By Osman Benk Sankoh
Today, it may seem like a long distant gone. It is about like two decades ago but for those who were living witnesses to it or may have consumed it from the pages of our history books , 1990 was the era of guns, bombs and bullets in some West African States . Like a plague, it caught up with Liberia and before you knew it, Sierra Leone followed suit. Guinea had her own fair of share civil strife in the ensuing melee but it was in Ivory Coast that it blossomed into a full blown contagion.
And like most people in these countries during this period, Agnes Fallah Kamara – Umunna knows what it means to suffer from instant diarrhea when the sound of Rocket Propelled Grenade (RPG) literally takes over the air-waves as if to signal the death knell of any anyone standing – be it young or old, man or woman. She, like many of her counterparts knows what it means to witness life being snuffed out from neighbors or even loved ones by rebels just because they don’t like their looks or may have had an old score to settle or on the mere presumption that they are either rebel collaborators or government informants.
In Liberia where she was born, Agnes hastily packed whatever that was left of her belongings when rebels came knocking on the city gates and ran across the border to Sierra Leone where she sought refugee with her father. If she had thought that coming over to Sierra Leone was the beginning of peace, then she definitely must have got her calculations wrong as rebels this time, under the leadership of Corporal Foday Sankoh and his Revolutionary United Front (RUF) started wrecking havoc on people with the hope of capturing political power at all cost from the claws of the All People’s Congress (APC) that had gripped power for over twenty four years.
But they say , home, no matter what , is always sweet home and in 2004 when peace once again revisited Liberia , Agnes decided to return to the land of sweet Liberty and the rest is what she , together with Emily Holland have catalogued in this compelling , ‘Memoirs of Reconciliation,’ – And Still Peace Did Not Come . But how did it happen? What was the inspiration? How was Agnes able to secure a contract with the UN Radio in Liberia that later created the break for her make ex-combatants not only her fan base or friends but loyalist who unto to this day, refer to her as the ‘Ol Ma’ whenever they see her walking through Broad, Centre and Carey streets among others in down town Monrovia?
Her co- author , Emily Holland, I have not yet met but for Agnes , it started when I got a call from Security that a lady who works in Sierra Leone as a journalist was at the gate to the entrance of the UN Mission gates at the annex of the headquarters in Liberia. She wanted to see me. Permission was granted and when we met, she was strange. I have not met or seen her before but she had an interesting story to tell. She said she was back home and wanted to contribute to the peace process in Liberia and that she had a little bit of experience working around a radio station. With time, Agnes met with my bosses Patrick Coker, Kingsley Lington and later, Joseph Roberts- Mensah (Kojo) who introduced her into real broadcasting and it was him ( Kojo) who transformed the then timid Agnes into a talk show host – Straight From the Heart on UN Radio .
Unlike other programs Straight from the Heart talked directly to both victims and perpetrators of the Liberian civil crisis but also , for the first time, it created a window of opportunity for both ex-combatants to confront their war past and reconcile or rather begged for forgiveness from those they had perpetrated heinous crimes against . Though painful, it was probably here that Agnes’ idea of teaming up with Emily to write about the stories of ex-combatants and the physical and somewhat traumatic experience she personally went through just to get their voices heard was conceived.
