What’s the truth about Ishmael Beah?

When I first told friends that I was going to Sierra Leone, they insisted that I simply had to read Ishmael Beah’s ‘A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier’. It has all the trappings of a tear jerker, a young boy whose parents are killed by the rebels in the civil war, friendships that are ripped apart by the devastation of conflict, forced drug abuse and finally an American adoption and a happy ending.

I must admit I hadn’t done much research on him and was quite moved by his account. Then I met a senior UN diplomat in Freetown who struggled to control his laughter when I told him I had just finished reading Beah. “Don’t you know he’s a complete fake?” I didn’t know. “He was sitting right where you are with a group of other child soldiers from the same regiment he had written about and no one could remember him,” he continued.

I felt silly and uninformed. As soon as I got home, I googled Beah and found that in early 2008, the Australian newspaper, The Australian, had challenged him on the authenticity of his story. Although Beah defended himself, the damage had been done. As it turned out no one was really able to vouch for certain elements of his story. The Weekend Australian revealed that Beah had been 15 not 13 when he joined the war and only served for three months in the Sierra Leone army instead of two years as he claimed.

Beah is currently a UNICEF ambassador, an appointment made before the damaging allegations. My friend at the UN confided that the local Sierra Leonean office of UNICEF was very unhappy about this and wanted to get rid of him as soon as possible. However they were unable to do anything since the decision had been made in the US. “They’re hoping that he won’t come back,” he said.