Daniel Bergner, USA
“The music came from the edge of the camp, where the government soldiers stayed, or just beyond. Hearing it – that fast rhythm, that slow high-pitched voice singing words I couldn’t understand – slipped away from my cot in the thatch lean-to, searching for the music’s source. Dawn didn’t come gradually there but all at once; before, I needed my flashlight to navigate past the rotting army truck, the trees split by lightening and others by shrapnel, and across the plateau of scrub towards the dark sheds where I thought the singer might be. I wanted to listen up close to his elongated notes, stretching above the tight drumbeats. I wanted to see his face in the first light.
I turned off the main path towards the shed where my ears directed me. The music ceased. I stood in the middle of the field, waiting. The shed was still a good distance away and I couldn’t be sure the singer was there. Dawn neared. The Sierra Leonean soldiers would be stirring, and I felt a bit foolish, viewing myself as they might view me, a white man stumbling through the scrub, hunting for a morning song they took for granted.”
Journalist and writer. Daniel Bergner first travelled to Africa in 1983, and has reported from many African countries, as well as Afghanistan. He graduated from Columbia University’s MFA Fiction Writing Program in 1988.
He is the author of the novel Moments of Favor, published in 1991. The novel is about the dangerous appeal of celebrity status. In 1999, The God of the Rodeo was published. In order to write the book, Bergner spent a year visiting prisoners with life sentences in Louisiana's “Angola prison.” This prison hosts an annual rodeo for the public where the convicts compete against one another. The text tells stories of the rodeo, of those inmates Bergner came to know, and his chilling encounters with Angola’s powerful warden. The God of the Rodeo was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.
Daniel Bergner’s Soldiers of Light (first published in 2003 under the title In the Land of Magic Soldiers: A Story of White and Black in West Africa) arose following visits to Sierra Leone over several years. In the West African landscape of spectacular beauty, he finds rampaging soldiers–-many not yet in their teens–-who have made a custom of hacking off the hands of their victims, then letting them live as the ultimate emblem of terror. The country is so anarchic and so desperate that, forty years after independence, some people long to be re-colonized. And the West wants to save it.
Bergner follows both a set of white would-be saviours–-a family of American missionaries, a mercenary helicopter gunship pilot, and the army of Great Britain–-and also a set of Sierra Leoneans, among them a father who rescues his daughter from rape, loses his hands as punishment, then begins to rebuild his life; a child soldier and sometime cannibal; and a highly Westernized medical student who claims immunity to bullets and a cure for H.I.V. It is a story of black and white, of the First World and the world left infinitely behind. The work describes people’s involvement in the country’s civil war, and their journeys towards restitution. The volume won the Overseas Press Club Award for international reporting, and was named the Best Book in 2003 by the Los Angeles Times.
Daniel Bergner’s writing has been published in Mother Jones, and he is a regular contributor to Harpers, Talk, the New York Times Magazine and the New York Times. He is currently working on a book about Afghanistan.
Daniel Bergner lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and two children.
