First Impressions: Rosemary Neill meets Mariatu Kamara, child war victim advocate

Bite of the Mango by Mariatu Kamara with Susan McClelland (Allen & Unwin, $22.99)

Mariatu Kamara, child war victim advocate. Picture: J. P. Moczulski

Bite of the Mango by Mariatu Kamara with Susan McClelland (Allen & Unwin, $22.99)

BEFORE telephoning Mariatu Kamara at her home in Canada, I am warned that the author and advocate for child war victims may take a long time to answer. For Kamara, an attractive 22-year-old woman from Sierra Leone, has no hands.

When she was 12 she fell victim to the vicious amputations that were a distressing feature of the civil war that tore through Sierra Leone from 1991 to 2002. Rebel soldiers who fought a succession of military governments for control ofthe country's mines, amputated the hands, legs, ears and lips of thousands of innocent civilians, who were then used to frighten others into submission.

In her memoir Bite of the Mango, released in Australia this month, Kamara describes how rebel soldiers from the Revolutionary United Front attacked a village near her home in 1999. Kamara had been sent to the village on an errand but became caught up in violence of such depravity it seems incomprehensible, at least outside the context of war.

The terrified child was tied up and made to watch as the rebels forced other villagers into a hut and set it alight. These mass murderers, some of them adolescents, then chopped off Kamara's hands: she saw one of her hands hit the dust, recalling how "the nerves kept it alive for a few seconds". She writes that after they mutilated her: "I saw the rebel boys giving each other high-fives. I could hear them laughing."

Was it difficult to revisit such memories in such harrowing detail? "It was, actually," Kamara tells Review, explaining that she wrote the book -- aimed at teenagers and adults -- to alert people to the traumas Sierra Leoneans have endured, but also to inspire them. "It was hard to go back and live in that moment again. Some of it (writing the book) was fun, although it was really tough to get this piece of information out of myself."

In Mango, co-written by the Canadian journalist Susan McClelland, the atrocities described are counterbalanced by Kamara's extraordinary resilience and sheer gutsiness. At one point she lived in a crowded refugee camp for amputees and begged on the streets of Sierra Leone's capital, Freetown. She writes wryly: "I would soon learn that kids like me, with no hands, made the best beggars of all."

While living at the camp, Kamara gave birth to a boy who died of malnutrition. She was only 13, but blamed herself for this tragedy. The baby, she says, was the result of a rape that had occurred in her home village: an older man had wanted to take her as a second wife and when she tried to fend him off, he wouldn't take no for an answer.

Out of the blue, Kamara's luck changed: a Canadian family read a newspaper report about her and eventually arranged for her to visit Canada in 2002. Once there, Kamara was granted residency on humanitarian grounds.

Today, she lives in Toronto in a large, livelyhousehold with other Sierra Leoneans. "Ithink of them as my family here in Canada," she says, adding that she is still acclimatising toher adopted country's famously frosty weather. A documentary is being made about her, and in August she will visit the Melbourne Writers Festival.

When Kamara arrived in Canada, she was 16, illiterate, unable to speak English and burdened with a potentially paralysing disability. Today, she speaks fluent English and is studying at college to become a family counsellor; assistants take lecture notes for her. She is clearly proud ofthe fact that "I pretty much do everything formyself".

She has been fitted with prosthetic hands but finds it easier to function without them. She has taught herself to use a computer, tie her shoelaces and cook. "Oh, cooking is not a problem. I cook. I love cooking," she says breezily. She twists lids off jars and bottles using her teeth and arms.

A UNICEF Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict, she has toured in this role across Canada, to the US and Sierra Leone. While visiting her native country last year, she met President Ernest Bai Koroma, and brought to his attention the plight of Sierra Leone's amputees who have been denied the kind of help she has received.

Among them are three of her cousins, caught in the same rebel attack as she was. Like Kamara, they have no hands. Unlike Kamara, they are still beggars. Although amputees have been promised free education and medical help, she discovered "nothing is being done by the government tosupport them. That breaks my heart a lot."

Kamara observes that although the war officially ended in 2002, "the situation in Sierra Leone is still bad. For example, people who have been hurt by the war, hurt like me, don't have good food, decent shelter. That was very disappointing for me to go back and see that situation still going on; it was really tough for me to see."

Bite of the Mango, which has been bought by publishers in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and throughout Europe, is being released at a time when fraudulent or exaggerated stories have cast a shadow over the memoir genre. Child soldier-turned-author Ishmael Beah has written a bestseller, A Long Way Gone, about his experiences in the Sierra Leone civil war, but last year, The Australian published a series of articles alleging that key parts of his story were inaccurate. (Beah claims he was forced into becoming a child soldier at 13, but records indicate he was attending school at that time.)

Beah, who stands by his story, has written an introduction to Bite of the Mango, and Kamara says he encouraged her to write her book. Neither Kamara nor McClelland will comment on apparent discrepancies in Beah's story. "I don't think it's my place to go into that," Kamara says.

McClelland stresses that Mango was fact-checked "line by line". She and Kamara travelled to Sierra Leone to double-check the veracity of people and places mentioned in it. McClelland suggests publishers need to apply such rigour to all memoirs, so that fake or exaggerated stories do not end up alienating readers from the genre, or casting doubt on authentic stories that need to be told. She says that as a seasoned journalist, "I know how to fact check a memoir and perhaps that is what publishing houses need to do."

Meanwhile, for all her courage and hard-won independence, Kamara admits that "little things" -- such as the time it takes her to button up a shirt -- can get her down. In her book, she writes about how initially she hoped the rebels who attacked her would be killed. But "over time I saw that taking a life was not the solution".

Still, understandably, forgiveness does not come easily to one who has suffered so profoundly. "I am still working on it, to be honest," she reveals.

"I haven't finally said I finally forgive or forget what happened. Forgiveness, I am working on it. I am taking it one step at a time ... it is a hard thing to let go of what happened."