Stuart Freedman

Today’s conflicts are not fought between countries but within them. Modern warfare is less about armies than irregular units. Through my work, I am exploring the mental landscapes of those conflicts that are being fought within Africa today and the result - a damaged generation. This story is not about child soldiers or kids in uniform. Rather it is an attempt to show that entire countries carry within their borders, those that have as young unformed minds, committed atrocities. These are minds that have experienced socialisation where the standards of behaviour are determined by the possessions of weapons and the power of life and death.

In Sierra Leone, Safia’s story is typical. He was nine when his parents were murdered. Captured by the rebels and force-fed gunpowder, he has been party to rape, torture and murder. Today in Freetown, homeless, unemployed and prone to fits of random depression and violence, he is a very disturbed young man.

I want this project to accurately reflect that the children and young men portrayed are not evil and it is they that have been subjected to unspeakable brutality. In these conflicts there are no battleground rules and it has been said that conflicts in late twentieth century Africa can be interperated in terms of the “wild sexuality of adolescent boys, lethal weapons and ‘Rambo’ culture”.(Michael Ignatieff). It is unpredictable, wild and sadistic. There is no traditional warrior’s honour. For some children, killing has become a game: life, something to “play” with. Tens of thousands of children are recruited (or forced) to fight in wars: brutalised and scarred, in turn, they give birth to societies where violence and brutality are key.
The proliferation of light small arms is a factor but children are easy to manipulate and cheap to feed. Children are often force-fed drugs and forced into atrocities (including the murder of parents) thus socialising them into violence and obedience. Child soldiers are not new but it is the scale and the easy acceptance of the poisoning of young minds that is so alarming.

It has become fashionable (especially in Western policy - making circles), after Robert Kaplan’s notorious essay, “The Coming Anarchy”, to see this “senseless” violence as Kaplan would have it, as a microcosm of a planet driven to war by over - population, enviromental crisis and tribalism. Here,“loose molecules” of violent youths, kill and rape with a “New Barbarism” which is beyond “our” (the west’s) comprehension. But this is too easy and I think were guilty of a modern misanthropy.
I think these ideas have everything to do with colonial legacy and the idea of African man as savage - the TV brings pictures from a world (‘over there’) that’s just too ‘crazy’ for us to understand.

These children/youths are pawns of a larger geo - political struggle that is being played -out in Africa, As states implode at the hands of warlords and would-be messiahs, the social forces which hold them together are also disappearing.
There is a savegery in Africa but I do not believe that it is any more inherent here than in other places. At the end of the Cold War, the West is losing its rationale for involemnt. By ignoring the fall out of these wars we are simply blaming the victims.

Rather than viewing Africa as “Heart of Darkness” country, we ignore this generation of damaged minds at our peril and damn ourselves by our own insecurities and inaction.

Stuart Freedman, May 1998

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold’ The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned…”