Photographer turned rebel leader · Sierra Leone
Foday Sankoh
Foday Sankoh (1937–2003) was a Sierra Leonean army corporal who worked as an itinerant and wedding photographer and as a television cameraman before founding the Revolutionary United Front (RUF). The RUF's war against the government of Sierra Leone, from 1991 to 2002, was marked by mass killings, amputations, rape and the use of child soldiers. Indicted for war crimes and crimes against humanity, Sankoh died in custody in 2003 before his trial.
Updated 2 min read
Sankoh is on this site only because Wikidata records his early work as a photographer; he is known for nothing in art. Born in 1937, he joined the Sierra Leone Army in 1956 and trained in its signals corps, as a wireless operator and, by one account, a cameraman; he is also said to have served with the United Nations force in the Congo in the early 1960s. In 1971, as a corporal, he was cashiered and imprisoned at Pademba Road prison in Freetown over a mutiny or coup plot; sources give the sentence as six or seven years. After his release he made a living with a camera, as an itinerant photographer in the south and east of the country, photographing weddings, and as a television cameraman. It was on those travels, and later during training in Libya, where he met Charles Taylor, that he gathered the radicals with whom he would found the RUF. A fact-check by the Nigerian outlet Dubawa found his army service, his rank, his imprisonment and his photography supported by the records it reviewed, while noting how sparse the record of his life is.
In 1991 the RUF, backed by Charles Taylor in Liberia, invaded Sierra Leone. The war that followed killed tens of thousands of people and displaced millions; RUF fighters became notorious for cutting off civilians' hands and arms, and for abducting children as soldiers. A 1999 peace deal made Sankoh vice-president, but fighting resumed, and he was captured in Freetown in 2000. Indicted by the Special Court for Sierra Leone on 7 March 2003 for war crimes and crimes against humanity, he died in custody on 29 July 2003, before he could be tried.
How to read this page: the photography is a footnote to a life that is judged by its consequences. The pictures that matter from that war were made by the photojournalists who documented it, and by the victims who spoke afterwards to the Special Court and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission; the Residual Special Court for Sierra Leone and BlackPast keep accounts of the case and the man. That reading is this site's own. See our list of African photographers.
