During the civil war in Sierra Leone in 1999, I found myself in a jungle town called Kenema as locals got word that a rebel army was headed their way. The Revolutionary United Front, as the rebels called themselves, was infamous for mass rape, execution, and torture, and the people of Kenema were understandably terrified. I watched women pour into the streets and start screaming at the men to go out and defend them. Then they grabbed their children and took shelter as best they could. The men rounded up whatever weapons they could find—rusty shotguns and AKs, old pistols, a colonial-era saber—and rushed out of town to meet their fate. They managed to defeat the rebels, and an unspeakable tragedy was averted.
The recent and very American idea that the sexes are the same or at least interchangeable was clearly not true for the people of Kenema in the early summer of 1999. Whatever one might be tempted to say about sex and gender from the safety of our powerful country, the role the women of Kenema chose for themselves in those terrible moments was to take care of their children. And the role they gave to their husbands was to fight. Every society in the world uses men for defense because they are stronger and faster and can be killed in huge numbers without it mattering very much. Lose half the men in a tribe and the other half will repopulate the group within a generation; lose half the women, and the tribe will never recover. Men make perfect cannon fodder, in other words. Had the women of Kenema chosen to defend the town and told the men to flee with the children, it could have ended catastrophically for both.
