And Still Peace Did Not Come

March 7, 2011
Between 2004 and 2007, Kamara-Umunna hosted Straight from the Heart, a phone-in radio program that broadcast the "true-life stories" of survivors of Liberia's civil wars (1989–1996, 1999–2003). At the show's inception, the focus was on the victims. In this part memoir and part history, Kamara-Umunna intersperses these "true-life stories" with accounts of her own childhood and experiences in war-torn Liberia. She tells the story of the Straight from the Heart Center, a refuge for child soldiers. There, former child soldiers rebuild their lives from the ashes of atrocity and forge deep bonds of friendship among themselves. "Sometimes," she reports, "I get overwhelmed," and so too will the reader. This memoir, like the recollection of "ales so unspeakable it was hard to believe they had actually occurred," is an act of hope and catharsis, an answer to the unspeakable, images of boys turned automaton killers, dressed in costume "torn from women and children that they had killed," that to this day haunt the survivors of Liberia's brutal past.

January 1, 2011

A Liberian journalist sifts through agonizing stories of the victims and perpetrators of 14 years of civil war in her country.

Kamara-Umunna was the host of a call-in radio program, Straight from the Heart, broadcast from the United Nations Mission in Liberia beginning in 2004, a year after civil war devastated Liberia. In fact, there were two wars, from 1989 to 1996, and 1999 to 2003, in which the rebel warlord Charles Taylor wrenched control of the country from the previous illegal military dictator, President Samuel Kanyon Doe, then unleashed his murderous child recruits to wreak genocide to the magnitude of 250,000 dead. The author's job involved soliciting stories from victims as well as from the young perpetrators of violence and the warlords, to some controversy, "paving the way for a countrywide conversation" about the mayhem that would lead to the creation of a national Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2005. Each chapter begins with a brief eyewitness account by one of the traumatized voices, involving children being captured, brutalized, drugged, forced to perform savage acts and random murder in order to terrorize villages and please their commanders. Notes one soldier: "This was a method our commanders used to make us brave...Human lives became valueless to us." The bulk of the narrative involves Kamara-Umunna's own story. Growing up in neighboring Sierra Leone, the daughter of a Liberian nurse and a Sierra Leonean doctor (although she was not apprised that he was her father until grade school), she got pregnant at a young age, curtailing her education; later she worked as a secretary at a Freetown radio station, mostly escaping the violence by remaining in Sierra Leone. Her eventual work collecting stories was remarkable and brave, especially convincing her editors and listeners that the stories of the young perpetrators should be heard, and forgiven.

A well-composed work that brings the Liberian conflict up uncomfortably close and personal.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

Starred review from April 1, 2011
Kamara-Umunnas memoir is a harrowing account of the nightmare that gripped Liberia under Charles Taylors reign of terror in the 1990s and of the countrys attempt to heal itself. For Kamara-Umunna, who became a radio personality after Taylors fall, the latter meant reaching out to former child soldiers. The boys armed with machine guns, who raped and killed under orders from Taylors generals, ended up displaced and shunned by society once the dictator stepped down. Kamara-Umunna found that the former child soldiers, taken from their families and forced to fight or be killed, are as damaged and scarred by the war as their victims. She shared the boys stories on her radio show and founded the Straight from the Heart Center to get them off the streets. When Liberia followed in South Africas footsteps and established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, she encouraged the boys to participate. Though the accounts of the horrors under Taylor are staggering, Kamara-Umunnas story is one of hope and redemption. Her connection with the former child soldiers, who come to think of her as a mother, is the heart of this powerful and moving memoir.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)