Before Before: A Story of Discovery and Loss in Sierra Leone

5 Star Review

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Editorial Book Review:

By Fabiana Barbery

Sierra Leone exists in the Western imagination almost entirely as a place of catastrophe. Blood diamonds. Child soldiers. War amputations. Ebola. Kush. Betsy Small arrived there in 1984, three years before the civil war that would tear the country apart, and what she found was something the headlines have never had much interest in: ordinary life, lived with complexity and grace and struggle and humor and love, in a rainforest village of forty rice-farming families who were not yet defined by the disaster coming for them.

Before Before is the act of bearing witness to that life, and the title carries the book's deepest grief inside it. Before before: the time before the war, before the world knew Sierra Leone's name for all the wrong reasons, before the country became shorthand for suffering. Small spent three years in Tokpombu, 250 miles from the coast, keeping the journal entries and building the relationships that would eventually become this book. When she returned decades later with her daughter, the double vision of then and now gave the memoir its particular ache.

What she captures in Tokpombu is the kind of daily texture that disappears from history when disaster rewrites the record. The tensions between elders honoring oral tradition and young men drawn toward the illicit diamond mines. The specific weight of women's lives in that community. The growing pressures that anyone paying careful attention could feel building before anyone had a name for what they were building toward. Small was paying careful attention, and her prose has the quality of someone who learned to see by refusing to look away.

Donna Shalala called it a masterpiece. Scholars from City College of New York and Quinnipiac University praised it as one of the best recollections of pre-war Sierra Leone in existence. That institutional recognition matters, but what matters more is the humanity on every page, the specific, irreplaceable people whose lives deserve to be known as more than prologue to catastrophe.

For anyone who wants to understand what was lost when the war came, this book is the most important starting point available.

About the Author

Betsy Small

Betsy Small served as an agricultural extension agent in the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone (1984-87), an experience that profoundly shaped her future. She has dedicated herself to humanitarian and educational work in classrooms, therapeutic environments, and research on violence prevention and work with survivors of sexual violence. She is also the former executive director of global peacebuilding organizations. Betsy's book, Before Before: A Story of Discovery and Loss in Sierra Leone is a finalist for the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards in Political and Social Sciences and 2026 Nautilus Silver Award winner in the category of World Cultures’ Transformational Growth and Development.