“Riveting, revealing, and brimming with stopping beauty and cruelty, Before Before is not just a great book, but an essential one for these times. It's a model of compassion and of humility, and of brilliant story-telling that both honors and chastens humanity.”— Sy Montgomery, NY Times Bestselling Author of How To Be a Good Creature
“In Sierra Leone, we have many sayings—Wan an bangul noh bah shake (It takes many bracelets on a wrist to make a beautiful sound) is an example. The stories and memories invoked in Before Before are illustrative of this core belief—that it takes many voices to tell a story. These chapters not only tell stories of Sierra Leone from a whole new perspective, but they weave an intersection between what people want to hear and what they may not yet understand.”— Adeyinka M. Akinsulure-Smith, Ph.D., ABPP, City College of New York
“Before Before: A Story of Discovery and Loss in Sierra Leone offers a rich and compelling ethnographic account of life in a Kono village in eastern Sierra Leone in the 1980s before the onset of the Sierra Leone civil war in 1991. It represents one of the best recollections of life in pre-war Sierra Leone and it should be preserved to help future generations appreciate what life was like in Sierra Leone before the war.”— Fodei J. Batty, Quinnipiac University