Joseph Kaifala is an author, lawyer, human rights activist, and founder of the Jeneba Project. He is also the founder and principal of the Center for Memory and Reparations, an organization which facilitates remembrance and common narratives around the Sierra Leonean Civil War (1991 - 2002).
March 23rd, 2021 marks the 30th anniversary of the start of the 11 year civil war in Sierra Leone. In this interview, Joseph Kaifala talks about the importance of narrative for collective healing, the work of the center, and why it is so important for all Sierra Leoneans to learn from our history.
Poda-Poda Stories: Thank you Joseph for joining the Poda-Poda. Tell us about yourself and your work as a writer, scholar and lawyer.
Joseph Kaifala( JK) : I was born in Pendembu, Sierra Leone. I was trained as a lawyer. I am currently working as a writer and a historian, focusing on Sierra Leone history. I am the Principal of the Center for Memory and Reparations. Our work at the center is to facilitate remembrance and common narratives around the Sierra Leonean civil war.
Poda-Poda: Your memoir AdamaLui is a book about resilience, surviving trauma and finding hope. What inspired you to write that book? And what was the writing process like?
JK: As a survivor of the Sierra Leonean civil war, people wanted to hear my story, especially when I lived in the United States, but my experiences in the Sierra Leonean and Liberian civil wars were so complicated that it is often difficult to tell people the entire story in one sitting. So over the years, I decided that the best way to tell the story is to write a memoir, because I wanted my American friends to hear about my experiences. I lived in the United States where many young people had never been through such violence. I also believed that young Sierra Leoneans needed to hear a story of resilience and hope. I realized that a story like mine - coming from this same country after a decade of civil war, going to Norway and the United States to pursue my education - could inspire the next generation of Sierra Leoneans to keep working hard and become resilient in pursuing their dreams.
Poda-Poda: What was it like reliving some of those experiences?
JK: Many people who've read the memoir have called me to talk about its authenticity. And for me, that was very important to the storytelling. I decided that I was not going to sugarcoat anything. I was going to tell the raw stories as I experienced them. And that also meant reliving some of those experiences. It went two ways: It's painful to remember the past, but also remembering the past and reliving some of those experiences can help the individual healing process. It provided a lot of healing for me. I also believe that when other people read the memoir, they will be confident enough to share their stories because story-sharing has always been part of our culture, and it could help us relieve pain, because if we don't share our stories, we internalize them. And when we internalize them, the trauma remains.
Poda-Poda: I was at the premiere of your documentary Retracing Jeneba, and it's a film that shows some of the many atrocities that took place during the war. In many ways, we are still dealing with the trauma of the civil war. How can we as citizens collectively heal and rebuild?
JK: What we have to do is create an atmosphere in which people feel confident enough to share their story, and the rest of the society is willing to listen to them. Again, we cannot force people to recover from their trauma because the effect of a traumatic experience is different for every individual. But what we can do as citizens is to create a collective atmosphere in which people can share their story and victims are honored and respected. As of now in Sierra Leone, we don't have that atmosphere because people are preoccupied with other things, and talking about the war, the victims and the trauma, has been put behind us. Some people are unwilling to openly confront these issues because we don’t have an enabling environment.
What we are doing at the center is to compel this country to create moments of listening and sharing, to realize that if we are not bringing out our traumatic experiences, we are internalizing them and internalizing them doesn't make them go away. Pretending we don't remember the civil war is not going to eliminate its consequences.
And I think for instance, in my case, I have decided that it is important to use my traumatic past to help create a country in which other generations of children would not have to go through the kind of experiences we went through as children in this country. Citizenship requires that I take that obligation seriously, because we are often talking about leadership and the requirements of leadership. I believe that leaders are obliged to create a better country, to inspire people, to provide spaces for people to pursue their dreams. And my own way of doing that is to make sure I use this center to provide people with the confidence to share their experiences.
One of the reasons I created this center is that young people were making fun of amputees and victims of the civil war, because there was this lack of understanding between the younger generation and those who survived the brunt of our civil war. I launched the Sierra Leone Memory project back then to allow victims to tell their stories so that I could bring the conversation to a public space where we could all listen and hear what our fellow Sierra Leoneans were going through. That is one of the reasons I am persistently behind the Government of Sierra Leone to officially declare National Reconciliation Day and promote healing in Sierra Leone, because with their official declaration, we can come together as a country to engage in various methods of transitional justice and reconciliation.
Poda-Poda: You’ve mentioned a bit about your work with the Center for Memory and Reconciliation. What is your mission and what does the center hope to achieve?
JK: Our primary aim is to facilitate remembrance and common narratives around the Sierra Leonean civil war, which lasted between 1991 and 2002. What we're doing primarily is to lobby the government to declare National Reconciliation Day as recommended by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). When that happens, the government of Sierra Leone can facilitate reconciliation activities and promote transitional justice to honor victims. As a center, we often promote what we call #DusomtinfoSalone on January 18 (which is supposed to be national reconciliation day), encouraging Sierra Leoneans to take 60 minutes of their day to do community service, because we want people to use the trauma of our past to do community good.
Moreover, the TRC identified about 99 mass graves and other sites around the country. Other sites simply means places like torture houses and other places of massacre like the Kailahun Slaughterhouse. What we are doing is to re-identify these mass graves and protect them, because ever since the TRC completed its work, nothing has been done about them, and many of these places have been abandoned. What we are doing is going to communities, identifying these mass graves, and protecting them so that they can become sites of conscience and remembrance. We also organize traditional burial rites, bringing communities together to conduct prayers for those they lost in the conflict, because many of us lost our relatives in the conflict without the opportunity to bury them and conduct traditional burial rites. Some of us don’t even know where our relatives were killed.
We are also currently planning a commemoration of March 23, 2021 - the 30th anniversary of the start of a decade-long civil war in this country. The aim is to really get Sierra Leoneans to pause and remember the issues surrounding the decade-long civil war, and to commit to building a better country.
Poda-Poda: I can't believe it's been 30 years. I don't think many people realize that.
JK: People forget that the civil war in this country started in 1991 and not in 1999. We are using this 30 year anniversary to dispel some of the myths surrounding the conflict itself. We have a podcast, Memba, which we use to present significant information about the conflict, because we have realized that people are also telling stories about the war that are not really fact-based. One of the issues that we have had to dispel is the idea that the attack on Bomaru on March 23, 1991 was conducted by Foday Sankoh. That is not true. Foday Sankoh attacked Sierra Leone a couple of weeks after the attack on March 23rd, which was really a criminal attack on Sierra Leone by National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) rebels from Liberia, on a raid authorized by Anthony Mekunagbe to retrieve a looted vehicle commandeered by Major Emmanuel Foday of the Sierra Leone Army. After that incident, Foday Sankoh and Charles Taylor agreed that it would be easy to invade Sierra Leone at that moment.
Poda-Poda: You have a podcast called Memba which is the storytelling platform for the Center, and you seem to merge advocacy and storytelling very well.
JK:Well, I think if you want to bring society along, you cannot work without certain elements of activism. And for me, that means primarily beginning with myself. This is why I started by telling my own story, so people can identify with me, and others can gain the confidence to share their own stories. Sometimes there are victims or perpetrators who think that their experiences are shameful for society, and one of the things I try to tell victims is that what they went through is not shameful. You are a victim, you are a survivor, and we want to hear your stories because we are all responsible for what happened to you. In Sierra Leone, for instance, the TRC has said that many perpetrators did not get to give their testimonies to the commission because they were afraid. So what ensued is that many of these perpetrators, like child soldiers, who were also victims, are now living with their trauma because they were never able to testify.
So activism is very important to the work we do, because we want to make sure that victims have what they need to survive by calling on the Government of Sierra Leone to implement the TRC recommendations. The TRC made specific recommendations to take care of certain categories of victims that have not been fully realized. Many amputees are still suffering in this country and I cannot do this work without having to plead on their behalf. That is why we combine activism with the transitional justice work that we do.
Poda-Poda: You have a span in your career as a writer. You’ve written a memoir, a children’s book, a history book and you are also a legal scholar. How do you navigate these different genres?
JK: Driven by my experiences in the Sierra Leonean and Liberian civil wars, I wanted to write a memoir. However, I realized I couldn't write a memoir without fully understanding the history of my country. So I decided to put that aside and spend four years researching the history of Sierra Leone. At the end of that, I wrote a history book, Free Slaves, Freetown, and the Sierra Leonean Civil War. In the beginning, I simply wanted to write about the civil war, but then I realized in the middle of it that I couldn't write about the civil war without providing a clear history of this country. So it ended up becoming a full history book of Sierra Leone.
There were also a lot of emotions I couldn’t describe in both books, so I decided to turn to poetry to make sense of my experiences. And that is what the poetry book is about. It is called Tutu's Rainbow World, because one of the individuals in our world who inspires me more than any other is Archbishop Desmond Tutu. He has a way of describing South Africa as a rainbow nation of diversity, and that is the theme of that poetry book. When Nelson Mandela was in prison Wole Soyinka wrote a poetry book he called Mandela’s Earth - I wanted to give Desmond Tutu the world. So, all of these books are intertwined in the sense that they are all geared towards making sense of Sierra Leone, making sense of my life as a Sierra Leonean, and surviving a decade of civil wars.
Poda-Poda: I always ask writers this question: How has writing saved your life?
JK: I think it was Shakespeare who said that “I write because there is a lot in me I cannot talk about.” When I'm able to express these things on paper, I can convey exactly how I'm feeling. One thing many people do not know about me is that I am an introvert. So, it is often better for me to write than to talk. But really, writing for me has been a way of healing. It gives me the opportunity to express my feelings, to share my hopes and dreams, and to make sure other people are inspired by it.
centerformemoryandreparations.org
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