Two major Hollywood films have been produced that relate to Sierra Leone. Steven Spielberg’s film Amistad (1997, with Morgan Freeman, Sir Anthony Hopkins, Mathew McCounaghey) is about an 1839 mutiny aboard a slave ship travelling towards the Northeast Coast of America. But much of the plot revolves around the court-room drama that lead to the historic supreme court decision recognizing the captives’ right to freedom. The heroic role of Sengbe Pieh (Cinque), who organized and led the revolt, was marginalized.
Edward Zwick’s film Blood Diamond (2006, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Connelly and Djimon Hounsou) is about conflict diamonds mined in Sierra Leone, Angola and Congo and sold in major diamond cutting centers – Antwerp, Tel Aviv and Mumbai – to finance (and prolong) armed conflicts in Africa. The film is centered in Sierra Leone and portrays many of the atrocities, including the practice of cutting off people’s limbs to spread fear and insecurity in the country side and to gain control over the diamond, gold, bauxite and rutile mining areas. But the action is focused mostly on Danny Archer (Leonardo DiCaprio), a white mercenary from Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), who trades arms for diamonds with an RUF commander (Corporal Foday Sankoh), and Maddy Bowen (Jennifer Connelly), an American journalist covering the war and investigating the illegal diamond trade. The role of De Beers Group, which is the major player in the diamond trade, was bracketed out. It has been suggested that the company pressured the producers of the film to include a disclaimer saying the events are fictional and in the past – De Beers has denied this. This film and the Nollywood Video films (Nigerian Productions) on blood diamonds have established Sierra Leone as the blood diamond country in the minds of people all over the world.
Another film relating to Sierra Leone entitled “The Language You Cry In”, is a documentary detailing the multi-generational connection between an African American family on the coast of Georgia and a small Mende village in Sierra Leone. The film focuses on the Georgia woman’s knowledge of an old funeral hymn in the Mende language. A trio of an anthropologist, an ethnomusicologist, and an African linguist worked with this woman to discover the African roots of the song. They found that the song originated in a small village in southern Sierra Leone. A trip is organized for the Georgia woman and her family to travel to this village and meet with the people of that community who may be her long-lost family in Africa. The film’s main point is to show how one specific “Africanism” has survived through hundreds of years and thousands of miles.
In literature, Sierra Leone is the setting for Graham Greene’s classic novel The Heart of the Matter, which deals with diamond smuggling during World War II. Since the rebel incursion in the early 1990s a number of books have been written about the trade in diamonds or minerals for weapons. These include Hugh Paxton’s horror/action novel; Amadou Kourouma’s posthumously published book about roving rebel war soldiers, such the late Sam Bockarie, who fought in Liberia and Sierra Leone and was killed fighting in Côte d’Ivoire; and Ishmael Beah’s book A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. Hugh Paxton’s novel Homunculus juxtaposes the realities of the war in Sierra Leone with a fantasy of the exploitation of the war for the trade in blood diamonds and for the testing, demonstration and sale by auction of bio-weapons to a select clientele of international arms dealers and mercenaries. Trial by Rebellion by retired Captain Francis Ken Josiah was recently published in United States.
Noteworthy Sierra Leone writers include Abioseh Nicol (The Truly Married Woman And Other Stories), Robert Wellesley Cole (Kossoh Town Boy), Syl Cheney-Coker (The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar), William Conton (Kissimi Kamara), Amadu Yullisa Maddy (No Past, No Present, No Future), Sheikh Gibril Kamara (The Spirit of Badenia) Aminata Fornah (Ancestor’s Stones, and Ishmael Beah (”A Long Way Gone”).
Finally, the Kroo Bay projectprovides sketches about the reality of life for thousands of people living in slum communities in the capital, Freetown.
