Who Stole Reality?
Tamba was an example of what I call real ‘reality’. I met
him when he was 18 and for the most part of the eight years before I met
him he had been a killer, a child soldier in my country’s terrible
ten year long civil war.
For all his crimes and there were many, Tamba was and is an innocent,
ripped from his childhood by people who should have known better.
They too, are part of the cycle of violence and evil that grew out of
injustice, wrongs done to people by governments that didn’t care.
At the beginning they were ‘irrelevant’ so they did things
like creating soldiers out of children that eventually made them relevant.
Tamba has not been destroyed by his experiences as a child soldier. He
is a good guy. He needs to know the good that is in him and so do all
my countrymen and women in Sierra Leone.
In the film I made with Tamba called Return to Freetown, I hope I have
shown people a way to forgive Tamba and all the child soldiers for what
they did and I hope the child soldiers like Tamba can learn to forgive
themselves because that is the purpose, I think of good journalism –
to show us all a way out of the cycle of violence by understanding how
we got there in the first place.
For me the saddest thing is that it is becoming more and more difficult
to make my films. The stories of Tamba and all the other “innocents”
do not make popular television – according to the broadcasters.
I suppose they’re just another business although I had always hoped
– I had always felt they were better than that.