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Wanjala Chris (Ed): Memories We Lost and other stories. 'Civilians are the greatest losers where there is a civil war.' Drawing illustrations from Mariatu Kamara's...

      

Wanjala Chris (Ed): Memories We Lost and other stories.

'Civilians are the greatest losers where there is a civil war.' Drawing illustrations from Mariatu Kamara's The President, discuss the above statement.

  

Answers

Martin
Introduction

In a war, the people who suffer and lose the most are the civilians. Some even never know what they are fighting for or what the fight is for. The narrator loses her hands to the rebels who tell her to go and ask the president to give her new ones. She does not even know what a president is.

Illustrations

In any war, it is civilians who lose most. The rebels give the civilians a choice of losing which hand first. They say the reason is that the civilians will not vote for the president. The narrator does not even know what a president is yet she loses her hands.

The narrator is pregnant, on top of losing her hands. She had been raped by Salieu, a man who wants her for a second wife. The rebels shoot him and he will never know the narrator is having his baby.
The rebels want to overthrow the government which they accuse of being corrupt. The civilians suffer for a war they know nothing about. Many are killed in cold blood and others are maimed. The narrator and her cousins are reunited in Freetown and they have to beg on the streets. At the camp life is hard and the living conditions are pathetic. There is filth, rubbish and the smell of dead bodies.
The amputees learn to do things for themselves like cooking, tying shoelaces and brushing their teeth. The narrator gets a baby and she goes through a caesarian section as her birth canal is too small. Some of the people in the camp are adopted but no one adopts the narrator.

The narrator leaves for Canada and is adopted by a Sierra Leonean couple. She still has to support her family back in Sierra Leone. they share a room with three girls. She is fearful about starting school and does not know how to write without her In high school it is hard and the narrator fails her exams. When she gets a computer, she is able to write her name. Eventually, she enrolls and graduates with a diploma in English as a Second Language.
The United Nations sends soldiers to initiate peace. The narrator notices that nothing is said by the culprits of the war and thus it the citizens who suffer.

Conclusion

In a war, the civilians die, lose their limbs, are displaced and some are raped. Most of them usually have no idea why there is a war.
marto answered the question on August 27, 2019 at 10:05

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