"My sympathies."
The condolences caught me off guard, and I mumbled my thanks and shuffled through passport control at Freetown's Lungi airport. Two weeks after September 11, I wasn't surprised to be chatting with a Sierra Leonean airport official about the attacks. There seemed little else worth talking about. What struck me was the note of personal concern, the assumption that a national tragedy must necessarily be a personal one as well. My sympathies.

Now, six weeks on, I've had this conversation over and over again. I've discussed with academics and with taxi drivers the intricacies of international diplomacy and the efficacy of bunker-busting bombs. Sierra Leoneans are as conversant as anyone in the recent history of the world, and devour the global broadcasts of unfolding events with the same rapt attention. It is hard to imagine more poignant evidence of the totality of globalization than the ease with which one translates the question "Where were you when you heard the news?"

But if Sierra Leoneans experienced September 11 as citizens of the world, they have experienced it in more immediate, more personal terms as well. Strangers speak of Mrs. Tucker, the one Sierra Leonean national to die that morning, with the same proud air of familiarity one might adopt when recounting the exploits of a famous but distant relation. A school teacher, living in Maryland, headed to Los Angeles for holidays. My sympathies. Freetown's networks of rumor and gossip blazed in the first few days with uglier stories as well, many engaging the fears and suspicions around the large, insular Lebanese community. In Kenema they were dancing in the streets. The headmaster of the Islamic school in Kissy is an Al Queda operative. Two young Afghan men were caught trying to enter the country without passports, their unlikely alibi that they wanted to start a carpet business in Freetown. No doubt they were casing the airport. And now, only days ago, the revelation that the Revolutionary United Front rebels were selling diamonds to buyers connected to Osama bin Laden. What does it mean for the peace process? Is it the end of the RUF as a political party?

There is also, of course, humor. Someone annoying you? She's a terrorist. Your neighbor making trouble again? What an Osama bin Laden. The local papers mangle national politicians' names to parody those on the world stage. And from the context of Sierra Leone, few things appear more comically absurd than the offer by Charles Taylor, the Liberian president famous for his Small Boys Unit and for fuelling the war in Sierra Leone, to send troops to Afghanistan in support of the US.
The beginnings of this so-called war on terrorism coincide with what seems to be the end of a decade long conflict in Sierra Leone; a conflict in which every Sierra Leonean has lost a relative or close friend, in which many have lost homes, and in which significant numbers have lost limbs or body parts in the particularly cruel logic of this war. There is nothing abstract about conflict here. War has so thoroughly saturated the everyday in Sierra Leone that there is no separation between personal and national tragedies. All social relations carry with them the residue of years of violence, and there is little else from which to make humor. Against this background, I understand the deeply personal tone of condolences in the wake of September 11, but I, who mercifully lost no one and like much of the world simply watched it on TV, feel somehow undeserving.

My neighborhood got lucky last night, and for a while the lights came on. I wandered across the road to the shack where my friend Mariama and her family live and work, selling small household necessities and soft drinks that are sometimes cold. In the evenings, the Sierra Leone Broadcasting Service relays CNN, and Mariama set up a small TV inside the shop. I arrived just in time for yet another scandalized documentary on the horrors of the Taliban regime. While Mariama passed out slices of boiled potato and cassava to the gathered assemblage of family and customers gathered around the set (most of them refugees driven to Freetown by fighting in the provinces), we watched epileptic video clips of a riot in Kabul. Only days ago, I photographed scenes of equal brutality as combatants from Sierra Leone's militia movement stormed a disarmament center, frantic that they might be left out of the process of demobilization and denied the training meant to facilitate their reintegration in the community. Such violence warranted no particular attention in the local (let alone international) news, and generated no particular interest in public or private conversation. But as we watched the flat blue images of people we didn't know beating each other senseless, we collectively sucked our teeth in worry, and commented on the tragic brutality of it all. My sympathies.

Danny Hoffman is a GSC Dissertation Fellow, currently researching and training in Sierra Leone on his project entitled "The Kamajors of Sierra Leone: New Magic and the War-Machine." He is a doctoral student in the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.