ISHMAEL Beah is the former African child soldier turned best-selling
author whose account of his time as a killer, driven by the memory of his
murdered family, has sold more than 600,000 copies around the world. His searing
tale made one television host's "heart hurt".
His book, which made The New York Times bestseller list a year ago and was
No3 in Time magazine's top 10 non-fiction books last year, has been praised by
authors such as William Boyd and Sebastian Junger, with other rave reviews in
the world's most powerful press.
But a bizarre set of events, sparked by a West Australian mining couple, has
revealed flaws in Beah's tale, A Long Way Gone.
The young author, who appeared on Enough Rope with Andrew Denton in July last
year and is a UN advocate for war children, appears to have been two years older
when he went to war. He would have been not 13 but 15. And instead of him
spending two years in the Sierra Leone army, it would have been two or three
months.
His story took place during the civil war that ripped Sierra Leone apart
between 1991 and 2002. Tens of thousands were massacred, more than a third of
the population was displaced and thousands of children were drafted into the
rival forces, the government versus the ideologically-driven Revolutionary
United Front.
Beah's version is that he survived three traumatic years between a rebel
attack on his home village in January 1993, when he was only 12, and his rescue
by UNICEF in January 1996, and that he spent two of those three years fighting
as a child soldier in the Sierra Leone army.
But inquiries by The Weekend Australian in Sierra Leone have revealed that
the attack that opens Beah's book, and that eventually led to the death of his
family and his own descent into savagery, happened two years later than he said,
not in 1993 as in the book but in 1995.
People who knew him in his home village of Mogbwemo, in the Bonthe district
of Sierra Leone's Southern Province, are adamant he was at school in 1993 and
1994.
The Weekend Australian's investigation was sparked after a Busselton mining
engineer, Bob Lloyd, was headhunted in July last year to run the Sierra Leone
mine where Beah's father used to work. It is owned and run by Sierra Rutile Ltd.
It closed after the rebel attack in 1995, but reopened in 2006.
Mr Lloyd had just read A Long Way Gone. His wife, Peta, who runs an
independent bookshop in Busselton, had pressed it on him as he left Australia,
knowing he was going where it was set.
Initially, Mr Lloyd believed, to his astonishment, that he might have found
Beah's father still alive and working at the mine. But while The Weekend
Australian's inquiry revealed that the man was only a relative, Mr Lloyd's
curiosity led him to discover the alleged discrepancy in dates.
When he and his wife tried to approach the various organisations and people
associated with Beah's book -- US publishers Farrar, Straus and Giroux, its
Australian distributors HarperCollins, his New York agent Ira Silverberg, and
the woman he now calls "mother", American storyteller and activist Laura Simms
-- they were met with hostility.
Eventually, after they had approached
Enough Rope, hoping to get a contact for Beah, executive producer Anita Jacoby
suggested they talk to The Weekend Australian. The newspaper also met with
hostility.
Asked yesterday about the alleged discrepancy in timing, Ms Simms
said: "If you were a kid in a war, would you have a calendar with you after you
had lost everything and were running through the bush. This young man has
literally changed the world and how human beings look at children in war."
Beah's book claims he walked from his village of Mogbwemo to the riverside
town of Mattru Jong with his older brother, Mohamed, in January 1993. They heard
the next day that their village had been attacked.
The book explains that
his mother's village of Kabati was also attacked and the rebels eventually
overran Mattru Jong, surprising the defenders by attacking from inland instead
of using the expected river route.
Beah tells how he joined other refugees
in using the only escape route out of the town.
But residents in the first
two villages say those events happened two years later than he described.
Sylvester Basopan Goba, the acting chief of Mattru Jong, was adamant Beah's
account was spot on, but it occurred two years later. "I almost lost my life
that day and my family's compound was captured that day, so, yes, I certainly
know what day I am talking about, let alone ... what year," he said.
"In
fact, I can tell you the attack was at 5.20pm as I had just finished listening
to the BBC news on the radio.
"The only way any of us survived was by using
a footpath through the swamp which was the one thing the rebels had not noticed.
I tell you that none of that happened in 1993."
Beah and his older brother
had attended the same town's Centennial secondary school, where the principal,
Abdul A. Barry, remembers him fondly. "He was unusually clever," Mr Barry said.
"He boarded with us and I was in charge of the boarding home back then so I knew
him very well."
Mr Barry's wife, Martha, said Beah's parents had asked them
to keep a close eye on him because he was smaller than other boys and sickly.
Mr Barry, who was promoted to principal in 2002, said Beah "was with us for
two full years (and) he was half way through his third year when the town was
invaded. That is the only time we have ever had to close the school and run for
our lives."
Mr Barry said Beah's account of the rebel advance on Mattru Jong
"was exactly how it happened", but that it occurred two years later.
HarperCollins publishing director Shona Martyn says, "As a general rule, all
publishers who distribute books assume that the original publisher has checked
the material."
Twist
in the tale of a child soldier | The Australian
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