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How de Body? One Man's Terrifying Journey Through an African War Hardcover – August 6, 2002

by Teun Voeten (Author)
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In 1998, acclaimed photojournalist Teun Voeten headed to Sierra Leone for what he thought would be a standard assignment on the child soldiers there. But the cease-fire ended just as he arrived, and the clash between the military junta and the West African peace-keeping troops forced him to hide in the bush from rebels who were intent on killing him.

How de Body? ("how are you?" in Sierra Leone's Creole English) is a dramatic account of the conflict that has been raging in the country for nearly a decade-and how Voeten nearly became a casualty of it. Accessible and conversational, it's a look into the dangerous diamond trade that fuels the conflict, the legacy of war practices such as forced amputations, the tragic use of child soldiers, and more. The book is also a tribute to the people who never make the headlines: Eddy Smith, a BBC correspondent who eventually helps Voeten escape; Alfred Kanu, a school principal who risks his life to keep his students and teachers going amidst the bullets and raids; and Padre Victor, who runs a safe haven for ex-child soldiers; among others.

Featuring Voeten's stunning black-and-white photos from his multiple trips to the conflict area, How de Body? is a crucial testament to a relatively unknown tragedy.
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  1. Print length
    288 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Thomas Dunne Books
  4. Publication date
    August 6, 2002
  5. Dimensions
    5.3 x 1.18 x 9.68 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    0312282192
  7. ISBN-13
    978-0312282196
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The title of this harrowing journey through war-torn Sierra Leone means how are you? in pidgin English; as photojournalist Voeten shows in his dramatic but incomplete work of war reportage, Sierra Leone isn't doing well and neither is he, after a 1998 trip there. On assignment to photograph child soldiers, Voeten finds himself in the midst of a war between a military junta and West African peacekeeping troops. After nearly being killed by a gun-toting teenager, he goes into hiding for two weeks: I feel like a fox running from hounds and curse the soldiers who won't give me a moment's peace. His disappearance makes him something of a cause celebre several of his colleagues are planning to mount a search and rescue but he's eventually able to leave the country. Yet that's just the beginning of Voeten's involvement with the impoverished African nation. Despite suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, he returns to Sierra Leone, and it is in recounting these times that the book weakens. Voeten doesn't delve beneath the surface of his interest in Sierra Leone; he fails to give readers even a basic history of the country or to reflect on what makes journalists willing to risk their lives to report from there. He also neglects to sufficiently describe his PTSD or how his multiple returns to Sierra Leone affect it. By not answering these questions, Voeten ends up with merely a frightening travelogue of a depressing country and one inelegantly written at that. The photos, which may be the book's highlight, were not seen by PW.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Voeten, an acclaimed photojournalist, writes about the ferocity of the eight-year civil war in Sierra Leone, a former British colony in West Africa. Once referred to as "The White Man's Grave," it is a country endowed with very hospitable people and mineral wealth gold, silver, and, in particular, diamonds, which "literally lie there waiting to be picked up." The abundance of diamonds has sown greed among the major ethnic groups and has also attracted an international consortium of criminals, arms dealers, mercenaries, and drug barons. Control of these diamonds is the cause and fuel of the war. Voeten was sent to cover the use of child soldiers by the rebels and in the process got caught in the middle of the warring factions and almost lost his life. He has covered many civil wars in other places, and references and comparisons are constantly made to other war-torn countries. Thousands of children were kidnapped by the rebels and conscripted as soldiers, bearers, and cannon fodder. Special amputation squads hacked off arms, hands, or legs to sow terror and avenge the rebels' defeat. Such mass amputations were compared to those done by Belgian colonizers in the former Congo. Throughout How De Body? ("How are you?" in pidgin English), Voeten, relief workers, missionaries, and human rights activists ruminate on the extent of savagery during the eight-year period. Voeten is also fascinated by the courage, strength, and hospitality of Sierra Leoneans. The author, however, exposes his own biases by using words such as natives, thick lips, bastards, fat, and the like in the first chapter. Overall, this is a very interesting but depressing narrative of the atrocities of a civil war characterized by greed and wealth. Recommended for public libraries and those interested in African politics and civil wars in general. Edward G. McCormack, Cox Lib. & Media Ctr., Univ. of Southern Mississippi-Gulf Coast, Long Beach
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Thomas Dunne Books; First Edition (August 6, 2002)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 288 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0312282192
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0312282196
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.15 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.3 x 1.18 x 9.68 inches
  • Customer Reviews:

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Teun Voeten

Teun Voeten

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Bio

Teun Voeten

was originally born in the Netherlands. After a year as an exchange student in New Jersey, he traveled for a while all over Europe. Later, he started to study cultural anthropology and philosophy at Leiden University, Netherlands.

While studying, he grew interested in photography and learned the profession by working as a photo-assistant, both in Holland and in New York, where he studied at the School of Visual Arts.

In New York, he also picked up his first assignments for magazines such as Details and High Times combining writing and photojournalism on subjects such as the Provo movement in the Netherlands, the elections in Nicaragua and the race riots in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn.

After carrying out extensive fieldwork in a gold digger community in the Ecuadorian Andes, Voeten finished his study in 1991 and moved to Brussels, Belgium. Over the years to follow, Voeten covered the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, Haiti and Rwanda for Dutch, Belgian, German and American publications.

In 1994, he took a break from war reporting and picked up his anthropological roots by studying a homeless community that was living in an old rail road tunnel in Manhattan. For five months, Voeten lived, worked and slept among the tunnel people. This resulted in his first book 'Tunnelmensen' published in 1996 at the Amsterdam based publishing house Atlas. It was broadly praised by the press, 'a supreme example of participant observation,' one Dutch monthly wrote. 'Tunnel People' appeared September 2010 in a translated and updated version at PM Press, Oakland.

Between 1996 and 1998, Voeten developed a taste for the so called "forgotten wars" and went out to document the ongoing crises in Colombia, Afghanistan, Sudan and Sierra Leone. Work from these trips was published in his photo book 'A Ticket To', published in 1999 by Veenman Publishers.

In 1998, Voeten went to Sierra Leone to work on a project on child soldiers. His first trip ended nearly in disaster went he was hunted down by rebels intent on killing him, but eventually resulted in the headline "How de Body? Hope and Horror in Sierra Leone" which was published by Meulenhoff, in 2000. The English translation appeared at St. Martins Press, New York, 2002.

In 2000 and the years to come, Voeten was working on the human rights violations in Colombia, the so called conflict diamonds in Angola, Congo and Sierra Leone, the ongoing war in Afghanistan and women trafficking and forced prostitution on the Balkan.

In 2003, he went to Baghdad to follow up on the American led invasion/liberation, to return there 6 months later as an embed with the US forces. Over the last few years, Voeten also followed the American Coalition forces in Afghanistan. More recently, he focused his camera on the Gaza strip, the DR Congo and North Korea (design and architecture) as well as Chad (Darfur crisis), Iran (daily life) , China (pollution) and more recently, in 2012, the Arab Spring in Egypt en Libya as well as the ongoing war in Iraq and Syria.

Voeten has been published in Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, NY Times Magazine, National Geographic Magazine, Newsweek, Time, Granta, Village Voice, Vrij Nederland, NRC, De Standaard, Frankfurter Allgemeine, between others. His photos are used worldwide by relief organizations such as the International Red Cross, Doctors without Borders, UNICEF, UNHCR, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Having won several awards for his photography and writing, Voeten is a regular guest on talk shows from all major networks in the Netherlands and Belgium, and is a sought after lecturer at universities and other cultural institutions in Europe and the USA. Besides his journalistic work, Voeten also started a foundation that is raising funds for a high school in Sierra Leone.

In 2009, Voeten started to focus on the drug violence in Mexico and made numerous trips to the flashpoints of the drug war, Ciudad Juarez, Culiacan and Michoacan. He also turned into new roads, making a video documentary about growing up in the most dangerous city in the world (Ciudad Juarez), as well as organizing a war photography exhibition, "10 years after 9/11" as a guest curator for GEMAK, a dependance from the Den Haag Fotomuseum in the Netherlands.

His photos from the drug violence can be seen in the photobook 'Narco Estado. Drug Violence in Mexico' which was published by Lannoo late 2012. Intrigued by the extreme violence in Mexico and trying to put 22 years of experience into academic perspective, Voeten started a PhD on the Mexican drug violence. 2018, he obtained his doctorate degree. An updated an completely rewritten version of his study appeared as a Small Wars Journal/El Centro book under the title: "Mexican Drug Violence. Hybrid Warfare, Predatory Capitalism and the Logic of Cruelty,"

Customer reviews

4.5 out of 5 stars
4.5 out of 5
9 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Augustine Invictus
5.0 out of 5 stars dangerous journey in sierra leone
Reviewed in the United States on May 5, 2012
Verified Purchase
This book will keep you on your toes. The location is Sierra Leone,a small West African country."How De Body" is Krio(Sierra Leonen creolish English mixed with native dialect or whatever)for "How Are You?". This is a journalist's account of this country's rebel vs. government forces conflict which had been going on for more than ten years and the coninued violence even after a cease-fire was promulgated. His main assignment about child soldiers in that conflict was complicated by the continued clash by military junta vs. West African peacekeepers that even his own life was in jeopardy. This long civil war was teemed with violence,murder,rape and the tragic use of child soldiers as young as 6yrs.old. The latter are abducted from villages,trained militarily and drugged to kill even their own family members,friends or innocent people to"toughen them up" under pain of torture and death!
This war was also fueled by the highly controversial diamond trade. The 2006 movie "Blood Diamond" with Leonardo DiCarpio portrayed the above. The author Teun Voeten has a remarkable way of telling his terrifying experience in such a way that it makes you feel that you are in his team. He writes of what he saw,heard,smelled,felt and feared not to exclude mixing occassional "nervous"laughter.The fear of being killed instantly or unexpectedly is cleverly narrated with some hint of humor involved to ease the tension.Whether there are occassional innaccuracies of observation does not really matter. Just put yourself in the author's shoes during his nerve-wracking journey and you might commit some yourself inadvertently. (For these mistatements, Just consult Wikipedia which have its own inaccuracies occassionally). I consider this book as a page turner, with no long protracted comments about complexities of United Nations or World Politics or International Monetary Fund, or Unicef etc. The resilience and forgiving character of the typical Sierra Leonen whether adult or kid is also portayed,sometimes tragically and sadly. Although some reviewers will put less than 5 Stars, I am going to dub this book with 5 stars. As I said this is an expression of personal opinion. I will still stick with Five Stars for Teun Voeten's "How De Body?".
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Jeffrey A. Cochrane
5.0 out of 5 stars Gripping History
Reviewed in the United States on October 16, 2005
Verified Purchase
Emotional and gripping. Publisher's Weekly misses the mark completely.

Here we find a struggle to tell the story of the Sierra Leone disaster from a new and compelling perspective. This is fundamentally not a story about the author himself, though his setting his harrowing tale within his own experience helps us to understand the people of Sierra Leone far better than any news report, photo essay, or anthropological tome that I have seen to date.

The book succeeds perhaps precisely because the author does not delve into a further discussion of his own PTSD, but rather covers it incidentally through that of the children, the therapist working with the children, and, yes, in context, the occasional hint of the depth of his own near destruction.

I am most grateful for the opportunity through this book to know people in Sierra Leone like Eddie, and am reminded of vignettes from the second world war about those who, surrounded by death at every turn, still found within themselves the courage to help others. For Eddie alone, this is a story to be read.

I myself witnessed Sierra Leone's disaster at a time just before the events in this book. Voeten's depiction of the people of Sierra Leone -- those who committed atrocities, and those who were the subjects of those atrocites, all victims -- to me rings very true indeed.
2 people found this helpful
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Mike
3.0 out of 5 stars Incomplete, conceited tale
Reviewed in the United States on February 10, 2003
While this book offers up a narrowly focused tale on Sierra Leone's civil war, Tuen Voeten's strained efforts to sound hip in the telling make this book one worth reading only if you're looking to see events from a different angle. Voeten's flagrent use of swear words (I wouldn't care about them if they added to the story) throughout the book seem to be an effort to sound like a cowboy on assingment instead of a professional journalist. Overall Voeten provides an easy to follow narrative about his experiences, but essentially no background on the events in Sierra Leone during the period of his times there.
9 people found this helpful
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Kevin M Quigg
4.0 out of 5 stars A Dutch Journalist account of the terror of the RUF.
Reviewed in the United States on May 19, 2008
This is my fourth book about the terrors of the RUF. These were ugly people trying to overthrow the legitimate government of Sierra Leone. The RUF killed white people, anybody that disagreed with them, and kidnapped young people to place in their army. They were supported by the likes of Charles Taylor of Liberia and Colonel Quaddafi of Libya. No wonder these were killers who didn;t care a dang about the people they were supposedly liberating. The RUF also engaged in a terrorist act of chopping people's hands/legs/nose/ears off, to show they meant business.

The author Voeten spent a terrible two to three weeks of hiding from these killers in 1998. A kind educated rural family protected him rather than turn him over to the RUF. The author recounts his stories of those that lost their lives in the Civil War. There are no bright shining heroes in this book. The legitimate government is shown as corrupt. The ECOMEG forces are shown as brutal and corrupt also. The NGOs serving Sierre Leone are also shown as having their own agenda. The journalists flock to these failed states to make a buck off the conflict.

This is a interesting account of the Sierra Leone Civil War. It is one man's perspective, but it details a history of the conflict.
2 people found this helpful
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Pauline shopping on line
5.0 out of 5 stars You are there, in Sierra Leone, during the past ten years.
Reviewed in the United States on May 20, 2003
Verified Purchase
For people from Sierra Leone, this book verifies the stories and rumors that they have been hearing over the years. The excellent pictures speak for themselves. References are there so that the reader may continue to read more about the devastation of a people from a peaceful country. For those who don't know about the tragedy going on in West Africa, this book tells all.
7 people found this helpful
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Pieter Franken
5.0 out of 5 stars Highly interesting, gripping and realistic
Reviewed in the United States on August 24, 2005
This book is definitely to be recommended for people interested in modern Africa and journalism. It tells the gripping tale of a Dutch (or Belgian?) journalist caught in the middle of the civil war in Sierra Leone. Don't hesitate just buy and enjoy!!

Pieter
3 people found this helpful
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Victoria Bruce
5.0 out of 5 stars Fun and terror as a war reporter...
Reviewed in the United States on August 25, 2002
a most amazing mix of humor, terror and intrigue. voten is charming and real. One of the best books in this genre ever!
5 people found this helpful
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