Liberia: Collecting Stories to Heal a Nation

When journalist Agnes Fallah Kamara-Umunna returned to her native Liberia in 2003, she found a country that was a shell of its former self. As the nation sought to rebuild, ordinary Liberians, traumatized by the war, struggled daily to survive. In the meantime, the nation embarked on the tough path to reconciliation. Former fighters could not go back home because of the atrocities they had committed, and many young girls who were raped during the war had to raise the babies that resulted.

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Kamara-Umunna, author of "And Still Peace Did Not Come: A Memoir of Reconciliation," hosted a radio program called Straight from the Heart which collected stories from both victims and perpetrators and started a conversation around the issue of post-conflict trauma in Liberia. She served on Liberia's Truth and Reconciliation Commission and is currently the executive director of the Straight From the Heart Group, a post-conflict, healing and reconciliation center in Monrovia. Among other things, the center trains local journalists to collect their communities' stories as part of this reconciliation process.
Kamara-Umunna recently spoke with AllAfrica's Trevor Ballantyne and Mahmud Johnson about working with victims and perpetrators of the war, and the process of collecting their stories.
In post conflict Liberia, how is the government dealing with the psychological effects of the war?
People are not dealing with trauma in Liberia. The government is not dealing with it. As a result, mental health is getting worse and worse. One cannot deal with trauma by just opening two-week or six-month programs. How can somebody live through the war for 14 years - got raped, fought the war - and you say, 'Oh, let's do counseling for six months?' That's not going to help.
Can you give us an example of one or two cases of post-conflict trauma you have come across?
In my book I write about a woman I met. Her husband used to work for [former Liberian president Samuel] Doe. During the war her family was trying to escape along with their four girls. The rebels raped and killed three of her daughters in front of her, and killed her husband as well. One of the daughters escaped and [the mother] ran to Sierra Leone and then to Ghana. All these years she thought the fourth daughter had died. When [the mother] returned to Liberia my boss asked me to go to the airport. At the time, refugees were coming back from Ghana. My boss asked me to receive them and see if they have stories [about the war to air on my radio show]. So I got in touch with this lady and drove her to her house. She saw that the house had been renovated so she wanted to see who was in there. It turns out that it was her daughter who had escaped. But her daughter was married to one of the rebels that killed her three daughters and her husband.
The woman is there in Monrovia and she doesn't want to talk to her daughter and the husband. The daughter said it was the guy who saved her, and they are married with two kids. I know she is traumatized and I try to get her to tell the story but she doesn't want to, so I don't force her.

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So to help Liberians deal with post-conflict trauma you collect their stories?
I ran a radio program called "Straight From the Heart." It ran from 2004-2007 on UN radio based in Monrovia. I started to hear stories from victims - that was what my boss wanted. But as we were going along my boss said, 'But all Liberians are not victims; there are Liberians who are perpetrators and witnesses as well. So why can't we get stories from them?' And so the show's focus shifted to air survivors' stories, hearing from different people.
But my approach was not to immediately ask what happened to people during the war; I wanted to know where they were before the war, as a springboard to discuss their war experiences, because it is difficult for people to directly tell you what bad things happened to them.
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