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Marc Sommers, "We the Young Fighters: Pop Culture, Terror, and War in Sierra Leone" (U Georgia Press, 2023)
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A
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It was just the five of us. So this was all planned. What are you gonna do?
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I will do whatever it takes to get my son back. I honestly didn't see this coming. These nice people killing all her fault. A new series streaming now only on Peacock. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [02:04]
B
Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Mark Summers about his book titled we the Young Pop Culture, Terror and War in Sierra Leone, published by the University of Georgia Press in 2023. Now, this book is doing a whole bunch of things at once in a really intriguing and intertwined way, because this is a story about Sierra Leone. This is a story about a very specific civil war that has had influences on all sorts of places beyond Sierra Leone. This is also a story about what happens when a youth population feels incredibly alienated. And this is also a story about Bob Marley and Tupac and Rambo, which are maybe not all things we would expect to find together. And yet, as this book shows, and as I'm sure our discussion will as well, they are all very much entangled together. So we have a lot to discuss. Mark, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
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A
Thanks, Miranda. It's a pleasure to be here.
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B
Could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book?
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A
Sure. Well, I'm a longtime researcher, a writer, a consultant, a diplomat. I've been a teacher, a photographer. But when I was out to, when I first this book sort of arrived on my doorstep, so to speak, in the year 2000. So 25 years ago, I was doing research for the Social Science Research Council in the Gambia in West Africa with Sierra Leonean refugees. Now, I'd already been in Sierra Leone a couple times during the war, but here we were way up country, myself and a human rights lawyer doing research with recent refugees from Sierra Leone. And they were refugees from this extraordinary attack on Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, which was really the zenith of the war in terms of terror based warfare. And so these people made it all the way to Gambia and then were placed in this very remote place way up the river in Gambia. And that's where I met. Now, in order to get into the refugee camp, I had to talk to the leaders of the camp and they said one afternoon, it's swelteringly hot there, and they said, come at 10 o' clock tomorrow morning right here and we'll have some, you know, refugee leaders here and you talk to them and then if they agree, you can get into the camp and do your interviews. I said, it's fine, it's a deal. The next morning I come and there's this. There's a huge number. I felt like a kind of a politician. I was shaking everyone's hands. I think people were just extraordinarily overwhelmed that there was somebody there to talk to them and learn about their lives and their situation as refugees. So the first question, which is something I normally do with refugees, is I say, how did you get to be a refugee? Basically, can you tell me your story? And I still remember on this hot morning in up up country in Gambia, people on my left, men and women jumped up and used this word Tupac. And I thought, what are they talking about? And then this old man on my right stood up and was pointing to me and he was saying, Bob Mali, Bob Bali. And I thought, what is Bob Mali and what is Tupac? Did they understand the question, what's going on? And there was also somebody who said Rambo and I, I really didn't understand what was going on. So everybody calmed down and I asked for explanation and they started to tell me about the, that some of the attackers in the Big Freetown no Living thing attack of January 6, 1999 were Rambo fighters. There were Tupac groups and there were Bob Marley groups. And I just, I could not believe this, that there were pop culture led militias and groups of fighters based on Marley, Tupac and Rambo. And that's really where it started. I, I kind of became an investigative journalist from that point onwards. It was such an unusual topic for a, you know, for a research project. It took me five years to get my first grant. I kept applying and I think, you know, sometimes you can ask for the comments like, why didn't I get it? And quite often it was, this is just weird. There's no research on this. So you don't get it, you don't get your, the research. And finally I got some, some funds in 2005 and I was able to go to Sierra Leone and the world opened up. That pretty much was astounding to me and had never really been uncovered. There were slight references, mentions of Bob Marley, Tupac Shakur and Rambo during the war in Sierra Leone, but nothing significant. It was anecdotal. And yet here it is talking to X fighters, survivors of attacks, and they would go into immense depth on all three. And so that's where the, that's really how the book, I had to chase that book and it was very hard to, to get funding for it continued to be difficult. And then I had to write it up and, you know, it came out 23 years later. So it was quite a long journey with me, Marley, Tupac and Rambo.
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B
A long journey indeed. But I'm so glad you stuck with it because yes, it is weird, but that's what makes it so interesting, right? Of course we have to pull on the threads when weird things pop up when we're doing research, otherwise how would we find out about all of these things? So thank you for sticking with it and I think it's time to go now even further back beyond the beginning of the project to get a Better sense of the conflict that all of this is wrapped up in. So I was not surprised at all to open the book and have you start telling us about Liberia's former president, Charles Taylor. Because those of us who work in African civil wars, you come across Charles Taylor quite often, but that is a pretty small realm. So for those maybe less familiar with his deviousness, can you maybe give a brief background on why you start the book that is mainly about civil war in Sierra Leone by talking about a president of a country that's not Sierra Leone?
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A
Yeah, great question. Thanks. It is a kind of an unusual starting point for people who don't know the war in Sierra Leone. Charles Taylor actually was in the Boston area when I was an anthropology student at Boston University. There was a African Study center and he had come there, this is before my time. I was told about it, and he was going around telling everybody that he was going to be president of Liberia. He was studying, I think, economics at Babson College, which is a small school outside of Boston. And people thought he was a nut. You know, the other African students who were there at that time and others who were there, he was a very, you know, he's a person you remember, he kept talking, he was very much focused on himself and he was going to be president. I think nobody realized that this guy, I mean, everybody had underestimated Charles Taylor, which is always a colossal mistake. So why Taylor? The first chapter is called the Innovator and it's about Charles Taylor and his innovations and sort of unfortunate brilliance in promoting terror based warfare and actually his aims for destabilizing all of West Africa. That was really what he was all about. And so Taylor struck me as a very good place to start because the specific way that the war started couldn't have happened without Charles Taylor. So there would have been a war, I think, at this point. At that point. So this is 19, say 1989, 1990, that the Sierra Leone was really in collapse. It was really in free fall economically. The government, it was really falling apart. So there was going to be a war, I think, or some sort of conflagration. So why Taylor and why this kind of war? Well, Muammar Gaddafi used to recruit potential revolutionaries to battle the status quo and overcome, you know, and take over their nations. And they would meet at this revolutionary headquarters in, outside of Tripoli in Libya, and Gaddafi ran it. And that's where Taylor met 40 Sanko. So Fotisanko eventually became the leader of the Revolutionary United Front, the ruf, which was the main rebel group. And he entered Liberia with Taylor. There were a hundred people in 1989, at the very end of the, of the war, I mean of the year, and started the war in Liberia with Taylor. And then in 1990, Taylor started scooping up basically abducting any Sierra Leonean national who he came on, who he came upon, particularly, you know, male adults, but also some children. And they became what was known as the vanguard for the ruf. So in a very specific way, Taylor was the starter, the beginner, the originator with fotesanko of the war. But there's more than that. So the nature of the war was really based on terror and on exploitation to a degree. This is where Taylor had sort of extraordinary skills and some of them really were applied in a very big way in Sierra Leone as well. So he would take extraordinarily mighty profits from the war zones he controlled. He clear cut rainforests and sold the timber. Everything was for sale. And, and the area that he controlled was actually bigger than Liberia. During his war was known as Taylor Land because it was all about him, it was all about what he controlled. It was a personal fiefdom. He used child soldiers to promote his terror based warfare. He had a policy called pay yourself. He never paid any soldiers, it's just that he gave them permission. Once they took a town or a village, they could loot and do whatever they want and that was their payment. He would call the BBC to advertise his presence if he took a town. And the BBC was really tricked by him and they would interview him. And so it helped him become quite famous and also quite feared in Liberia because everybody for information would listen to the BBC. That used to be true across Africa. And then there is the fact that Liberia has for their currency uses US dollars. And the diamonds had historically been coming, a lot of them been flowing from Sierra Leone, which has alluvial diamonds, really an enormous amount. And then in order to do the quick trade, a lot of the diamonds would come into Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, because then they could be bought and sold with dollars. So there was this way to really loot and make money from Sierra Leone if the rebels went in there. And that's exactly what him and Fode started in March of 1991. So in a way Taylor shaped the war, helped to start the war, and then had kept his presence and influence on the war until the very end.
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B
Those are some very specific techniques there of war that I think we're going to see very repeated in Sierra Leone and repeated in Other places, too. But you mentioned that even if there hadn't been Charles Taylor, there still probably would have been conflict in Sierra Leone. So what are the other factors we need to understand?
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A
Well, I think there's kind of two levels. So one of them is that how did the country just start to fall apart? There was a ruler who was quite a dictator. He was suspicious of his own army. This man named Shaka Stevens. I think he was the third president of the nation. It came in in the late 60s, and he was there for 17, 18 years. And he created what's known as what I call in the book, a fake state. So it looks like a government, but it's not. He ran the government. The government was kind of a front. Some scholars called it a facade. And what it really was, what he was really doing, is running a diamond business and taking all the profits for himself and his network. So he also looted government revenues and again confiscated just about every single diamond that was mined in the entire country. So he became fantastically wealthy. And when you do this kind of, you have a fake state in order to keep it running, because people don't particularly like living in a fake state. You need to be able to repress people and to stop, because there's going to be dissent. So what you need is state force, state violence. And he used that in the extreme. He invented his own units to, like, kind of personal militias to attack anyone who had. Who dared to say anything against him. And so. But, you know, when you don't supply many public services and you take everything, you have to repress. And that's the kind of thing that he did. Then when he retired, his successor was one of the military generals, Joseph Momo, and he was totally hapless. And he also had to create his own corrupt sort of network in order to be in power, because that's how it worked. It was all about patronage. People didn't support you unless they were paid. It was hard to do because Stevens and his network dominated everything. So he also was under pressure from the IMF to repay loans. He, he. And there was just nothing. And then the government itself was not really functional. So everything was falling apart. Famously, the radio tower for the national radio fell over and was never fixed. And on and on. So by the early 90s, this was a country in complete free fall that was very lightly ruled, very violently ruled, but it's sort of losing control. So that's one reason why, I mean, as. As a rebel group, it was really the perfect time to attack, because this government was you know, not really in control of much by the time the war started. But then there's a deeper thing that went on. Most male youth were being treated very badly by elites. They were really trapped with no way out. So elites tended to exploit their labor, particularly in rural areas. And the young men found it very, very difficult to gain recognition as adult men and get schooling, get dignified work, and most important, to marry. And so it was, the setup was made it very difficult, almost impossible for most to gain recognition as a man. You can never be recognized as a man unless you're married in an official way. The same thing happens to female use. What happens if there's no one to marry? Then you can't gain recognition as a woman either. So youth were trapped under immense pressure with no way out. And so the result was profound alienation and a strong sense for young people of being cornered. So this really set the stage for pop culture heroes to enter the scene and become so meaningful. You had no local heroes, right? There was no one to look up to that was almost illegal. So people started to look outwards for inspiration. And that's how Marley and later Rambo and then later still Tupac, that's how they came on the scene. There was a need for heroes, and they filled that void perfectly. This episode is brought to you by White Claw Search. Great podcast, pig friend. No surprises there. After all, you're all about finding the tastiest flavors out there, just like White Claw Surge. And with big, bold flavors to enjoy, like blood orange, BlackBerry, cranberry and more, it's time to go all in on taste. Unleash the flavor. Unleash White Claw Surge. Please drink responsibly. Hard seltzer with flavors. 8% alcohol by volume. White cloth seltzer works Chicago, Illinois at New Balance, we believe if you run.
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B
Yeah, the void is very clear in what you've described. And the fact that some something's going to fill it makes a lot of sense. Why Those three in particular, though, why was it that Bob Marley, Tupac and Rambo were the heroes decided on?
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A
I mean, this is. This was, you know, the first question of this book when I was told about this, like, why these three? Why is it Marley, Tupac Shakur and Rambo, why? And how come? Why are they linked together? And I just. I mean, to this day, right, and connected to war. So there's right now in the Ukrainian military, there's a Bob Marley squad in Papua New guinea, some of the militias are called Rambo groups. There are Rambo fighters in Papua and in Aceh, I understand. I was told by a researcher in Indonesia there's also Rambo fighters. And then here's another one. During the Iraq war, why is it that American fighters, soldiers, would put on their headphones and listen to Tupac's very scary Hit him up song on their headphones and then go out fighting into battle listening to Tupac? So what do we make of this? You know, we can try to unpack all three, but I think the biggest issue is, is that all of them say that the world's upside down, that the powers of the status quo, this is what Marley called Babylon in many of his songs, has been turned against innocent people, often young people. And the idea is that all three of them are saying, everyone's blaming us and. But we didn't do anything. So the world's crazy. The Universe is Perverse, which is the title of the second chapter, to try to convey this idea that the world is crazy, people are against us, and we did nothing wrong. So it's in the songs of Marley. It's all over Marley. And Marley is also religious music. It's. It uses. You go on there. Rastafarians, which is a religion. He's a very committed Rastafarian, the most famous of them all. Marijuana is used in a sacramental way by Rastafarians. There's a very explicit ideology about resistance and dignity and self worth and fighting back. That's a big theme in Marley's work. He calls on listeners not to be fooled by the powerful, to resist inequality and repression and when necessary, you know, to fight back. He makes reference quite often to the freedom fighters and then with. With the hip hop with Tupac. It's an interesting thing. Tupac has been by far the most important and influential hip hop singers in the world. He has been venerated, for example, by Palestinian youth. I don't know about now, but for, I don't know, 20 years or so, he was the man for youth there. And he's kind of like this hero of the underclass. He's a total outcast, but he's proud of it. He's fearless. He expresses every emotion that there is for a young person in his songs. And I just want to give you a sense of his profound alienation. So he has a song called Only God Can Judge Me. Okay, so only God can understands. Can understand what it's like to be me. Only God knows and can judge the kind of world that I'm in and why I have to do what I have to do. So that idea by itself, the title of that song, radiated across the world to this day to young people who are feeling misunderstood and are truly alienated. So he's the hero. And as he says in that song, I've been trapped since birth and so I'm cursed heading to a hearse. And a lot of young people can identify with Tupac in a way that's really, truly profound. Then you have the Rambo movies, and I'm only talking about the first three, which were certainly three of the most popular and influential movies in the world in the 1980s. And in the first film, Rambo is sort of harassed by the police. And it turns out he didn't do anything. They just start to harass him and arrest him. And we learn while he's arrested that he's been traumatized in war. And so he attacks because. To defend himself, because they're after him and no one understands him. He rarely uses words to defend himself, but he does say many times in that first movie, but I didn't do anything. And again. And then he has this sort of, you know, a fighter, a one man fighter, right? Completely resilient on his own, low tech, fighting in rainforests. Sierra Leone is also a rainforest for the most part. And so there's a lot that Rambo and being a Rambo fighter, he's like the perfect warrior. And again, he's always dragged into fighting. He never wants to fight, but they force him. And so he's a great hero as a warrior that goes back, I think, you know, and resonates with young people around the world, including female youths. There was this one girl who told me this story is the rebels came into her village during the war in Sierra Leone. And she, in terror, runs out of the village and runs into the rainforest and runs and runs and runs until she gets tired. And then while she's catching her breath, she asks herself, okay, well, like I thought maybe she'd say, well, what would my father do? What would my mother do? What would the chief do? What would my uncle and aunt do? Someone like that? No, I said, so what did you think then? And she said, I asked myself, what would Rambo do? And then she did that. I guess if I can just say, just a chronology for Sierra Leone, that sort of a pop culture chronology is in the 60s, marijuana arrives and people dropped it into the soil and it grew 15ft high. And it's super strong, super potent marijuana. Why does that matter? Because in the 70s, here come the reggae heroes. And there are all these young people that are thirsting for direction, inspiration outside of the repression that they're living in under. And there are the reggae heroes, Burning Spear, Peter Tosh, all kinds. But immediately Marley, Bob Marley rises to the top. And in order to really be a follower of Marley, you have to smoke marijuana. So the process was you would listen to Marley, so smoke marijuana and become conscious of the repression in your life. This was called as a process of becoming conscientized in Sierra Leone. And there were a lot of people then at the university and in Freetown, in particular, among male youths, elite youths, non elite youths who were really drawn to Marley and were seen as he was sort of their guide for resistance against this extremely violent state. Then in the 1980s, here come the Rambo movies. It's kind of hard for us to imagine, but these movies would come, they would, you know, these entrepreneurs would have these pickup trucks with a generator in the back and a screen, like, I guess some sort of, you know, cloth, white cloth screen and then a projector, and they would set it up at night and, you know, you charge some money and like a whole village would go in and everybody that. The most popular movies by far were the Rambo movies. So this was in diamond mines. This was in villages and urban neighborhoods. And it's a strange idea, but young people were so drawn to. To Rambo films. And again, imagine looking at a Rambo film under the stars as a. As a young boy or a young girl. They memorized these movies. They had them memorize the scenes. And this comes up very importantly during the war as a. Because these became military training videos. By the way, even the RUF rebel commanders were trained on with Rambo films before they entered Sierra Leone. That was in when they were in Liberia. And then in the 1990s, here comes Tupac and he arrives pretty much when the war begins. And he has this extraordinary impact on male youth here. Imagine if you're a boy looked down upon and called a tug a thug and many other names to put you down, to humiliate you. And here's this guy. I mean, even before you hear his music, there he is with this. You see a picture of him and it says thug life tattooed to his, on his torso in his pictures, you know, without his shirt on. And. And what you start to realize is that this guy is not embarrassed about being a thug. He's like, call me a thug. Sure, I'm a thug and I'm proud of it. You're proud of it. This was a revolutionary idea for a lot of young people. He was an instant hero even before they heard his music. Tupac was something else. And he was an inspiration for these denigrated young people. And, you know, in all three of them, they were very, very profound heroes and examples for the young people that grew to follow them.
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B
Yeah, that's incredibly clear in those examples, which are really quite evocative and make that link very, very obvious to us. And as you said, they're intimately linked during the war itself. Right. Watching Rambo before you go fight, there's all sorts of ways in which the things you're talking about are kind of generally in the culture, but also really specifically intertwined in the war. So I wonder if we can talk a bit more about that. So the role, for example, of drugs in the war, or when we're talking about youth, a really notable factor with Sierra Leone's conflict is not just that the fighters are young, but that often they're actually children. Right. We're not talking 18, 19. We're talking a lot younger than that. So these elements of alienated youth, these elements of drugs, can you tell us more about how they're bound up in the violence and the terror of the war?
- [33:47]
A
Sure. I think, you know, one of the words in the subtitle is very intentional. It's all very intentional. But there's the word war that's in the subtitle, but there's also the word terror. And the reason terror is there is because there was state terror before the war. There was terror really going back into the slave era, the way life was lived. And then there was the nature of terror based warfare, which we see today also in violent extremist youth using terror. So I guess there's a. What I try to depict with regards to the war is the nature of terror based warfare that arose in Sierra Leone, which was extraordinarily potent and extraordinarily successful for, you know, well over a decade. So what was terror based warfare and what were the roles of Drugs and children in those. Well, to start with, with drugs, I mean, the rebels didn't really seem, I had to say, all the fighters didn't really see marijuana as a drug. It was part of what you do when you're a fighter, but it certainly was a drug. And the drugs were. When a boy or girl was abducted, one of the first things they did was to go into a room. Quite often this is when the war was, if there wasn't a formal training, they'd go into a room, they'd have to smoke marijuana and listen to Marley. And so that was their part of their initiation into being a fighter. And so the rebels were really smart about this in terms of keeping kids, kids drugged 24 hours a day. So the water that they drank was boiled with marijuana. The food they ate had marijuana in it. So these are, you know, the, the child soldiers, I mean, the youngest reported that an ex combatant told me was the youngest they had in their unit was three years old. So we're talking about the youngest ch, you know, child soldier force, I mean the youngest military force I think in modern history. How can you get younger than the ruf? So, and then going up from there all the way up into like guys in their 20s. So they are drugged all the time, they're always high. And some of the kids don't always remember. Their memories are kind of faulty about a lot of details during their war because they were high the whole time. At least that's one of the reasons, that's what they would say. So you start with marijuana and then before you go into battle, you, then you bring, the commander brings out other drugs. So what was there? There was heroin, there was cocaine, there was amphetamines, barbiturates, there was Valium, I don't know what else there was, but those I think were the biggies. And so they had things called plasters where they cut a kid next to his, on his temple, on his face, and then put the drugs into the incision and then cover it with a band aid or a plaster. And so it, the drug went straight into your brain and started to make you crazily high instantly. Or the commander would ground up all the pills and then make it sort of like a dust and throw it in the air and the boys and girls would inhale it and then it goes straight into your system and off they went into war. So that was sort of the starting point with drugs. Drugs were really important. Now you have this issue of, with terror based warfare, you focus on attacking civilians, right? You're mostly children and you're high as kites. What are you going to do in front of a conventional army? You're going to get wiped out. So you don't do that. You focus on villages. You focus on places that, you know where there are civilians that are unarmed. And then let's say you're a mother or father in this village. Here come these little children. They're always in the lead. There's older fighters as well, but they come at you drugged as can be. And what you have is the world upside down. That same motif, the perverse universe that children are now in charge and they're ruling us. And that was a very intentional dynamic that the rebels wanted to inculcate because it's the. It was the elites, it was the elders who were repressing us and looting, taking all the food, taking all the diamonds, taking all the money and leaving us impoverished. So there was a very explicit target on elites, and in some cases all adults were seen as enemies. And then one of the big curse words during the war was, or phrases was, you're beneath us. And that's when a young child would say this to, let's say, an elder. So the world flips upside down, which is very much what they live as, alienated people. That's the kind of an exploitation of those ideas from Marley, Tupac and Rambo. And here it is being acted out in terror based warfare. So these are all, you know, elements of the terror based warfare that was used to terrify people and in many cases drive populations out of areas. Now you really wanted to use terror in villages, but also in the diamond mines. If you drew, if you drove out a lot of people but captured the miners, you could use them as slaves to mine your diamonds for you. And then everybody else runs away. And then you don't have to control them, because how are you going to control them with a bunch of teenagers? Right, so. So it really worked. The leaders made a lot of money on the diamonds and diamonds were looted by military groups on all sides of the war. And everybody smoked marijuana. And everybody, by the end saw themselves as a rebel. All the fighters, no matter what side you were on, you were against the status quo. And this was fueled by the popular culture, particularly Marley, but not just Marley, also Tupac and Rambo and sometimes others. But it was also the way the war was fought.
- [40:49]
B
All right, so this is really helpful for helping us understand kind of how embedded all of these things are. The drugs, the three icons, the youth aspect, the terror, and especially that Evocative idea that kind of everyone thought they were a rebel by the end. Like, there's definitely a lot of chaos coming through in what you're describing. And in fact, it is a particular aspect of that chaos that you dropped a hint at earlier in our conversation that I want to pull out now, which is the moment when you said you were speaking to refugees in the Gambia, going kind of, how did you get here? And one of the answers was, rambo gangs kicked us out of Freetown. Now, that's obviously fascinating in and of itself, but I have a really kind of logistical question about that. How did they know they were Rambo gangs? Like, how was Rambo. You mentioned watching Rambo videos to prep you to fight. Great. But that would happen before the fighting started. So how did someone fleeing know that the people causing them to flee were a Rambo gang?
- [41:52]
A
That's wonderful. So it was easy to know the Marley fighters because they had dreadlocks and usually Bob Marley T shirts. And then the Tupac crowd dressed like Tupac in their way of Tupac. They had the turn up. They would roll up the trouser leg. One trouser leg, which is called the turn up, which Tupac did. They had tattoos, so they. They had Tupac T shirts. They were really important in the war. And so it was easy to know the Tupac fighters and the. The Bob Marley fighters as well. Now, Rambo, the Rambo fighters were thought, often thought to be the toughest. So you could be a Rambo fighter without being a member of a Rambo group. But generally speaking, the Rambo groups were considered the scariest of them all. Now, Rambo fighters, just like Rambo, had red bandanas like Rambo did, there were other. Other groups had bandanas like Tupac. So it was a little complicated. But it was important for rebels to know which group was which so that they wouldn't. I mean, in some cases, they really would fight each other, but it was important to know who, you know, what your, quote, uniform was. So they had red bandanas, and also often they tied red cloth around their biceps, and that was pretty much the Rambo look. If you had an AK with lots of. With like, lines of bullets, that was definitely a Rambo look. And they were considered to be the fiercest and the violent and the most heavily drugged of the. The fighters. And so if you were a real strong fighter, if you were really fearless and brutal, you could get a Rambo nickname. They. There were a lot of them, but the ones that were kind of notorious, there was a Rambo group that was thought to be quite scary. There was actually a girls Rambo group at one point as well. And then there were names for fighters like nasty Rambo, co Rambo. Let's see, Rambo, Red Goat Jr. Rambo, Col. Rambo. I might. I mean, I don't know how many more. There must have been 50 of them and different nicknames. So they were known to be the fiercest, among the fiercest and the most violent and of course, the most heavily drugged.
- [44:44]
B
Okay, that's pretty intense sounding. So thank you for answering that question that I had right at the beginning of our conversation. I want to pick up another thing you mentioned around Tupac's lyrics having an impact on the use of terrorism. You mentioned that was even true with US Military fighters kind of listening to Tupac before going into combat. So can you help us understand more the kind of links between the lyrics and the violent action and if there was any sort of variation in this over the course of the war?
- [45:15]
A
So Tupac had an extraordinary influence among male youth during the war. Just to give it in context, Marley was influential among the leaders. The leaders venerated him. Yes, they exploited Marley in, you know, in extreme ways. But it isn't as if they didn't venerate Marley. Marley was the ideological sort of guide point for. For the rebel movement and also often used by the government as well. At one point, point, there was a military coup in 92, and the. The new military leaders of the government were venerating Marley. And their song was. Their key song was One Love. And they were up against fighting the ruf, the rebels, who also venerated Marley. And their key song was Get Up, Stand Up. And they were fighting the crazy bald heads. They were trying to get the bald heads out of town. So the government officials, government military were called the Bald Heads, which comes from a song by Marley. So on both sides, it's a chapter called Both Sides now. Because during one several years of the war, you had Marley troops fighting each other. So that's kind of the broader sort of architecture of the war was really tied. More than anyone else. More than any more. Anyone else. It was tied to Marley. Marley, Marley. Marley was everywhere. And marijuana. Okay, what about Tupac? So Tupac. There were certain Tupac groups that arose as early as 1992, which I found extraordinary because Tupac started recording in 91, and a year later, there he is influencing a war in Sierra Leone. The defiant, brave, articulate Tupac, who will say anything, anything at all, and incredibly fearless. The early groups Would write tupac the number 2 and then pic all over the walls, cars, everything that they took. You knew that Tupac groups were there because they would put Tupac painted everywhere. Okay, so what about this issue of. Of lyrics? So talking to adults about Tupac, Tupac inflamed them. They hated Tupac. And even the rebel leaders that I. The former rebel leaders that I interviewed, they. They didn't care. They loved Marley, no question. But did they love Tupac? They tolerated Tupac. They thought that. And I found this kind of ironic that these guys who were doing terror warfare would call him a rude boy and call him, you know, not really our kind. But the boys really loved Tupac, so they tolerated Tupac. The thing that really got to. If you could boil it down, what civilians were afraid of, particularly adults, what bothered them about Tupac, it boiled down to his use of the word fuck and particularly the word motherfucker. So why the word motherfucker? Why was it so important to Tupac? And then I can sort of. So. So one of the things that's fascinating about listening to Tupac, and I have really studied Tupac, is his reliance on the curse word motherfucker. So it's. I. I've detected three different ways he uses it. One is as a. As an adjective, I ain't got no friends. That's how hit him up opens. And then he says, that's why I your. You fat. Okay, now he's talking about Biggie, who is his big rival, and hit him up another. The. A New York hip hopper. And he's putting him down, calling him a motherfucker. But sometimes a motherfucker is a compliment. He's got a song called Breathing, where he says, I'm the last motherfucker breathing. So what a complicated word. And extraordinarily, he's so reliant on this one curse word, motherfucker. Okay, what does the word mean? It means mother, son, incest. That's what Sierra Leoneans heard, and that's why it was so terrifying. The word itself implies terror warfare. And one of the worst atrocities committed by the rebels was to enact the motherfucker atrocity. So you would abduct a boy and then drug him so he doesn't know who he is, where he is, send him back into his village and have him rape his mother. He doesn't know he's doing it. He's drugged. You bring him back into the base camp, the rebel camp, and then when he finally comes to, his commander says, you just slept with your mother. You raped your mother. Now why did he do that? This boy now has a death wish. He's going to be very brave in battle and he'll never escape because escaping was a big problem. So you wanted to make sure that the boys didn't run away and the girls. So the motherfucker atrocity. I don't know how often it was used. It was relayed to me enough to make it pretty clear that it did happen to some degree. And it really exemplifies how Tupac and how pop culture was adapted in a very vivid way to fuel terror based warfare.
- [51:27]
B
This is a real good story about Bronx and his dad Ryan. Real United Airlines customers.
- [51:32]
A
We were returning home and one of the flight attendants asked Bronx if he wanted to see the flight deck and meet Captain Andrew. I got to sit in the driver's seat.
- [51:40]
B
I grew up in an aviation and seeing Bronx kind of reminded me of myself when I was that age. That's Andrew, a real United pilot. These small interactions can shape a kid's future. It felt like I was the captain.
- [51:52]
A
Allowing my son to see the flight deck will stick with us forever.
- [51:55]
B
That's how good leads the way. Yeah, that's an incredibly specific link and a very powerful one. Another aspect we've mentioned a few times that I want to pick up is the gendered aspect of violence here. Um, we've talked about girl youth being kind of just as interested in these pop culture figures as boys. We've talked about girls being fighters as well as boys. You draw in an additional thread in this aspect of the book though, that we haven't talked about yet, which is the even older legacies of violence than everything we've been talking about with Charles Taylor. For example, the gendered violence that happened with the imperial slave trade that happened in the colonial era. How did those legacies and histories influence the gendered violence in these more recent civil wars?
- [52:43]
A
Okay, that's a great question. I would say that the, no matter what they were called and or what acts they were doing, so the girls in the war were considered the best spies of them all. Who would, who would, who would think a 14 year old girl could, you know, was a spy across, going across enemy lines. But they were fantastic at it. They were the best, the teenage girls. But everything was based on sexual slavery. Their relationships were really based on that. Those were the abducted girls. Importantly for the rebels, nothing for their ideology, nothing zero was promised to a girl, a female youth, a woman. If they won, everything that they were, if they won, everything was going to go to male youth and men, no women whatsoever. It was quite extreme. Most rebel insurgent groups are not like that, but this one was really extreme. And then there was this unbelievable focus on sexual violence to a degree that was stunning to me and also to a degree that made me wonder why aren't most, you know, why aren't more scholars of Sierra Leone raising this? There were a few, but this is a big part of the war, a really big part of the war. And, you know, a question I had to try to find out was why? How come there was this obsession, why was sexual violence such a big part of the war? And as you say, it really does start in the era of the slave trade. So I think we forget that the slave era in our world, although it still goes on. But I'll talk about the Atlantic slave trade for a moment. It's a lot longer. It lasted a lot longer than the post slave era. So in Sierra Leone, it was about 400 years and domestic slavery was outlawed finally, I think, in 1929, so less than 100 years ago. So what happened during that period? So it started with the Portuguese, and then for the most, most of the 400 years, it was the British. What they wanted primarily was male slaves. The way they did that is they would give arms to groups in conflict or fuel the conflict and have two separate groups use their guns to fight each other. And if they were, there were prisoners taken. The Brits got the prisoners. So they were boys and young men, and that's what they wanted. So over the centuries, boys were being depleted, males were being depleted. And you had this really alarming in terms of social structure, this alarming disjuncture between the number of males vis a vis the number of females in your population. So in Sierra Leone, like I'd say most traditional societies, as soon as you're three or four, you know, you're getting married because that's the purpose of life. Your, you know, social life is to get married and to have a family. So what if there's no one to marry? Because there is no, you know, there are no boys to marry. So there was this dangerous instability in the society that was created by, by the slavery going on for centuries. So one result was polygamy. So youth, I mean, elders, wealthy people, wealthy men could take on more wives. So that was, but that's, that didn't solve all the problems. So two things happened because there was so much violence and so much warfare that was fueled by the slavers. The, the, the boys were really press ganged into Being the fighters and to being violent, to being the fighters on the front lines of these battles. And they had to fight hard or they'd be taken as slaves and also as bodyguards for chiefs. So their role became tied to violence. And at the same time they were being pushed in that direction, encouraged to be vicious and violent. Over time, they were also, you know, nobody wanted them around. They were denigrated, they were humiliated, they were emasculated. And even to this day, many blame these young people for the war, which is impossible because they were abducted and drugged. But they're blamed. They are very unpopular. A lot of sort of the down and out male youth are blamed for a lot of what's wrong in Sierra Leone. What about femininity? And these are boys that had trouble getting married. Even though there were lots of females to marry, it was very difficult because their labor was controlled and made it very difficult for them to be recognized as men. What about for the women? What about for girls? Just all females? Well, there was this excess of females because the slaves were mainly men, males. It created over the centuries this idea that femininity was powerful, was dangerous and a threat to society. It was wild. It threatened society, which means it threatened male power. So society, that is men were obligated to control women and their, their dangerous power. So the idea that women were, were not powerful was not true in Sierra Leone. The idea was it was powerful, but it was outside of society, their power source, and it had to be controlled. So some of the things that came out is obviously there's a lot of domestic violence that comes out of this because men, husbands were compelled to control their wives and to really see them as dangerous to the household. And the second thing is there was female genital mutilation, which is actually common in other parts of the world and other parts of the region. But it was the idea of taking away the clitoris was a way of controlling women and some of their source of power because that pleasure could lead them to adultery and other things that would undercut society. So that became part of the womanhood, right? And is there till today. So when the war started, there was this real obsession with, with, I mean, a really high level, obsessive level with sexual violence. And I looked into this and there's a chapter in the book called the War on Girls where I try to understand this, this mystery, try to try to look at why was there so much. And I came up with five reasons. One, and this was reported by former female members of the rebels, the heavy, very heavy drug Use by. When their, quote, husbands were, were drugged up, they knew that they were going to be, quote, sexed a lot and they could be sex in a very violent ways. Secondly, the boys were watching porn movies that came from abroad and it brought in practices that had never before been seen. I was told many times in Sierra Leone, oral sex was one, there were others. And this by itself was terrifying, was part of the terror warfare. There was a feeling that some commanders, it's disputed, but that commanders would have ordered them to rape the boys to rape. There's also this issue, and this is kind of mechanistic, but because boys, it was so hard for poor boys to marry and, you know, have sex that suddenly the war provided this access to females like never before in their lives. So sexual violence might have come from that. And I think the fifth reason ties back to this deeper idea of femininity as inherently wild and dangerous, which comes from the 400 year slave era. And the last thing I'd say is it was really interesting to interview men, how terrified they were of female fighters, that they were the scariest of them all. And their fear of castration by a female fighter seemed to be the greatest horror that could have ever happened to them. I don't think it happened very often. But the again, for terror, female fighters drugged and enraged and armed was something that really terrified civilian men to a degree that was quite unusual. So the bigger idea though, I think is to apply. They were applying violent masculine force to tame feminine power. Seemed to be a subtext of this really obsessive level of sexual violence during the war.
- [62:51]
B
Yeah, that definitely, unfortunately makes a lot of sense. But you mentioned in there a number of kind of aspects of which what you were describing wasn't just true in the war, but there were kind of ways it lasted after the conflict ended too. So do we also see that looking back again at Marley, Tupac and Rambo, do they stay influential in the post war era?
- [63:14]
A
You know, that's a great question. I was in Cote d' Ivoire about maybe two years ago, and in the hotel van minivan that takes me to my hotel, pick me up at the airport, the driver turns the key to start the engine and, you know, his, I don't know CD comes on and it's Marley. So we get to the hotel, I go up to the, to check in and what are they playing in the hotel lobby? Bob Marley. I get onto it's, I don't know, fourth floor. I get my key, I get into the elevator, the doors close. What do I Hear Bob Marley. Bob Marley is so much a part of the world that Africans live in, West Africans in particular, but it's all over. It's an extraordinary amount of familiarity with Marley's music and Marley's lyrics. So I just want to put that out there as the broader context. But when you get to the post war, I think it's important to see how sophisticated the interpretations are by ordinary young people of their pop culture heroes. They're very aware of the fact that wartime leaders severely exploited their heroes and extracted meetings. You know, Superman was one of the big rebel commanders. He used Marley's Exodus song, which is a very religious song about returning to the fatherland. In the song Coming going back to Africa, and it says move and movement a lot in the song. And to empty McKenna, one of the biggest cities in Sierra Leone during the war, he had his soldiers take boomboxes, post them around. McKenna, put on the song Exodus and put it up full blast. And the idea was when you heard the song song that as a civilian you were supposed to drop everything, you couldn't carry anything with you, nothing in your pockets, no purses, nothing, and walk out of the city. So there's a real example of deep exploitation of Bob Marley during the war by a commander. What happened after the war? Young people retook their heroes and reinterpreted and re emphasized their heroes for, for the, for the new context where they were again being denigrated, just like before the war. So how did they do that? Well, for Barley, Get Up Stand up was, you know, the song that was sort of branded as the RUF song and they reinterpreted it to give them a support. So Get Up Stand up was now meant for you as yourself, have some self dignity, you have self worth. Don't get. Let people put you down. Listen to Marley. As one female youth told me, like Bob Marley tells us, don't give up. So Marley is really the biggest. And I think to this day you can listen to Marley. There's a Marley radio station. Marley's very big in Sierra Leone and not just with youth, but it's very interesting to see how he's been reinterpreted and applied to the post war era. Rambo kind of faded away. I remember in 2005 I was coming back to the Capitol and I saw these posters of. It was on Easter Sunday. We're trying to get back to the early from the field and we passed some coming into the city, we passed some video parlors and there were posters. You have posters outside to See, this is what we're showing today. And what was on the sign in one after the next after the next were Rambo films. So what I understood is that you would go to church and then the whole family would go into the video parlor and watch a Rambo movie. So, but after a while, Rambo's really about war, and people didn't want to really think about and contemplate war anymore. So his. His influence started to fade away. Not Marley. Marley bigger than anyone else, but Tupac as well. And what was interesting about Tupac is that there he has such a wide array of songs that appeal, that really talk about all kind of young person's emotions, some of them very empathic. And it's those songs that became more popular with. With young people. So songs like Changes, for example, would be one, keep your head up would be another. Those are the kinds of songs that they pulled out and saw as important. And always, always, always, all eyes on me. That goes without saying. Here's something from somebody, a boy, a male youth after the war, talking about Tupac. I just thought I'd read this. He says, I love Tupac. We still love him in Sierra Leone. I heard that his father was not there and his mother was in jail. Imagine if you are from nowhere and you become a pioneer in the society. We admire a person like that so much. There are so many sufferers here. Now, the word sufferers comes from Marley as well. Suffer us. He makes reference to people who suffer in his songs a lot. So both of them make reference to that. So the boy says, there are so many sufferers here. I used to hear about people who succeeded, like Tupac. I'm from nowhere. What an idea. I'm from nowhere, but someday I can make it. Tupac is an example for us.
- [69:35]
B
That is a great way, I think, to end our discussion of Sierra Leone. But is there any way in which you want readers to take away all of this that might apply beyond Sierra Leone, or is this a very one country specific sort of story?
- [69:51]
A
Well, I mean, the obvious one is, you know, pop culture circulates the world and is interpreted locally. And you cannot predict how who is going to be important and how they're going to be locally interpreted. So that's just the sort of the big format, right? It's not just Marley, Tupac and Rambo. There's all kinds of others that become important, and it's important to be aware of that. And this really points to young people looking for guidance and the power of youth alienation in this, in this world today is really profound and all over. And I think it's important for us to be aware of that and to listen to, obviously to young people who make us uncomfortable because they're suspicious, they're alienated, and it's a challenge. And their heroes often, you know, make us uncomfortable in what they have to say. But I think the other, another idea is this idea of a fake state. So there's a lot of governments in the world are. Who that are really running the government for profit and using state violence to oppose any peaceful dissent from citizens and really not providing many services at all. The challenge, and this is this idea that the world's upside down. So a lot of institutions that were raised to venerate, like the government, like elders, and then their international supporters are often supporting these fake states, these governments that are run as businesses, and that would be corporations, banks. I mean, who does the money laundering, right? International banks have a big play in that. Development agencies, humanitarian agencies are often seen by people on the ground as working to support the government that is oppressing them. These are. They tend to thrive in authoritarian states and authoritarian environments. So who sees this? And this is where I think we can really learn is ordinary people. You know, they're taught by Marley and Tupac and Rambo and others how to read a situation and recognize who your oppressors are and how the world is upside down and you're being blamed, but you didn't do anything. And so in terms of policy, it's important, the starting point is to start to learn to see what the world looks like from this upside down point of view. When the system's against you and you didn't do anything, who's running this crazy system and why has the system turned against you? This is an optic from which a whole new understanding of our reality comes in. So this is all in the framework that I propose in the last chapter of the book. The second one, the second optic to take into account is the perspective of, from insurgents, violent extremist groups, and even gangs. What do they see in terms of the status quo? Whoa. Why is it in so many cases, so easy to exploit the status quo? What is it that they're exploiting? Once, almost always, it comes down to the issue of governance, right? There's supposed to be justice and there isn't. There's supposed to be a provision of services, and there aren't they aren't there. There's supposed to be, you know, equality and there's gross inequality in state violence. So this is what opens the door, door for insurgents, gangs, non state actors, let's say, to come in and thrive and really grind down government status quo. And if you don't see this or appreciate this and you just think, well, there's the Ministry of Justice over there, I'm going to work on human rights over there, when the police and the government are extorting people and dragging people off to jail without charge and so on and so on, then you really don't get it. And if you're working without an understanding of that broader context, you're probably making it worse. Not that you're intending to, but that's probably happening. So there's a great need for mainstream, authentic responsive governance. And almost always in my research that is the main challenge is responsive government governance that provides equally to society, that doesn't marginalize certain groups. Racism or hatred of particular groups is an immense problem. And I think the last part, and again this is in the framework in the final chapter, is to use research to really customize a viable strategic response given to after you start understanding how the system really works and how it looks from the perspective of, number one, alienated underclass people in that society and number two, insurgents who are seeking to overthrow where are the, you know, the weak points and where are they going? And it's from those perspectives I think you can start to build a strategic response. So the bigger picture, and this is the sort of, my final point, is that the, the status quo is not working for alienated young people. It's not working for a lot of other people too. There's a hell of a lot of alienated people in today's world, but the status quo is making it far worse quite often. And this is where the weaknesses are and this is where, you know, other non state actors come in and try to take advantage.
- [76:03]
B
Yeah, that's definitely a message that resonates well beyond Sierra Leone. Is this the sort of thing you're continuing to work on? Obviously the book, as you mentioned, was a massive long project. It was published in 2023. So I don't know if there's anything currently on your desk you want to give us a brief sneak preview of.
- [76:20]
A
Sure. I'm working with two veteran, yeah, award winning documentary filmmakers. They've optioned we the Young Fighters, the book and I'm working with them. We're in the very early stages of developing a feature documentary based on the book about Marley Tupac and Rambo in Sierra Leone. So we'll see. You know, we got to get funding, but this is our this is our hope. I'm also working on a new book called Untold Young People in War. War. Years ago, I was a professional freelance photographer, and I've taken photographs everywhere I've gone. And what I. What I'm aiming to do is use photographs of young people in intense wartime context, but to tell the stories behind those pictures so you understand what these people are, what's going on and what that context is. And then often the story of my engagement. I also have drawings of war by children together with the photograph of the artist, the young artist, and what each drawing depicts. So that's also part of Untold Stories. So there are eight chapters, six African countries and then Colombia and Kosovo. And the aim is to really allow, I guess, reader viewers to gain an instrument, an intimate understanding of what the lives of young children and youth engulfed in war, what their lives are like, and to give voice to these resilient young people. They really, I mean, a lot of people I've run across are absolutely incredible and living dignified lives in the most incredible, challenging circumstances. So I'm also working on sort of issues regarding governance and the threat of violent extremism and why violent extremism is expanding in today's world.
- [78:26]
B
Well, plenty then, to keep you very busy. And of course, for listeners who want to know more about what we're talking about, you can, of course, read the book titled we the Young Fighters, Pop Culture, Terror and War in Sierra Leone, published by the University of Georgia Press in 2023. Mark, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [78:46]
A
Miranda, it's been a pleasure. Thanks for inviting me to join you.