The Mercy of Monsters

Before I Answer You

You want to know which villain had a good point.

He laughs, quietly. Then his face goes still.

I should warn you before I answer: what I’m going to say won’t land anywhere comfortable. Not because I enjoy discomfort – I’ve had enough of it to last several lifetimes – but because the truth I want to tell you doesn’t fit into anything clean. And people like clean. People like a villain they can point at and a hero they can cheer for without any residue left on their hands afterwards. I used to like that too, before I understood what both of those words actually cost.

My name is Ishmael Kamara. I run a small non-profit here in Freetown. We work with former child soldiers, young men mostly, helping them find their way back to something resembling a life. I won’t tell you it’s easy work. I will tell you it’s the only work I know how to do, given what I’ve seen, given what was done to me, and given what I’ve had to make some kind of peace with over the past two decades.

I’m thirty-eight years old. I have two wrists where my hands used to be.

I say that not for your sympathy. I say it because it’s relevant to the answer you’ve asked for, and I’d rather you know it now than have it arrive as a surprise halfway through. Context matters. Context is almost everything, in my experience. So let me give you some.

I grew up about fifteen kilometres outside Freetown, in a village called Tombo – a fishing community, mostly, though my father was a teacher and my mother kept a small stall where she sold groundnut soup and sweet potato leaves on market days. I was the eldest of three. My sister Aminata was four years younger than me, and my brother Joseph was seven years old when – well. We’ll get there.

I want you to understand what Tombo was before I tell you what it became, because this is where most accounts of war make their first mistake. They begin with the violence, and so the place only ever exists as a site of catastrophe. Tombo was not a catastrophe. It was a place where Mrs Koroma beat her washing against a flat stone every Thursday morning and you could hear it from two streets away. It was the smell of woodsmoke and salt water and my mother’s soup coming through the window before dawn, because she started the groundnuts early to get the flavour right. It was the path to school along the red laterite road, the dust coating my feet by the time I arrived, the way the iron roof of the schoolroom ticked and popped in the heat of the afternoon. It was ordinary. It was ours.

I was good at school. My father was proud of that in the quiet way he had – he wouldn’t say so directly, but he’d find reasons to mention it to other men, and I’d hear him, and we’d both pretend I hadn’t. I was going to be a teacher like him, or perhaps a doctor. I was eleven years old and the future felt like something solid I was walking towards.

Hold that image for a moment, if you would. An eleven-year-old boy walking to school along a red dust road, the sound of the sea somewhere behind him, his future still intact.

Hold it. Because I’m about to take it away.

The Revolutionary United Front came to Tombo in the dry season of 1995. I don’t remember the exact date. That isn’t an omission born only of trauma – it’s because time inside violence doesn’t work the way it does outside it. Days lose their edges. What I remember is the quality of the light: too bright, very still, the kind of afternoon that usually meant a good evening for fishing.

They called themselves freedom fighters. I want you to remember that. Every single one of them, if you’d asked, would have told you they were fighting for the liberation of Sierra Leone. They had songs about it. Slogans. A whole language built around the idea that what they were doing was righteous and necessary and historically inevitable.

They burned half the village. They killed my father in the street. They took my mother and Aminata and Joseph, and I don’t know – to this day I do not know – what happened to the three of them after that morning. Not knowing is its own kind of thing to carry, and I’ve been carrying it for twenty-seven years, and I expect I’ll carry it until I’m done.

And then two men held me down on the ground, and another man cut off my hands at the wrists with a machete.

I was eleven years old. I was not a combatant. I was a boy who was good at school.

Afterwards, when the bleeding had been bound with whatever came to hand, a man with a genuinely kind face placed a rifle across the stumps of my arms and told me I was a soldier now. A soldier for the liberation. He said it with such conviction that I remember thinking, even then, even through everything that was happening to my body and my mind at that moment: he believes this. This man actually believes what he is saying.

I have thought about that a great deal in the years since. The believing.

I spent two years inside the RUF. I won’t give you the full accounting of those years – not to protect you, or even myself, but because it isn’t the point of what I’m trying to tell you. What is the point – what I need you to understand before we arrive at the answer you actually asked for – is something I noticed during that time, something I was too young to name but old enough to file away, the way children file things they don’t yet understand but sense are important.

The RUF was not chaos. I know that’s not what anyone tells you. The story told about groups like the RUF is that they were anarchic, barbaric, disordered – animals, essentially. And from the outside, from a burning village, yes, of course. But from the inside, from where I was standing, it was something else entirely.

There was a chain of command. There were rules – brutal ones, enforced brutally, but they were consistent. If you disobeyed an order, the consequence was predictable. If you followed orders, you were, in a horrible and functional sense, safe. The officers had authority. The authority held. The structure, as a structure, worked.

What the RUF exported was chaos. What it ran on, internally, was order.

I was twelve, thirteen years old, turning this over in the back of my mind without the vocabulary for it. I only found that vocabulary much later – after I was extracted from the movement by UNICEF workers in 1997, after years of what they called rehabilitation, after I’d taught myself to hold a pen between my wrists and learned to read again and eventually to write, eventually to study, eventually to come back to Freetown and try to build something from the wreckage. Only then did I understand what I had actually been observing in that camp.

Order and cruelty are not opposites. That was what the RUF taught me, though it was not what they meant to teach.

He sets the cup down. His wrists rest flat on the table. The tea has gone lukewarm.

Are you still with me? Good. Because that’s the foundation of everything I’m going to say next, and I’d rather build on solid ground.

A Small Television and a Galaxy Far Away

It was 1996. I was twelve years old and I had been inside the RUF for roughly a year. One of the older fighters had acquired a small portable television and a battery pack that lasted perhaps four hours before it needed to be left in the sun to recover. It became, briefly, the most coveted object in the camp. Not because of any tactical use, but because of what it could do to the hours. And the hours, inside that kind of life, are the thing you most need to manage. Boredom in an armed camp is its own form of danger.

Someone had a VHS tape. I don’t remember who brought it, or where it came from. What I remember is the label, handwritten in English that I was only just beginning to read: Star Wars.

We gathered around that screen, twenty, perhaps twenty-five boys and young men, the light already failing, the television propped on a crate and tilted so that everyone could see. And from the first minute, from that opening shot of the star destroyer filling the frame, the room had a sound to it. Not quite cheering, not yet: more like a collective intake of breath, a held excitement I could feel in the boys on either side of me. Something was happening that was larger than our circumstances, and for four hours we were going to be inside it.

They cheered for Luke Skywalker almost immediately. Of course they did. Young man, no family to speak of, taken up by a cause larger than himself, given a weapon and told he was part of something righteous. I watched the boys around me recognise him, viscerally, without knowing they were doing it.

I sat very still.

I want to be precise about what I felt, because it’s easy to narrate backwards: to say I immediately saw through the Rebellion, or instantly understood the Empire’s logic, and that would be too neat, too knowing for a twelve-year-old sitting on the dirt floor of a camp in Sierra Leone. What I actually felt was something quieter and more unsettling: a dissonance. A wrongness I couldn’t locate. Something about the film kept snagging on something in my mind, like cloth on a nail, and I couldn’t work out what it was until a scene roughly halfway through.

The scene isn’t one that anyone tends to discuss very much. It isn’t the trench run, or the lightsaber duel, or the Death Star. It’s a briefing room. Imperial officers seated around a table, receiving orders, deferring to authority, reporting outcomes. The chain of command functioning. And I remember looking at that scene and thinking: I know what this is. I have lived inside something that looked exactly like this.

But here is what was different: those officers went home at the end of their shifts, or something resembling home. They were not the ones burning villages. The brutality of the Empire, when it came, came through structure, through orders, through a command that flowed downwards through ranks. It didn’t come the way RUF brutality came: laterally, spontaneously, from anyone in the group, at any moment, for any reason or none at all.

I couldn’t have told you any of that at twelve. But I felt it, sitting there with the screen flickering in front of me. I felt it in my wrists.

Now. I want to be very careful here, because what I’m about to say is the part that tends to make people angry, and I don’t want you to misunderstand me through inattention.

I do not think the Rebel Alliance was evil. I want to say that plainly before I say anything else, because if you hear what’s coming as a straightforward attack on the Rebels, you’ve missed the point entirely, and we’ll both have wasted our afternoon.

What I think the Rebel Alliance was is this: familiar.

The language first. “Freedom.” “Liberation.” “The will of the people.” “A more just galaxy.” Every faction that moved through Sierra Leone in the 1990s used some version of that language. The RUF used it. The AFRC used it. The Civil Defence Forces used it. They all had a story about what they were fighting for, and the story was always oriented towards the future: towards the moment of victory, the dawn of the new order, the thing that would justify everything they had done to get there. And not one of them, not a single armed group operating in my country during that decade, had a coherent account of what happened on the morning after victory. Because the morning after wasn’t the point. The cause was the point. The fight was the point.

Now watch the Rebellion.

They are extraordinarily good at the cause. They are extraordinarily good at the cell structure, the secrecy, the principled individual willing to sacrifice everything for the movement. Princess Leia, carrying the Death Star plans inside a droid while her ship is boarded, giving nothing away. That is courage. I’m not dismissing it. But notice: Leia is a senator. She is the daughter of a viceroy. The Rebellion’s leadership is almost entirely composed of people who held power inside the Old Republic and lost it when the Empire rose. They are not the dispossessed of the Outer Rim rising up against an oppressor. They are the old order, seeking restoration, and the language of liberation is the vessel they’ve chosen to carry that project in.

And they are willing to accept extraordinary civilian cost in service of the mission. I kept returning to this, years later, when I watched the films again as an adult and had the vocabulary to name what I was seeing. The plans stolen from Scarif: do you know what the Empire did to that facility once the Rebellion had taken what it needed? It destroyed it. The base, the city, thousands of people. The Rebellion knew the Empire would respond that way. They knew, and they proceeded, because the intelligence was worth it. The cause required it.

I have heard that calculation made in a jungle. I have been in the vicinity of that calculation. It sounds the same in every language.

He picks up the cup. He doesn’t drink from it. He just holds it.

I’m not saying the Rebellion was the RUF. I want to be absolutely clear about that. I am saying that the architecture of a revolutionary movement is a recognisable thing: the certainty of purpose, the willingness to absorb civilian loss, the vision of liberation that carries no plan for the morning after. And I recognise it. When I see it, I pay close attention, regardless of how the cause is dressed.

The Rebellion won. And the galaxy had a generation of instability afterwards that would have been familiar to anyone who had lived through the collapse of a state: well-intentioned people holding power they hadn’t been built to exercise, old grievances reasserting themselves, the regions the Empire had held together by force fracturing because force was the only thing that had ever held them together. I don’t think that was an accident. I think it was written into the Rebellion’s structure from the beginning. They were built to fight, not to govern. Most revolutionary movements are.

So. The Empire.

Let me tell you what the Empire actually did, as a governing body, before we get to what it did wrong, because the what-it-did-wrong tends to swallow everything else and I think that’s a mistake.

The Empire maintained the hyperspace lanes. That sounds administrative and dull, and it is, and that’s exactly the point. Keeping trade routes open requires constant, unglamorous, thankless enforcement against pirates, smugglers, and the criminal syndicates that had operated with near-total freedom in the last decades of the Republic. Han Solo is a charming man, and I understand why audiences love him. Han Solo is also, functionally, a smuggler operating in defiance of trade controls, and the existence of people like Han Solo in large numbers is what makes it impossible for ordinary people to conduct ordinary commerce safely. The Empire crushed that world. It did it brutally and without mercy, and the outer rim planets that had been prey for those organisations experienced something they hadn’t had in a generation: a degree of physical safety in transit.

They built infrastructure. Roads, in the sense that a galaxy has roads. Orbital facilities. Administrative systems that, however oppressive, were at least consistent and present. You knew who was in charge of the sector. You knew which office to go to. You knew, and I cannot overstate the value of this to someone who has lived inside its absence, that the rules tomorrow would be the same as the rules today.

In Sierra Leone, in the years I spent inside the movement, the rules changed depending on who was having a bad day. An officer who had slept poorly might interpret an infraction differently than he would have the morning before. There was no appeals process. There was no recourse. There was no stable structure of authority that you could learn and adapt to, because the authority itself was unstable, mood-dependent, rotating. You could do everything right and still be in the wrong place at the wrong moment.

A single, predictable tyrant is navigable. I know that sounds like a terrible thing to say. I’m saying it anyway, because it’s true, and because the people who find it most appalling are almost always people who have never needed it to be true.

When there is one source of danger, you can map it. You can learn its habits, its hours, its tolerances. You can build a life around its edges, in the spaces it doesn’t bother to reach. Populations under firm, consistent, centralised authority have done this throughout history: they find the margins, they cultivate them, they survive. It is not freedom. It is survival, and survival is not nothing. Survival is the thing that makes everything else possible.

When there are fifteen sources of danger, all operating on different rules, all of them moving, all of them willing to define you as an enemy for reasons that shift from week to week, you cannot map that. You cannot build around its edges because its edges are everywhere and nowhere. You cannot cultivate any margin because the margin is the first thing that gets burned.

That was Sierra Leone in the 1990s. That was the galactic Republic in its final decades: a senate so corrupted and so gridlocked that it could not prevent warlords from operating openly in its territory, could not protect the planets that fell under the influence of criminal cartels, could not respond to a crisis before it had talked the crisis to death across a hundred committee chambers. The vacuum was real. The dysfunction was real. And what the Empire understood, what Palpatine understood, with a clarity I find repellent and accurate in equal measure, is that a vacuum of that kind does not stay empty. Something always fills it. The only question is what.

The Empire was what filled it. The RUF was what filled ours.

The difference, and it is a significant one, is that the Empire filled the vacuum and then held. It lasted. It gave the galaxy roughly twenty years of something that, for the majority of ordinary people in the core systems, was not noticeably worse than what had come before. Twenty years is a long time. Twenty years is a childhood. Twenty years is the difference between a generation that grows up in reasonable safety and a generation that grows up in rubble.

I know which generation I was.

Now. Alderaan.

I need you to know that I have not forgotten Alderaan, because I suspect you’re waiting for me to try to. The destruction of an entire planet, billions of lives ended in a moment, to make a point about power. I’ve thought about Alderaan more times than I can count, and I’ll tell you what I think with the same honesty I’ve been trying to maintain throughout this conversation.

It was atrocity. There is no other word for it and I won’t reach for one. It was the moment where the Empire’s logic, which I am arguing had genuine merit, collapsed under the weight of its own worst impulse: the belief that terror, applied at sufficient scale, is a substitute for governance. It isn’t. Terror at that scale doesn’t produce compliance; it produces exactly the thing it was meant to prevent, because it destroys the basic compact between ruler and ruled, the one that says: obey, and you will be left to live your life. Alderaan obeyed. Alderaan was destroyed anyway, as a demonstration. And every planet in the galaxy that watched it happen understood, correctly, that no degree of compliance would protect them. Palpatine made the Rebellion inevitable with that single act.

Yes, then. The Death Star was monstrous. What happened to Alderaan was atrocity. I say that clearly and without reservation.

And the premise underneath it, the premise I’ve been building towards, is still true. Without a structure of order, chaos devours the weak. A functioning, centralised, coercive authority is not a sufficient condition for safety. But it is a necessary one. The Empire understood that, and then destroyed its own case with the very instrument it built to prove it. That is a tragedy of a very recognisable kind.

Now we come to the man himself. Lord Vader.

I want to approach him the way I try to approach everything I don’t want to be true: directly and without looking away.

You know the image. Black armour, mechanical breath, the capacity for violence worn openly, like a uniform. Everything about the way Vader is presented is designed to tell you: this is the thing you should fear. And you should fear it. That’s not wrong. But I’ve noticed, over the years, that the things worth fearing are rarely simple, and Vader is not simple.

There is a moment in the first film; you’ll know the one. He lifts an officer off the ground by the throat. The officer has expressed scepticism about the Force. Vader kills him for it, efficiently and without apparent emotion, and the scene is written and shot to make us recoil: to show us what the Empire is made of.

Here is what I see when I watch that scene now.

I see a commander who will not tolerate incompetence or insubordination in a structure where both could cost thousands of lives. I see a man enforcing a standard in the only currency his environment makes available: fear. Is it monstrous? Yes. Is it the action of a man who has made a certain kind of peace with being monstrous so that the structure he maintains can function? Also yes. And those two things coexist without cancelling each other out.

Inside the RUF, punishment was arbitrary. It landed on you for reasons you often couldn’t determine and therefore couldn’t avoid. There is a distinctive terror in that: it hollows you out, because there is no adjustment available to you, no way to be good enough, no standard to meet. You are simply at the mercy of someone else’s interior weather.

Vader’s officers knew what the standard was. They knew what failure looked like. They knew what the consequence was. That knowledge is, and I hesitate over the word but I’ll use it, a form of clarity. Brutal clarity. The kind that lets you, if you are capable and careful and doing your job, stay alive.

I am not telling you this is good. I am telling you this is a different thing from what was done to me, and that the difference matters, and that collapsing both into a single category of cruelty, because they both involve cruelty, is a kind of moral flattening that only works from a very great distance.

Vader believed something. This is what I keep coming back to. He believed, and the tragedy of his arc is that he was not entirely wrong to believe it, that the strong must carry the burden of being feared, because the alternative is the weak being devoured by something that carries no burden at all. Something that just devours: without structure, without limit, without even the minimal accountability that a chain of command provides.

I know what it is to be devoured. I know it in a way that isn’t metaphorical and didn’t happen to someone else whose story I read. I was eleven years old and I was devoured by something that called itself liberation, and the thing doing the devouring had no Vader. It had no one at the top who could be held to account, no chain of command that, if you could somehow reach the summit of it, might be subject to a different kind of judgement. It was chaos wearing a political vocabulary, and the only thing that stopped it was the eventual, grinding intervention of a West African regional force and the international community, acting together as something very close to an empire of their own.

Vader’s argument, stripped to its core, is this: I will be the monster so that you don’t have to live inside one. It’s a bargain. A monstrous bargain. And I will not stand here and tell you, having lived the alternative, that a monstrous bargain is always worse than no bargain at all.

The people who say it is will say it with great confidence and considerable eloquence. They are, almost without exception, people who have never sat on the floor of an armed camp and tried to calculate which direction the danger was most likely to come from today. People who have never been the child in the burning village, watching their father killed by someone singing a liberation hymn. People who have the luxury of finding the argument repellent because they have never, not once, needed it to be true.

I needed it to be true. I needed it to be true and it wasn’t, and I carry that in my wrists every day of my life.

He sets the cup down. He looks at his hands, at the place where his hands were.

That’s the argument. That’s the whole of it. I told you it wouldn’t land anywhere comfortable.

What I Carry

Let me tell you about my Mondays.

Monday is intake day at the centre. It’s the day we receive new referrals from the government’s disarmament programme, from NGO partners, occasionally from families who’ve found their way to us by word of mouth after years of not knowing where their son went and then finding out, and having to decide, with extraordinary courage, that they want him back anyway.

The boys who arrive on Mondays are, on average, between fourteen and twenty-two years old. Some of them have been inside armed groups for a matter of months. Some of them have been inside for the better part of a decade. Some of them come willingly. Some of them come because the alternative was a prison cell, and they’re making a calculation rather than a choice, and that’s fine, because I understand calculations, and in my experience a calculation made in the right direction has a way of becoming something else over time.

I should tell you what some of these boys have done. I say this not to diminish them, because diminishment is the opposite of what I’m trying to do, but because the truth of my work requires it. Some of them burned houses. Some of them killed people. Some of them did things I’m not going to describe in detail, because the detail is not mine to give and wouldn’t serve either of us. They came to me having been turned, by adults who should have known better and in most cases did know better and chose it anyway, into instruments of exactly the kind of chaos I’ve been describing.

The youngest boy currently in our programme is fifteen. His name is Emmanuel. He was recruited at nine.

Now. I want you to sit with something for a moment, because this is the contradiction I live inside every single day of my working life, and I want you to understand it fully.

I was mutilated and conscripted by the RUF at eleven years old. I spent two years inside a movement that burned my village, killed my father, and took my family from me. And now I spend my days asking the government of Sierra Leone – a fragile, underfunded, imperfect, frequently exasperating government that I nevertheless believe in and rely upon – to invest its authority in the rehabilitation of the boys who were turned into weapons by groups exactly like the one that destroyed my life.

Every time I do that, I am making an argument. The same argument. I am standing in front of a government office or a donor meeting or a community forum and I am saying: your authority matters. Your laws matter. Your presence matters. The structure you impose on these boys’ lives, the framework of rules and consequences and expectations you create and maintain, is the thing that will determine whether Emmanuel at twenty-five is a man who can hold a job and raise children or whether he is back in the bush, having reverted to the only structure he was ever effectively taught.

I am, every Monday, arguing for the Empire’s premise.

Not the Death Star. Never the Death Star. The premise beneath it: that a functioning, centralised authority, one that shows up and stays and maintains consistent rules and holds people to account within them, is not an optional feature of a liveable society. It is the foundation. Everything else is built on top of it, and when it goes, everything else goes with it, and the first people to find that out are always the ones who had the least to begin with.

I want to come back to Alderaan one more time, because I think it’s where the argument is most often misread, and I’d rather be clear.

The destruction of Alderaan was wrong. Not strategically wrong, though it was that too, as I said earlier. Morally wrong, in the plainest possible sense: an entire civilisation erased for the purpose of making a point. There is no logic that cleans that. There is no calculus of order and stability that makes two billion dead people a reasonable line item.

I was mutilated at eleven years old and used as a weapon by men who believed their cause justified what they were doing to children. I know what it is to be on the receiving end of that logic. I know what it feels like to be assessed as an acceptable cost. I would not do to anyone what was done to me, and I would not defend anyone who did.

So hear me carefully: what I am separating, and what I am asking you to separate, is the logic from the application. These are not the same thing. They are related, they rhyme, and in the worst cases they enable each other, but they are not the same thing. A hammer is not a skull fracture. It becomes one in the wrong hands, under the wrong conditions, wielded by someone who has stopped caring about the difference between a tool and a weapon.

The logic: order requires authority. Authority requires the credible willingness to enforce itself. A state that cannot enforce itself is not a state, it is a suggestion, and suggestions do not protect children from machetes.

That is true. I believe it to be true. I believe it in the way I believe things I have paid for with my body and my family and twenty-seven years of consequence.

The application: build the largest weapon imaginable and use it on a populated planet to frighten the people you haven’t killed yet into compliance.

That is atrocity. And the atrocity doesn’t disprove the logic. It is what happens when the logic is stripped of the thing that’s supposed to keep it human: the understanding that order is not an end in itself. It is a condition. A condition for what? For the small life. For Emmanuel at fifteen to become Emmanuel at forty, with grandchildren and a trade and some approximation of the future that was taken from him at nine. For Mrs Koroma to beat her washing against a flat stone on Thursday morning and have that be, unremarkably, the most notable thing that happens to her that week.

That is what I want. Not empire, in the sense of dominion and fear and the boot on the neck. I want a government that shows up. A police force that doesn’t run when things get difficult. A school that doesn’t burn. A court that sits and hears cases and produces verdicts that are not purchased in advance. I want the boring, procedural, administrative machinery of a functioning state, and I want it to persist through changes of government and cycles of instability and all the ordinary pressures that cause it to corrode.

That is all the Empire ever needed to be, and it chose the Death Star instead. That’s the tragedy. Not that it was strong, but that it confused strength with terror and terror with permanence, and that confusion was its end.

There is a schedule on the wall in our main room. It’s nothing special to look at: a laminated sheet printed in two languages, a grid of times and activities from six in the morning until nine at night. Breakfast. Morning exercise. Skills workshops – carpentry, electrical work, literacy for those who need it. Lunch. Counselling sessions, individual and group. Afternoon work placement for the boys who are further along. Dinner. Evening reflection. Lights out.

I made that schedule eight years ago, and it has not changed substantially since, because the point of it is not the activities. The point is the repetition. The point is that Tuesday looks like Monday and Wednesday looks like Tuesday, and that when a boy has been living inside that rhythm for long enough, something happens in him that I’ve watched enough times now to recognise even when I can’t fully explain it.

He stops watching the door.

You don’t notice it consciously at first. But if you pay attention over weeks and months, you see it: the gradual shift from a body that is always oriented towards escape, always tracking the nearest exit, always waiting for the environment to become hostile, to a body that is, quietly and tentatively, beginning to rest. The shoulders settle. The meal is eaten rather than guarded. Eye contact, which in the early weeks is either absent or aggressive, begins to find a middle register. Something that was wound very tight begins, incrementally, to release.

What’s happening is not complicated. The boy is learning, at a cellular level, that the rules are not going to change overnight. That the person who runs the morning session today will run it tomorrow. That the consequence for breaking a rule of the house will be what it was last week and what it will be next week. That the structure is not a trick, not a prelude to something worse, not a net designed to hold him until someone decides what to do with him. That it is what it presents itself as being, and that it will continue to be that.

I don’t use the word “order” with them. I never have, because the word carries too much of the wrong history. Every group that ever conscripted a child soldier imposed order. The word is contaminated, and I know it, and I won’t touch it.

I use the word “safety.”

I tell them: this house is safe. I tell them: these rules are here because safe things need edges. I tell them: you are allowed to rest here. And I watch them test it – push against the edges, look for the inconsistency, probe for the place where the safety turns out to be conditional, because every structure they have lived inside has been conditional, has had a hidden clause, has been safe only until it wasn’t. And when the edges hold, and the rules don’t shift, and the structure remains exactly what it said it was, the testing gradually slows. And then it stops.

And then Emmanuel eats his dinner without watching the door.

I built that schedule. I maintain those rules. I run that house with a consistency that some of the boys find frustrating and a few find infuriating, and I hold the line every time, because I know, in a way that is not theoretical, what the line is there for. I know what’s on the other side of it. I’ve been on the other side of it.

Every morning when I unlock the centre and turn the lights on, I am arguing, in practice rather than in theory, that a firm and predictable structure is an act of care. That safety and order are not in tension with each other. That the thing you build around someone who has been harmed by chaos is, first and before anything else, reliable. Consistent. There tomorrow in the same form it was today.

I am, in other words, doing what the Empire should have done, on a very small scale, on a street in Freetown, with fifteen boys and a laminated schedule on the wall.

He lifts the cup with both wrists. He drinks. He sets it back down.

I told you at the beginning that the answer I was going to give you wouldn’t land anywhere comfortable, and I hope you’ll agree I was right about that. I also told you I wasn’t asking for your sympathy, and I meant it. What I’m asking for is something harder.

I’m asking you to hold two things at once.

The first thing: Darth Vader and the Emperor were capable of atrocity, and committed it, and nothing in what I’ve said this afternoon constitutes a defence of that. Alderaan happened. The Death Star existed. The galaxy’s non-human populations were brutalised by an institution that considered them inferior. These things are real and they matter and I have not forgotten them.

The second thing: the argument underneath the evil is not itself evil, and refusing to engage with it because of who made it, and what they made it in service of, is a luxury, and luxuries are not equally distributed. Some people can afford to find the argument repellent without examining it. Some people need to examine it because they are trying to build something in the space where the alternative was demonstrated, and they cannot afford the luxury of a clean position.

I am the second kind of person. I have always been the second kind of person, from the moment a man with a kind face put a rifle across the stumps of my arms and told me I was a soldier now.

I’ve spent twenty-seven years in the rubble of a failed liberation. I’ve spent eight of them trying to build something that works, something that holds, something that gives a fifteen-year-old boy named Emmanuel the chance to eat his dinner in peace. I know what the argument costs. I know what it costs to ignore it.

So I’ll leave you with the only question that has ever seemed to me to matter, when all the philosophy has been said and the cup is empty and the afternoon is getting late.

If you had been the child in the camp – not reading about it, not watching a film about it, not visiting it with the return ticket already in your pocket – but in it, at eleven years old, with everything you loved already gone, and the night coming down, and the danger coming from every direction at once without pattern or limit or mercy –

What would you have wanted someone to build around you?

He doesn’t wait for the answer. He already knows there isn’t one that doesn’t cost something.

He picks up the cup. It’s empty. He turns it once in his wrists, sets it down, and is still.