By the time my mother sent tickets for my middle sister and I to join her in America, I had grown skilled at ignoring anything I couldn’t comprehend. My memory is generally not the best when it comes to this time, a common effect of childhood trauma. My father was in politics, so when the war started, the people I knew were some of the first to go. Then, there was a curfew – no leaving the house after 6pm.

First, my mother left, off to America to continue her legal education. In April 1992, Valentine Strasser, a young military officer, seized the Sierra Leonean government, becoming the youngest head of state in the world. But it was a life built on unstable ground. I travelled to Europe every summer holiday. On the outside, I had a very privileged childhood. I grew up in Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone. Books were the only way I felt I had control over my world. Whenever I felt uncomfortable or scared, I disappeared into books, my safe place.

Growing up, I was what you would call a master of escapism. For the first time, I was putting together all the things I’d seen and then just as quickly forgotten during the last few years of my childhood. My physical body was there, on that staircase, but the rest of me was elsewhere. Graphic images flashed behind them: gunfire, tanks, bodies lying dead in the streets.Īs I watched it, I felt a peculiar, floating feeling. They spoke with horror about how the atrocities happening were the worst they’d ever seen. It was 1997, I was 10 years old, and I was crouched on the staircase, watching as a reporter covered the civil war in Sierra Leone, West Africa, the homeland I’d left less than a year ago. The first time I realised I’d just escaped a war, I was watching CNN.

The Gilded Ones by Namina Forna