Phonslyn Tity Turner, who turns 17 this month, has never known the horror of war.
His country, Sierra Leone, has settled into an uneasy peace two decades after its brutal and protracted civil conflict killed more than 50,000 people. He didn’t even understand why that war happened until a team led by Joseph Ben Kaifala, founder of the Center for Memory and Reparations, visited his school four years ago and explained why this new generation must protect peace.
“Knowing that most of the fighters were young children, like child soldiers, was really shocking to me,” Phonslyn said from Lungi, a coastal town north of the capital, Freetown, during a video call. Mr. Kaifala’s team “taught us that we must understand each other… Now I talk to the people in my community and explain to them what I have learned in school about the war.”
Why do we write this?
In addition to identifying and protecting mass graves, the center founded by Joseph Ben Kaifala elicits pledges from young people to never allow or participate in war again. “The idea of forgetting that the civil war happened to us is the most appalling statement I have heard in post-conflict Sierra Leone,” he says.
In a country under pressure to overcome its violent past, Kaifala believes remembering the war is vital to preventing its return.
As a child, Mr. Kaifala lost his father after the family fled the Sierra Leone civil war, which ravaged the country from 1991 to 2002. He survived another war after fleeing to neighboring Liberia, studied on scholarship in Norway and the United States, and eventually returned to Sierra Leone to launch educational initiatives such as the Center for Memory and Reparations. In addition to identifying and protecting mass graves, the center elicits pledges from young people to never allow or participate in war again.
“It’s always important for humans to connect with each other because when they know each other’s history, they are less likely to harm each other,” Kaifala told Nigeria-based Monitor contributor Innocent Eteng during a video interview in January.
Here is a transcript of that interview, condensed and edited for clarity.
Q: How do you promote peace in the next generation?
Promoting peace in a generation that has not known war is teaching them their history. It is to show them that their country had made a mistake because it abandoned certain values and principles. That’s why the (post-war) Truth and Reconciliation Commission began by outlining where we went wrong as a country. And then they listed all the mistakes we have made, from colonialism to corruption, violations of fundamental rights and bad governance.
Courtesy of Joseph Ben Kaifala
We keep saying that children are the future leaders. To make them effective leaders, we have to teach them their history: the good and the bad. Secondly, I always say that conflict is a fracture or failure of fundamental values. Peace is just a collection of good values: forgiveness, tolerance, good neighborliness, generosity, honesty.
What we are also doing is teaching these values to the young generation of Sierra Leoneans, to ensure that they understand that community peace does not fall from the sky like manna from heaven.
Q: How do you talk to young people about peace so that it is age-appropriate?
When I was young, when our parents gave us an encyclopedia to read, we would get excited. When I was a child I listened to the radio because my father listened to it. But you can’t expect Generation Z to do these things. You know that Generation Z will spend their time on social media watching short videos.
We produce short videos about the civil war and its transitional (post-war) justice system. We also have a podcast, which is not very long, because one of the things about Generation Z is that their attention span is very limited. We have learned to meet them where they are.
We’re currently building a civil war museum, and one of the things we’re working on now is a children’s section, because we can’t tell this story to children the same way we tell it to adults. One of the things I’ve done is create an avatar, which is a child who basically tells the story of the civil war the way children would want to hear and see it.
Q: What questions do young people ask you when you talk about your work?
Often when we talk about the violence and destruction that took place in this country, young people wonder how the country got to that point, especially when we tell them that most of the civil war was fought by children. They find it difficult to understand that adults can arm children to fight their wars. That’s a difficult question to answer beyond saying that we lost our way.
There are some schools where children want to know why other countries did not come to help us early enough, which also gives me the opportunity to emphasize that (the Economic Community of West African States, through its military wing, the ECOWAS Monitoring Group) was always with us. Our neighbors were our neighbors when we needed them most.
Q: How does your work as Chairman of the Sierra Leone Monuments and Relics Commission translate into preserving history for the younger generation?
Monuments and relics are very important in teaching younger generations about their identity and what we aspire to be as a people. When you honor a hero – for example, in Sierra Leone, we have a hero like Sengbe Pieh, who led the Friendship Revolt (1839) – what we are telling young people is that courage is important.
Secondly, I mentioned earlier that our main task at the center was to identify, map and protect mass graves. The idea is to turn these mass graves into places of conscience, as monumental places that remind the next generation of Sierra Leoneans that when we make mistakes and abandon our paths, this is the result.
Q: Sierra Leone has been under pressure to move forward after the civil war. What are the risks of a generation growing up without a clear understanding of that war?
One of the things I have come up against was the phrase that our clever politicians introduced right after the conflict. The phrase is “Forgive and forget.”
The idea of forgetting that the civil war happened to us is the most appalling statement I have ever heard in post-conflict Sierra Leone. I often remind people that sometimes that phrase comes from a place of privilege. How can we forget that (the hands) were amputated? Were you a farmer who can no longer farm? How do you forget that you were gang raped? How do you forget that when you were a child you were recruited and, to prove your loyalty, you saw your entire family burned to death?
I know it is impossible to forget these things because I will never be able to forget the things I saw in the civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone.
