Published in Issue 64.1: Winter 2025
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Do you know about the 1997 coup d’état in Sierra Leone? You might have heard about it if you saw that 2006 Leo DiCaprio movie Blood Diamond, which did a surprisingly good job with the subject matter, given the Hollywood factor. But this coup d’état happened before social media, so it didn’t garner much press. It also happened in Africa, where events don’t often make it past the horizon of global interest. As luck would have it, I happened to be in Freetown, Sierra Leone’s capital, when the coup erupted. The memory of it dims, an outlier in the puzzle of my person: mother, American, Tunisian, neuroscientist, . . . war survivor? I’m writing this down to inform you—but also me—that it really happened, to make a record of events, to provide a sample of lived civil unrest.
I was eighteen in 1997 and visiting my family in Freetown, home from my first year in college. I’d been to Freetown the summer before, and my dad had been stationed there for a couple of years already. A “resident representative” of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), a sister organization to the UN focusing on economic development, he spent his first year alone in Sierra Leone due to the country’s security problem—namely, a brutal civil war. The rebels fighting the war, the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), were famous for their signature arbitrary limb mutilation as they ravaged the country, village to village. But by 1996, whoever was in charge of UN family repatriation decided that, with the war ebbing and a civilian government in place, the country was once again safe for the spouses and children of its personnel. And so, my mom and two younger sisters joined my dad in Freetown, in a lovely house on a hill, in a neighborhood called Wilberforce, a name imbued with power, weighted with history.
That year, I begged my dad to help me find an internship, not wanting to spend my summer in tropical listlessness. (No internet back then.) My father was leery of nepotism, so it was the first and last time he hooked me up with something, a volunteer internship with Action Against Hunger (AAH). On my first day, I met with the people working there, mostly French, young and dour. I got the general vibe that I was unwanted. At lunch that first day at AAH, someone showed up who made everyone else stand up a little straighter, a Belgian man from the EU commission who strode into AAH like he owned the place. The staff seemed in awe of him. At the table, he took over the conversation, doling out insider information on rebel activity in the country, and the others deferred to him like he wasn’t the dime-a-dozen European Who Understands Africa he was. Why is he worth a mention? Because a few weeks later, under the shelling, he would unveil himself as a dyed-in-the-wool dirtbag. During those few weeks at AAH, a kind Spanish nurse took me under his wing as we drove around the Freetown Peninsula to check on displaced persons camps. Like me, he seemed to breathe freer out in the field than at headquarters.
The civil war in Sierra Leone had begun in 1991 and, by 1997, was thought to have ended. In brief, the country was mismanaged following its independence from the British in 1968. In 1991, Sierra Leone was one of the poorest countries in the world. Its people suffered, its youth had no future, and, as you can imagine, the next logical thing happened: the RUF came into being, fighting the established government in a brutal internecine conflict. In Sierra Leone, the war “ended” when South African mercenaries stepped in, imposing a form of peace. These mercenaries, improbably called Executive Outcomes, had to earn a living after apartheid ended and racist secret police were dismantled. Why and how did South African mercenaries end up in Sierra Leone? It was the second largest producer of raw diamonds in the world. There were fights and threats of fights over the diamond pie, so the Sierra Leonean government opted to hire “well-trained” security to bring peace and protect the diamond mines. And peace came, for a while, and a civilian government with it. But then the mercenaries were thrown out, the optics being what they were (bad). The RUF were not neutralized though: echoes of their brutality in the bush made their way to the capital, though we were reassured that they were banished from the Freetown Peninsula. Still, one could find many strange players in Sierra Leone in 1997, Indiana Jones-types, adventurers probably lured by the diamond mines. So there were a lot of armed factions at the time in the country, including the civilian government; the RUF in the bush; the South African mercenaries who still hung around, incredibly large and pink men; the Kamajors, local village militias formed to push back on the RUF; and the Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group (ECOMOG), a peace-keeping force made up of mostly Nigerian soldiers. If this collection of armed interests wasn’t volatile enough, next-door Liberia was also implicated in the RUF via the country’s one-time president and now-convicted war criminal, Charles Taylor, who provided arms to the rebels in exchange for diamonds. Altogether, a large ensemble cast of people and interests.
My family lived in a compound, a large house surrounded by high walls. Our backyard was a vast, steep slope. The view from the back of the house was the breathtaking expanse of beach and Atlantic Ocean. As in other IMF residences, ours was not a home but a functional house. The sheets and dishes were familiar, elegant but neutral, as they were in the previous residence we’d lived in, thousands of miles away.
There were many details about our life in Freetown that we chuckled at, mainly centered on security measures we didn’t fully appreciate at first. The compound was walled, spiked with broken glass, and topped with barbed wire. The main doors of the house were impossibly thick wood. We were tasked with securing those doors with a large metal bar every night. If you went upstairs to our living quarters, you’d be greeted first by a metal gate, followed by a bulletproof door, which led to a hallway. Off that hallway, our bedrooms, and another bulletproof door that led to a double room, where my parents slept and where we hung out. This was our safe room, where we were meant to hide in case of trouble. We laughed too at the weekly drill on the radio, when UN security did a roll call of personnel and my dad had to come on and state his code name. We marveled that a security expert came to inspect the house for vulnerabilities. A security expert! It was a bit spy-novel for us, but the report that came back was downright surreal, if presciently accurate: the roof of our fortress was made of tin, easy to breach. The solution would be an electric grid laid on the roof to shock any intruders. Finally, at night, a UN patrol would come around a couple of times to make sure we were safe. We had no weapons of course. It was forbidden for IMF and World Bank personnel to possess firearms, not that we would have known what to do with them anyway.
I arrived in the capital at the end of April 1997, my older brother a month later. My family had found their groove in Freetown, made some friends, found a bakery, that sort of thing. My father organized a family outing the first weekend we were all together, out to a beautiful place on the beach at a river’s confluence. The river wasn’t too wide, but wading into its mouth, you could feel that pull of the ocean, of the Big, Big, Bigger than you. After a morning at the beach, we went to a restaurant nearby for lunch, where I noted the presence of French soldiers, more non-sequitur characters playing on the Sierra Leonean stage. Later that day, we went to one of Freetown’s hotels, the Mammy Yoko, where we had access to the pool. On the terrace, my parents ran into friends and acquaintances, picking up news. Being Arabic speakers, they had befriended a number of Lebanese Sierra Leonians, more immigrants than expats, some having settled there a century before. There was the usual coterie of diplomats and UN personnel. But scattered amongst them were more curious men with opaque reasons for being in the country, vague professional affiliations such as “business” rather than an acronym. Some were tough, some pretended to be so, and all were cagey in their answers, lured to the country by the crucible of diamond trade churning in just barely controlled chaos. At some point, the hotel manager, a genial American man who would later be accused of arms dealing, came to greet my dad. That Saturday, May 24th, was a peaceful day in a beautiful place, full of birdsong and blue skies, a day where we all actually enjoyed one another. It might have been one of the last times my family did so.
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Leyla Loued-Khenissi is a Tunisian-American cognitive neuroscientist and mother based in Lausanne, Switzerland. She holds a PhD in neuroscience from the École Polytechnique Fédérale De Lausanne. Most of her writing to date has come in the form of arcane, peer-reviewed scientific articles on the neuroimaging of uncertainty and surprise in humans. She has written about this work in Psyche magazine in an attempt to illuminate the arcana of her science.
