape, torture of other kinds, and long term and ongoing abuse by soldiers for years......sometimes the girls were also forced to become soldiers, and commit atrocities themselves, to bind them to the troops....or assist in kidnapping other children in hopes of protecting themselves. Many bore children as a result of these offences.
Life hasn't been great for boys, either....many also kidnapped and forced to become child soldiers, also forced to commit atrocities themselves...
Children routinely witnessed their parents and other close adults massacred.
This is the country that became famous for having lots of people's hands cut off, and other torture performed.
With so many fellas killed in the fighting, there are lots of widows...and widowhood is apparently a shameful state. Women experience much economic and legal inequality.
The fighting has stopped, but people are scattered all over, and rape being considered shameful and the girl, of course, to blame, many girls are too ashamed to seek out their families, if they still exist. Ex boy soldiers do not feel too happy about what happened to them, either.
Anyhoo, that is part of the story of these young refugees....there's more, but you prolly have heard enough.
So...needless to say some of these young people are having a wee bit of trouble knowing how to be good mummies and daddies, and such.
I will gradually be finding out about the culture from community members, but so far what I have been able to find on the web is all about trauma, and I am finding it hard to find about what the culture is like in ordinary times....I do not just want to know about what things are like in a poor country like this when things go mad, I would love to know about the culture's strengths and ordinary stuff.
Anyone know about the place? Or know of good sites to find out?
Pretty please?
http://sierra-leone.org/links.html
You might find something in these links.
Do you use scirus . com for research?
Thanks Blacksmithn, but I had already found those. I didbn't see much about culture in there.......did you, did I miss something?
Yep, I had found that one, Ul.
What is scirus . com? I will go have a look after work.
well I know enough to not want to know more, unfortunately this kind of occurrence is rather popular in africa. Living in South Afirica we get so many of the refuguues from all over it's terriying to hear the stories where ever they from sad thing is nothing changes nothing stops.
If you google sierra leone culture, you'll get 11,500 hits or so. Some of them look pretty interesting. I'd post some, but I'm outta here in 30 seconds.
blacksmithn wrote:If you google sierra leone culture, you'll get 11,500 hits or so. Some of them look pretty interesting. I'd post some, but I'm outta here in 30 seconds.
No worries, I will do that.
I was just hoping someone here knew first hand.
tagged_lyricist wrote:well I know enough to not want to know more, unfortunately this kind of occurrence is rather popular in africa. Living in South Afirica we get so many of the refuguues from all over it's terriying to hear the stories where ever they from sad thing is nothing changes nothing stops.
Have you worked with the refugees, TL?
The Atlantic Monthly has published a number of stories, some of which provide "used to be" background.
http://www.theatlantic.com/srch/?words=Sierra+Leone
Bless you Noddy! And here is me a subscriber.
Dlowan--
There may be nothing in those stories but hints of a past, pastoral golden age, but somehow I know that the young men went out with the herds and the young women learned to fetch wood and carrywater and grind incredible amounts of grain.
i'll try to get Mr. B, aka bbaptiste (send him a pm?) onto here. He's from Liberia and knows a thing or two...
dagmaraka wrote:i'll try to get Mr. B, aka bbaptiste (send him a pm?) onto here. He's from Liberia and knows a thing or two...
Ah, Liberia is next door, and has its own horrors I believe. (We have a lot of refugees from there, too.)
That would be great!
Whoa, the Atlantic article IS interesting, here is an excerpt and a link:
THE COMING ANARCHY
by Robert D. Kaplan
February 1994
The Minister's eyes were like egg yolks, an aftereffect of some of the many illnesses, malaria especially, endemic in his country. There was also an irrefutable sadness in his eyes. He spoke in a slow and creaking voice, the voice of hope about to expire. Flame trees, coconut palms, and a ballpoint-blue Atlantic composed the background. None of it seemed beautiful, though. "In forty-five years I have never seen things so bad. We did not manage ourselves well after the British departed. But what we have now is something worse?-the revenge of the poor, of the social failures, of the people least able to bring up children in a modern society." Then he referred to the recent coup in the West African country Sierra Leone. "The boys who took power in Sierra Leone come from houses like this." The Minister jabbed his finger at a corrugated metal shack teeming with children. "In three months these boys confiscated all the official Mercedes, Volvos, and BMWs and willfully wrecked them on the road." The Minister mentioned one of the coup's leaders, Solomon Anthony Joseph Musa, who shot the people who had paid for his schooling, "in order to erase the humiliation and mitigate the power his middle-class sponsors held over him."
Tyranny is nothing new in Sierra Leone or in the rest of West Africa. But it is now part and parcel of an increasing lawlessness that is far more significant than any coup, rebel incursion, or episodic experiment in democracy. Crime was what my friend?-a top-ranking African official whose life would be threatened were I to identify him more precisely?-really wanted to talk about. Crime is what makes West Africa a natural point of departure for my report on what the political character of our planet is likely to be in the twenty-first century.
The cities of West Africa at night are some of the unsafest places in the world. Streets are unlit; the police often lack gasoline for their vehicles; armed burglars, carjackers, and muggers proliferate. "The government in Sierra Leone has no writ after dark," says a foreign resident, shrugging. When I was in the capital, Freetown, last September, eight men armed with AK-47s broke into the house of an American man. They tied him up and stole everything of value. Forget Miami: direct flights between the United States and the Murtala Muhammed Airport, in neighboring Nigeria's largest city, Lagos, have been suspended by order of the U.S. Secretary of Transportation because of ineffective security at the terminal and its environs. A State Department report cited the airport for "extortion by law-enforcement and immigration officials." This is one of the few times that the U.S. government has embargoed a foreign airport for reasons that are linked purely to crime. In Abidjan, effectively the capital of the Cote d'Ivoire, or Ivory Coast, restaurants have stick- and gun-wielding guards who walk you the fifteen feet or so between your car and the entrance, giving you an eerie taste of what American cities might be like in the future. An Italian ambassador was killed by gunfire when robbers invaded an Abidjan restaurant. The family of the Nigerian ambassador was tied up and robbed at gunpoint in the ambassador's residence. After university students in the Ivory Coast caught bandits who had been plaguing their dorms, they executed them by hanging tires around their necks and setting the tires on fire. In one instance Ivorian policemen stood by and watched the "necklacings," afraid to intervene. Each time I went to the Abidjan bus terminal, groups of young men with restless, scanning eyes surrounded my taxi, putting their hands all over the windows, demanding "tips" for carrying my luggage even though I had only a rucksack. In cities in six West African countries I saw similar young men everywhere?-hordes of them. They were like loose molecules in a very unstable social fluid, a fluid that was clearly on the verge of igniting.
"You see," my friend the Minister told me, "in the villages of Africa it is perfectly natural to feed at any table and lodge in any hut. But in the cities this communal existence no longer holds. You must pay for lodging and be invited for food. When young men find out that their relations cannot put them up, they become lost. They join other migrants and slip gradually into the criminal process."..............
http://www.theatlantic.com/ideastour/archive/kaplan.mhtml
My dad is GP in a really rough part of the city and he deals with all sorts. At the moment there are major security guard strikes and policeman from zimababwe have come in there month off to work as security gaurds in Jo'burg becasue they will earn more as guards here then police man in Zim, my dad had two working for him for a while. I shot a doccie in second year about AIDS orphans in Alex (one of our major townships/ghettos) and about families of kids raising kids some of the most harrowing stuff ever.
But the illegal immigrants are from everywhere: from mozambique, the Congo, Zimbabwe, Nigeria etc. Every time you meet one and hear there story it kills something inside of you.
I met a group of illeagal immigrants that told me they had hitched and walked they way through Africa and that some of them had died of exhaustion, eaten by lions or killed by millatry, rebels etc. (they were from somalia a long far walk to S.A.)
hi dlowan,
Dagmaraka told me about this thread. I was born in Liberia which is next door to Sierra Leone and shares a similar culture and recent history of tradegy and misery. You see the trouble in Sierra Leone began when the Liberian Civil War (via Charles Taylor) spilled over into Sierra Leone.
Sierra Leoneans, like Liberians, are a very vibrant, happy people. Before the war, freetown was one of the friendliest cities in West Africa. Sierra Leoneans love music, dancing and very spicy food. The culture is very family oriented and communal in nature.
I'll wager that as these folks get settled in Oz, their neighborhoods will become a fun destination for good food, good music and good company. It's really hard to summarize and condense an entire culture in an email. However, feel free to contact me at
[email protected], I'll be happy to help you with any questions that you may have.
Emanuel
Thank you bbaptiste!
I have your email addy now, if you wish to ask a mod to remove it for you.
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