When Chris Blattman was last in Liberia, we talked about blogs. And Kindles and enumerators and a lot of other things too, but also a lot about blogs. He was just about to launch his new site christblattman.com and was looking for a header image.

I pulled out my laptop and started flipping through files of images. I asked him what kind of thing he was looking for. He wasn’t sure, he said.

But, no children.
And, no Africans dancing.

No problem, I said. I have tons of photos of all kinds of things, and since most of his research coincidentally takes place in the two countries where I’ve spent the most time, this would work out nicely. As I scrolled through some thumbnails, he stopped and pointed to one of them and asked to see it full size.

It was of children dancing.

He finally settled on this image, from Karamoja.

Check out his new site for Lenin cakes, development experiments, and a belly proof golden summer.

(If I had been there, nothing could have kept me from taking a picture. Rules about respecting people’s wishes to not be photographed be damned!)

And speaking of going dot com, next week I’ll be launching ScarlettLion.com. Stay tuned for more info. It’s been fun a fun lion sex filled run, blogspot, but it’s time for me to go dot com.

Former Liberian President Charles Taylor, who spurred a decade of violence in neighboring Sierra Leone, is on trial for war crimes. Why don’t Sierra Leoneans seem to care?

BY GLENNA GORDON | JULY 28, 2009

In every country, there’s a number. It’s a number journalists memorize and repeat so often that it’s hard to remember it’s a real number. In Uganda, the number was two million displaced at the height of the conflict with the Lord’s Resistance Army. In Liberia, the number is 250,000 dead during fourteen years of civil war.

I just learned the number for Sierra Leone: it’s tens of thousands dead, one third of the population of six million displaced by war.

I don’t remember the exact moment when I learned the number for Uganda. I also don’t remember the moment I learned Liberia’s number, since I read about the country long before I came here.

But just yesterday, I had to learn Sierra Leone’s number. I looked it up, because ten days in Freetown didn’t teach me that number.

The number two.

Just an hour away from bustling Freetown, a small hotel called Franco’s is the perfect getaway. There’s fish carpaccio and a tomato salad that reminded me just how good really good olive oil is. I went with my brother and a friend and we drank and swam and ate and relaxed.

It was high tide. While usually there’s a big sandy beach right outside the building, the water came up to our room’s window. I almost got carried away by the rip tide during an ocean romp, but that’s another story for another day.

For now, here’s my friend exiting the room via the window. And then my brother. And then a sunset. It was a really lovely trip.

Candace Feit is an award winning photographer who spent several years in West Africa. She’s recently moved to India, and photography from the region is worse for it. Her work is always thoughtful and beautiful, and tells some stories that make headlines and also important stories that don’t. I loved her recent series on Senegalese wrestlers, “Tyson vs. 50 Cent,” and she agreed to answer a few questions about it for Context Africa.

The point of this series is to highlight projects that go above and beyond daily news to tell a story of a place in its context. I also hope create an ongoing dialogue about what it means to tell contextual stories in Africa. There’s a lot of daily news out there that is factually incorrect, slanted, or stereotyped. But, there are also a lot of journalists committed to telling a different kind of story.

See Context Africa posts:

• Mary Wiltenburg documents a year in the life of a refugee
• Sam Reinders pictures the complications of “poverty tourism”
• Paul Sika’s technicolor dreamscape
• Andrew Rice on memory, murder and Idi Amin
• Tim Hetherington on the culmination of ten years of taking pictures in Liberia
• Rob Crilly on how to write about a place as contentious as Darfur
• Nicholai Lidow on post-conflict surfing
• Jina Moore’s Q and A about forgiveness in Rwanda

There are a lot of wrestlers in Senegal. How did you decide to focus on this particular group? How long did you spend working on this series?

You mention that wrestling is changing a lot in Senegal, from a village sport to big business. Did you get to see examples of the village counterpart during your time in Senegal?

At any point during the snapping did you do some wrestling?? Or weight lifting?

A the formed headquarters of ICRC, posters once served as a means for people to find family members lost during the war.

MONROVIA, Liberia — Gladys Arthur doesn’t care about Charles Taylor or Ellen Johnson Sirleaf or any of the other warlords and politicians who are named for wrongdoing in Liberia’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission final report.

The commission sought to understand both the causes and the consequences of Liberia’s chaotic 14-year civil war. They collected testimony of nearly 20,000 Liberians, including victims like Arthur and perpetrators like Prince Johnson, head of one of the rebel groups and one of the individuals listed as the single most notorious war criminals.

President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf is publicly sanctioned in the report and it recommends she not be allowed to hold office for another 30 years. Charles Taylor, who is now on trial at The Hague for crimes against humanity committed in neighboring Sierra Leone, is condemned and further prosecution is recommended.

But for Arthur, the only name that matters is on page 334 of the report, number 90 (she knows this off the top of her head) on the list of “most notorious perpetrators” recommended for further prosecution.

“M-A-N-G-O M-E-N-L-O-R,” said Arthur, 31, spelling out each letter decisively in her soft-spoken drawl. “Mango Menlor. That’s his name. That’s the man who killed my mother.”

Menlor killed her mother. And he also raped her, forced her to live with him as his wife, separated her twin brothers and gave away her baby sister to another commander.

Arthur was only 12 at the time. After several months, one of Menlor’s other wives helped Arthur escape by opening a side window when no one was looking after Menlor threatened to kill the young girl one time too many.

During the war, nearly a million Liberians were displaced, more than a quarter million died, and three-fourths of the country’s women were raped or sexually assaulted. In a country of only 3 million people, virtually everyone suffered.

For years, said Arthur, she felt shame and anger. But in 2007, a pastor at her church in a Monrovia suburb asked her what was wrong. She didn’t answer at first, but after weeks of quiet prodding, Arthur told her story. Then she told it again.

And now she’s telling it again and again.

Some of her friends and relatives who knew about her past judged her as part of an all-too-common blame the victim mentality. But, when her pastor didn’t, she felt better. He encouraged her to testify at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and while she was nervous about doing so, she agreed.

Truth commissions to resolve the problems in African countries coming out of civil conflicts were spearheaded by post-apartheid South Africa’s approach, and have played important roles in Rwanda and Sierra Leone. The emphasis is often on the victim’s opportunity to tell his or her own story.

After Arthur told hers to Liberia’s commission, she says she felt like a new person.

“When I put my story out, I felt better. I let go of the bitterness, of the burden I was carrying,” she said. “If you keep it, it can hurt you.”

It took her five hours of testimony to explain what had happened to her during the first round of hearings by the TRC, and a similar amount of time during a subsequent testimony. And now, every time she can grab a few minutes, she writes out more of her story on unlined white pages. First she used a blue pen, and then a black one. Her handwriting is careful and timid at points, bolder in some places, small and compressed in others.

The title page says, “A true story that happened to me.”

“Being able to unburden yourself as a victim can be really powerful experience,” said Lizze Goodfriend, a programs associate with the Liberia office of the International Center for Transitional Justice. “That’s what truth commissions can accomplish that a prosecution process can’t.” She also mentioned that hopefully human rights and justice groups will continue to create spaces that give victims a place to tell their stories and connect with each other on a community level.

To Arthur and many of the victims of the war, the TRC was less about what will happen next than a point in itself.

Menlor now lives in the same area in Monrovia as Arthur. “I see him every morning, and I feel bad, but I have been letting go. When I see him, I walk on the other side of the road.”

Arthur has high hopes that Menlor and other warlords will be further prosecuted for their misdeeds. Though it’s unclear if or when this will happen, what is clear is that for Arthur, the war is finally over.

They’re kinda famous now! I sent this photo to AFP, and didn’t know it had been syndicated until I saw it in USA Today recently. I was tickled — these kids are my neighbors. They hang out in the empty lot near my house playing and being generally adorable. The other day when I was walking down the path to my house, they embraced me in a sort of kamakaze style hug, five kids deep in every direction.

Unfortunately, there’s now a big metal wall around the lot and someone’s doing construction. The kids have lost one of their play spots. The cute quotient in my life is dropping rapidly.

Two weeks away from Monrovia in lovely Freetown feels like vacation, even though I’m here working. Freetown is cheaper, easier to get around, has less security issues, and is generally a breath of fresh air after sitting in too many concrete compounds with barbed wire walls in Monrovia. Here are a few tales of Freetown since I’m currently enjoying a fabulous internet connection and some Nescafe.

• The hotel I’m staying at is very Chinese. On the signpost outside the main gates, the name is in Chinese and then in English. When you fill out a room card, there’s a place to write your Chinese name. Most annoyingly, all the outlets in the room are designed for Chinese plugs. I guess this makes sense since every appliance and scrap of furniture in the room was clearly imported from China. The TV remote control is so confusing it may as well be in Chinese. Oh wait, it is in Chinese.

• The other day, I went to a music producer’s studio. It didn’t have a sign. The producer had told me that everyone in the area knows the place and that I’ll find it easily. After I’d asked three people who had no idea where it was, I called him. “It’s just by the prison.” Ah, of course!

• I jumped in a shared taxi late on Saturday night with two other women. One woman said to me, “You’ve come from Liahberah.” I didn’t recognize her, and was surprised she knew me. She said that she sees me around Newport Street and Carey Street with a camera, that I love taking pictures. I didn’t have my camera out, so there’s no way she could have guessed this. Clearly, she had seen me around. Sometimes I feel invisible because my MO is generally to hang out at some place long enough that people forget about me and go about their business. But she hadn’t forgotten. She was very nice and we chatted a bit. She’s a Fula lady from Guinea, visiting friends in Freetown right now, though she lives in Monrovia. I said I might head there sometime next month. She said, “Then I’ll see you in three countries!”

I’m headed to Sierra Leone for ten days. Blogging will be intermittent, but I’ll be back online after that.