'“What can we do with the past, I wrote in my journal that night. How can we outlive it? And what about the stories we tell? So partial, so fugitive.” These words, I think, express something central about Michael Jackson’s many years of anthropological struggles. He continues, “We tell stories in order to come to terms with what has befallen us,” to “create the illusion … that we have a hand in our own fate” (pp. 30–31).

In Sierra Leone is a small but ethnographically rich book that could only have been written by someone who has followed the developments of the country for several decades and who also is a gifted writer. It is a kind of ethnographic biography of S. B. Marah, a Sierra Leonean politician. The book revolves around Marah’s life story and political career. Woven around that theme are explanatory stories told by Jackson’s old-time assistant Noah, who is Marah’s younger brother, and by other informants as well as Jackson’s personal experiences and reflections, always full of small but, indeed, profound observations, of the sort too often ignored in writings on war-torn Africa. For example, as Jackson notes on the last page of the chapter called “The War,” the majority of frustrated young men in today’s troubled Africa choose not to embrace armed struggle. A rare but, indeed, important insight.

Jackson describes his recent revisits to Sierra Leone and inland travels with Marah toward Kurankoland. But he also presents a journey into the country’s past, and into his many years of Sierra Leonean experience. Readers can also recognize the feeling of loneliness that sometimes characterizes the enterprise called “ethnographic fieldwork,” despite the many people constantly crying for the attention of the anthropologist. Jackson sketches the paradox of his life-long Sierra Leonean engagement, at one occasion ceremonially initiated and celebrated, at other times imbued with a feeling of being among people with whom one does not quite belong. Still, a shared humanity.

Marah’s stories are carefully recorded, transcribed, and reproduced, and these stories also frame the account: “So partial, so fugitive.” Jackson discusses less about the motivations of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels or on how former rebels now cope with the stigma of being global bad guys in postwar Sierra Leone. Marah’s four-wheel-drive vehicle, with Jackson in the back seat, briefly stops in a town depicted as an “RUF stronghold,” not because of the travelers’ curiosity but because of a mechanical problem with the car that needed attention. Before readers can learn more about the town, the car is repaired and the journey continues. Jackson works from the other end, contextualizing Marah’s and other people’s bitter experiences of the war and the RUF rebels. So this is a book with the victims’ rather than the perpetrators’ stories. Jackson’s conclusion is still very important: A conflict always “takes on a life and logic of its own” (p. 155). With time, this violent logic detaches itself from the original motivations; the root causes fade. Perhaps it was all about politicians, like Marah, who eventually lost “touch with the common people” (p. 126), and perhaps young people’s “patience with autocracy, traditional or modern, had worn thin” (p. 47). But also, as Jackson so insightfully elaborates, in postwar Sierra Leone, Marah is again a man of age, of position and power, which enables him to nurture his bitterness. The majority of war victims, by contrast, are too powerless to cultivate feelings of retaliation. “They were simply realists, acutely aware of what they could and could not do,” because everything is boiling down to the existential “issue of power and powerlessness” (p. 69).

Jackson struggles against impressionism and against abstractions and generalizations. Still, he says something profound on the human condition, in general. He carefully balances his personal experiences against the diverging experiences of his informants and Sierra Leonean friends. As is typical of Jackson’s work, each dimension shreds light on the others. I read the book for a second time during fieldwork in war-torn Uganda, leaving it behind with one of my best friends, a university student and a close fieldwork associate, when I traveled back to Sweden. The book encouraged us to reflect on numerous parallels with Ugandan history and with our own experiences. And we were both provoked by Jackson’s statement about young students he interviewed in 1969–70, about “the poignantly impossible gulf between their dreams and their reality” (p. 148). We hope that our own research, from young Ugandans’ perspective, eventually will add nuance to this conclusion.

Jackson’s existential–phenomenological anthropology is of great inspiration to me, a source that never goes dry. And In Sierra Leone is perhaps ethnography at its best; it is specific but still encourages comparison and contemplation on the human condition, in general, forcing and inspiring scholars to engage in new ways with our own material.