For the time being, war-torn Sierra Leone has no standing army of its own. But Chief Sam Hinka Norman, reappointed as deputy minister of defence, says he has other forces to call on.
“If you point your rifle at me, you may believe it, it will not strike me,” he says. “When all this is over, we will call the Western press and we will have a conference and put an object down and say, use any weapon you want to, try and hit that at close range. And you will not.”
Norman’s belief in the military application of supernatural power is shared by the strange collection of fighting men still under his authority.
Led by priests and organised by traditional hunting brotherhoods – known as the Kamajors, Capras, Tamaboros and Dunsos – these fighters have in recent weeks played a major role in clearing Sierra Leone’s interior of forces loyal to Major Johnny Paul Koroma’s ousted military junta.
The assault against the junta forces, an alliance of Koroma’s mutinous government army and the Revolutionary United Front guerrilla movement which ruled for nine months following a coup last May, was led by regular Nigerian troops of the Ecomog West African peace-keeping force.
By February 14, Ecomog had liberated the capital, Freetown. But in the interior cities of Bo and Kenema, fierce fighting took place between the Kamajors and the junta forces, with the Kamajors (mainly members of the southern Mende tribe) prevailing.
Across the country, the hunting brotherhoods, of which the Kamajors and the Capras – mainly ethnic Temne – are the largest, have been enlisted to help the less mobile Nigerian regulars comb the bush for rebels still holding out against the elected President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah.
With years of experience in fighting the junta forces’ allies in the Revolutionary United Front guerrilla movement, it is a role to which the Nigerian military commander, Colonel Maxwell Khobe, says they are well suited.
What matter if their methods are a little irregular, not to mention their appearance?
On March 6, the day after Nigerian troops first entered the northern town of Magburaka, a band of Capras emerged from the bush, dragging with them a terrified junta fighter they had captured the previous night.
These were the first “civil defence” fighters that most of the Nigerian regulars had seen and – despite efforts to be polite – few could resist giggling and nudging each other.
Clad in bright, multicoloured woollen vests and ponchos, adorned with mirrors, medicine bundles, conch shells and fetish beads, the Capras looked like the paramilitary wing of the Jimi Hendrix fan club.
The band – 27 strong – included several youths, a couple of old men and one boy who looked no older than 13. The child was unarmed, but the rest clutched old single-barrel shotguns.
One man held a well-preserved 19th-century cavalry carbine, another proudly brandished the group’s only modern automatic rifle, an AK-47 captured from the junta forces.
But the band’s representative, who called himself Motorman Garage, explained that firearms were not their primary weapon.
“There are different ways of fighting,” he said. “When we approach the rebels, we will make the rebels not hear any sound. The rebels’ guns will not fire, and the rebels will not see us approach. One hunter can fight 40 rebels.”
Their secret weapon stood beside him. Just 1,5m tall and speaking no English, the elderly “priest”, or “tamabora leader”, called himself Johnson Doe.
He wore faded plaid trousers and a Clint Eastwood poncho festooned with little woollen packets containing charms.
He said the junta forces and their allies in the guerrilla movement had, in two years, not managed to kill a single one of his men and give their native Masombirie area a wide berth.
Was it true the Capras use secret rituals to prepare themselves for battle? He smiled: “That is a secret.”
Movements claiming to have supernatural powers are not uncommon in Africa, even in modern times. In the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, for instance, members of the Mai Mai movement fighting local ethnic Rwandans and President Laurent Kabila’s government believe that undergoing secret rituals and fighting naked makes them bullet-proof in combat.
In Mozambique in the early 1990s the Naparama movement, led by the messianic prophet Manuel Antonio, cleared most of Zambezia province of Renamo rebels without government help.
They did this despite the fact that the rebels were armed with modern weapons and the Naparamas were forbidden, on religious grounds, from using anything but knives and spears.
But unlike the other quasi-religious militia movements in Africa, Sierra Leone’s traditional hunters are closely allied to their country’s legal government.
Kabbah’s efforts to expand the role of the traditional hunters at the expense of the regular army is widely believed to have helped spark Komora’s coup.
Kabbah, like most ordinary Sierra Leoneans, had become convinced the government army was secretly working in cahoots with its supposed enemies in the Revolutionary United Front, who had been looting and laying waste to the interior since 1991.
The traditional hunters, on the other hand, were determined to protect the people from the rebels – and the army if need be.
In 1995, at a refugee camp on the outskirts of the interior capital, Bo, I met a tiny 78-year-old man named Joseph Fatuma who, half a century before, had fought with the British Army’s West African Frontier Force in Burma.
Now his people, driven from the southern district of Pujehun, had called him out of retirement to train them to fight.
Each month, every family in the camp donated two cups of dry rice and a few cents in cash to feed and equip his ragged force of 45 men, half of them armed with antique shotguns, the rest with machetes and spears.
Patrolling back into their home district, they claimed to have killed over 60 rebels in three months. Despite his age, Fatuma himself led the attacks. “I do not fear these people,” he said. “They are children. I fought the Japanese.”
Ironically, last year’s alliance between Komora’s soldiers and the Revolutionary United Front rebels also cemented the bond between the technocratic modernists of Kabbah’s elected government and the atavistic peasant hunters of the interior.
Hence the odd mixture of personalities in Kabbah’s first post-coup Cabinet, announced this week.
Sierra Leone’s urbane former ambassador to the United Nations, James Jonah, will work cheek by jowl with Norman, a traditional Mende chief and self-confessed practitioner of magic.