African author Ishmael Beah is under intense pressure to admit that his best-selling memoir of child soldiering in Sierra Leone is a mix of fact and fiction.
A Long Way Gone has sold almost 700 000 copies and transformed Beah from penniless orphan to millionaire writer and the United Nations Children’s Fund poster boy for its global campaign to keep children out of warfare.
Evidence gathered by the Australian newspaper makes the case that Beah was 15 and not 13 when he took up arms, and that he was a soldier for two months rather than the two years he claims.
As well as the narrative being out of kilter, the paper alleges that some events may be fabricated. It found no one to corroborate Beah’s detailed account of a January 1996 clash inside a government-administered refugee camp in Freetown that left six dead.
”It’s just not possible that could happen, with six people killed and nobody knowing about it,” veteran Freetown journalist Ahmed Mansray said.
Beah (27) and New York publisher Sarah Crichton have denied inconsistencies but have failed to provide anything to back up Beah’s account.
Crichton wrote to the Australian saying she had ”met many people who knew him in Sierra Leone and who have corroborated his story”. But she did not give the names of any.
Crichton admitted the facts in the book had not been checked — that the publishing house had simply accepted the New York writer’s word as gospel.
”When Mr Beah says, as he adamantly does, that the dates in his book are correct, we have absolutely every reason to believe that this is the case,” she wrote.
Most of the action in the book involves anonymous victims in unnamed villages but the starting point of the tale is a rebel attack on the village of Mattru Jong where Beah was at boarding school. This assault left him an orphan and began his descent from star pupil at Centennial Secondary School to the drug-addled murderer the book depicts him becoming.
Everyone the paper spoke to has the critical event on January 25 1995. Beah was then 15. Teachers from Beah’s boarding school confirm 1995.
”I was right about my family. I am right about the dates. This is not something one gets wrong,” Beah wrote in a letter to the Australian. ”Sad to say, it’s all real.”
The faults in A Long Way Gone were first noted by amateur sleuth Bob Lloyd, a Perth mining engineer working in Sierra Leone.
Lloyd approached the Australian after he was given the brush-off by Beah, his publisher, his agent and by Laura Simms, a professional storyteller who is Beah’s guardian in the United States.
The paper commented that the ”Ismael Beah saga is a puzzling tale complicated by what seems to be unquestioning and passionate belief in the young author from his publishers, guardian and agent”. — Sapa-dpa