Because I am a Girl Read Online Free

who stood out with the flowing gowns and brightly coloured fezzes. Their Islamic faith and desire for profit cared little for international boundaries. And there were ambitious Krio administrators from Freetown who came out to the provinces with their textbooks and college degrees determined to drag rural Africa into the modern world. And there were even a few white missionaries, remnants of an earlier age when seeding Christianity in the heathen hinterland of Africa was seen as the way forward for a continent.
    But in recent years those horizons had closed in on Kailahun and its location had been its curse. When Liberian warlords set about stirring conflict in Sierra Leone it was through Kailahun that their rebels and guns flooded. As more and more of Sierra Leone fell to the gunmen, so Kailahun became a transit point for gems flowing out of the country’s diamond fields and blood money flowing in. A once major town was destroyed and though the war had officially ended years before there remained in Kailahun a very immediate post-tsunami air, a strong and still current sense of shock at the scale and cruelty of the battering it had endured.
    Bendu’s life had spanned those awful times although she remembered little of what she had actually witnessed. She knew her parents were both dead, killed in the first attack on the village where she was born just outside Kailahun. The story went that she had been found still bound by a lappa to her dead mother’s back and taken in by one of the rebel army’s female camp followers. That woman had in turn been killed in a later counter-attack and Bendu had spent the next years as flotsam on the war’s ebb and flow.
    Forced to work as a slave for various armed factions, she spent years on the move, making temporary home in the ruins of war-damaged villages or out in the forest. There were moments when she had been forced to carry a gun, shooting madly into the forest in what was later described with pride, though scant honesty, as ‘military operations ’. There had been assaults by men if that’s the right word for the armed brutes often not much older than her. She could remember the rancid smell of palm wine on their breath and the glazed unseeing eyes as they crushed the last remnants of her childhood out of her.
    Since the war ended, child psychologists sent by aid groups had come to treat her almost as a special case. War crimes investigators had endured the eighteen-hour drive all the way across Sierra Leone to speak to her. Apparently one of the rebels she had spent time serving, Issay, was a ‘kakatua’, the so-called Big Fish responsible for the worst atrocities of the war and the investigators came with their notebooks and tape recorders to take down what Bendu remembered.
    But she had deliberately kept the details from lodging permanently in her mind. Her past was too distressing. Like many in Sierra Leone she saw no point in looking backwards and trying to pin blame. There were too many in the community who had taken part in atrocities that to hold them all to account would eat out society and leave nothing in its place. But she remembered how Issay justified everything – child soldiers, rapes, killing – with the same remark: ‘In Africa your elders know best.’
    After the operation she underwent at the United Nations hospital when she was told she would never be able to have children, she made herself try to look forwards , to think of tomorrow, not yesterday. All that mattered now was earning enough from growing and selling rice to pay the rent on her room in Kailahun, and keeping her place at Methodist Girls’ High – MGH – the oldest school in the region and the first to reopen after the war.
    She struggled to sleep again after the dream but dawn was still some way off. Murky moonlight came through her un-curtained window allowing her to make out the outline of her possessions. There was the rattan armchair, fashioned by her landlord and paid for by a