If you have never experienced violence far away from your comfort zone, you will most likely dismiss what is going on in South Africa at the moment. But I have and I can tell you for free that it is the ugliest thing in the world to wake up one day and know that you have hit ground zero and there is no way up.
That was me and my wife close to two decades ago. The place was Sierra Leone where I and a couple of young soldiers had gone to keep the peace. It was supposed to be a very simple assignment, get in there, get paid in dollars while your pay was still running back home in naira and try to keep a bunch of natives who were killing themselves like it was going out of fashion in check. But that was the problem, the said natives were not about to stand down and what we found ourselves doing to our chagrin was dodge bullets day in day out for years. You don’t want to be in such a situation or in South Africa for that matter right now. You may point out that the scenarios are different but you will agree that violence is the same.
It was evening as I recall when the scouts our commander had sent out returned. Actually, not all of them made it back to camp. As historians, if they care to pay us heed, will tell you, the Nigerian soldiers who had embarked on a peacekeeping operation in the ECOMOG task force in Sierra Leone met with a lot of casualties. But as everyone knows, it is a tradition with soldiers to die. But no one reckoned with the scale at which these deaths occurred in the neighbouring country with many warlords ready to do whatever to protect and capture territory. The result is that the casualties continued to mount even for the soldiers who had shown up to keep the peace. That was me and my colleagues largely made up of soldiers from Nigeria and a sprinkling from a few west African countries.
“This khaki no be leather o,” was how those who had experienced t before us were describing it. We who went in later found it to be exactly that and more.
But I digress. So, what was left of the scouts returned to tell us the horrors they had experienced and the danger of us remaining in the camp. As anyone can imagine, a deathly silence fell over the camp. Morale had been low or totally non-existent owing to how dire the situation had been for weeks. But we had come to Sierra Leone to do a job and our officers were hell-bent on making sure that duty was done. We were in a territory of rebels who did not care what our mission was. They were bloodthirsty and everyone who was in their way was to be eliminated, cut down like a forest of useless trees. The small band of rouges whom we gathered had broken off from the Fodey Sankoh strand gave us hell.
The map detailing our motive indicated the operation as high risk and code named it ‘Exterminate’. We were not to take prisoners as everyone knew by this time that the rebels were not playing and would have to be forced to shift ground rather than persuaded hence every avenue was to be utilised. In plain language, this was not a drill.
But we were late. When we got to the village, there was not rebel in sight to exterminate let alone engage with. Rather, they had done the exterminating and all we were left with was the tears, sorrow and blood to borrow the line from Afrobeat maestro, Fela, whose music was, and is still a favourite among soldiers.
I led the small team that combed the area to make sure there were no enemies about and that the friendlies, if any, were helped to rehabilitate in saner sections of the country or even as refugees away from the madness.
It was then I spotted her. She was sitting with her face in her arms. Her dress, which had seen many days and must have been once bright green, now hung on her emaciated body like a tent in a military camp that had survived a terrible shelling. Frail as she was, there was no mistaking her beauty. If the ruins we beheld had been a village, she would not have had trouble winning the crown of village belle since even the terror she had evidently experienced could not erase the trace of the natural magnificence she possessed. Before us was a rose among thorns.
It seemed as if she was oblivious to the world around her and only looked up into my eyes for a moment when I approached and tapped her on the soldier. She was neither afraid nor accommodating, just lost in the world, vulnerable. It must have been at that point that my heart reached out and touched hers. That is the best way I can describe what happened in that Sierra Leonean village those many years ago.
“Hello,” I said, but she just looked into the blankness in front of her and said nothing in return.
Against regulations, we brought her back to camp. There was no way we could let her go, besides, she was the only one who had witnessed what had taken place there and might have critical information that would help in our peacekeeping effort.
Eventually, she told us her name, Zara. But that was all we could get out of her. We sent her off to a refugee camp in the demilitarized area in the capital in Free Town. I continued my tour of duty but I couldn’t get her out of my mind. She was like a sore thumb with medicine and therapy unable to eliminate or even dull the pain. I just had to see her. Eventually, I was able to get a pass and wasted no time to get on my way to the refugee camp in Freetown. What I saw there amazed me to no end. In fact, it is the reason the killings in South Africa have called me experience in Sierra Leone to mind.
Continues next week