10 - Visions of War, Testaments of Peace: The “Burden” of Sierra Leone

Summary

Take up the White Man's burden

Send forth the best ye breed—

Go bind your sons to exile

To serve your captives’ need;

To wait in heavy harness, On fluttered folk and wild—

Your new-caught, sullen peoples, half devil and half child.

Rudyard Kipling, “The White Man's Burden” (1899)

Introduction

Kipling's poem “The White Man's Burden” is the ultimate aesthetic signifier of the role of white colonialists around the world, but even more significantly, it carries within it a greater burden, one shouldered by the subjugated, the object of its derisive lens, who must forever live in the shadow of their assumed inferiority. The poem lives beyond the colonial era, for its implications—the nobility of white Westerners, their transcendent humanism manifested in their ever-present willingness to give to those unfortunate “sullen” peoples—encapsulate a Western vision of the world that still defines, categorizes, codifies, and judges everything that darker peoples do, from defecation to spiritual elevation. When we examine the present-day aesthetic signifiers and depictions of the real, of the realities of the darker “other” as still perpetuated by the center “white,” we are left with variegated concepts of the white man's burden. When we specifically move toward a cinematic lens, the visual field recodes, reifies, and makes even more obvious the need for the white man's rationality, stability, strength, intelligence, and dignity in the face of the ruthlessness, violence, chaos, irrationality, ignorance, and ineptitude of the darker being.

This chapter examines both visual and textual depictions of the Sierra Leone war and its aftermath. The analysis focuses on three vectors: the films Blood Diamond and Ezra, the text A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah, and the e-book Don't Let Me Die by Adisa Andwele (ÁJA). My intention in this chapter is to provide a critique of the paternalistic, problematic vision of Africa inherited through the discourse of the white man's burden, reflected in the film Blood Diamond, by debunking its representational myths about the continent or, as they are described by Achille Mbembe, its “imaginary significations.” The critique thus hinges on comparing and contrasting differing versions of the representation of the Sierra Leonean civil war and its aftermath as seen in the film Ezra, the memoir A Long Way Gone, and the e-book Don't Let Me Die.