The taxi driver is unforgiving and unrepentant. It is March 2003 and we are on Kissy Road, Freetown, Sierra Leone, 14 months after President Tejan Kabbah announced the official end of the country's 11-year civil war. As he inches the cab through the throngs clogging the street around the old clock tower, our driver points proudly to the charred remains of the Eastern Police Station. “Do you see that building there?” he asks. “We burned that down.” The whole judicial system is corrupt, he says, explaining his hatred for the police, who comprise the front line and provide the easiest targets of public frustration with government corruption. Police frequently harass motorists, he says, and while poor men can serve years in prison for minor off ences, wealthy, powerful people go free after committing major crimes. The January 6th 1999 ‘rebel’ invasion of the city – an orgy of murder, mutilation, rape and abduction – provided a chance for revenge. “The only time you could exercise your power was at that time – with the barrel” (of a gun).

Our driver says his ‘brother’ was killed by soldiers of the government-allied West African peacekeeping force, ECOMOG. He boasts that he transported goods for rebel forces during the war and therefore could drive unharrassed in this region. He speaks fondly of the late rebel leader, Foday Sankoh. And he boasts, “In 1,000 years, peace will not come because we will tell our children” about the war and the reasons for it. For all his bravado, his calls for generations of revenge seekers are unconvincing. It simply was not that kind of war.

But also unconvincing are declarations of ‘forgiveness’ and ‘reconciliation’ that I hear repeated like mantras across the country from people who suff ered terribly during the war. “Let's forgive and forget.” “Leave the past behind.” “Swallow the bitter pill” (of no justice for most perpetrators). “Let sleeping dogs lie.” After all that Sierra Leoneans went through during this bitter war, can they really forget the past that easily, or are these the words of people resigned to no justice and determined to get on with their lives in a country rated by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) as the poorest in the world (UNDP, 2008)?