Guns to Tools
Sierra Leone suffered bitter and bloody civil war for most of the 1990s until the UN finally intervened in 1999. The disarmament and decommissioning process that followed has been thorough and effective, turning one the most heavily armed and fractious countries in Africa into a relatively peaceful nation. The country is still suffering from the economic and social effects of years of war however, and although the political situation is now more stable most of the population remains desperately poor, especially in rural areas. Two NGOs, MAPCO and APT Enterprises have address this abject poverty by training blacksmiths to recycle the detritus of war into agricultural tools for rural farmers. AK47 assault rifles, rocket launchers and even tanks are dismantled and then forged into shovels, sickels or possibly even ploughshares, providing an income for the blacksmith, good, cheap tools for the farmers and putting the weapons forever beyond use.
A pile of decommissioned weapons, collected from rebel militia at the end of the civil war in Sierra Leone in 1999. Tens of thousands of tons of weapons were collected under the supervision of the UN.
A private security guard at an NGO compound holds two halves of a decommissioned AK47, collected by the UN at the end of the civil war in Sierra Leone. These remains comprise a significant amount of high quality scrap metal.
Blacksmiths collect scrapped weapons from a small stockpile outside the southern city of Bo. Other sources of scrap-metal have been bought up by dealers from India and China.
A traditional charcoal forge glows red-hot as two AK47 barrels are heated in the first stage of their transformation into low-tech tools for rural farmers.
The barrel of an AK47 assault rifle is stripped of it’s fittings by the skilled hand of a blacksmith in Sennehu, a small village on the road to Bo.
A village blacksmith carefully tempers the edge of a bush-knife made from the remains of an assault rifle.
Three examples of the simple tools which can be made by local blacksmiths from the remains of decommissioned weapons. Left to right: a planting hoe, a bushknife and an axe.
A village blacksmith holds examples of weapons recycling in his simple
smithy in Sennehu.
Bush-clearing, the first stage of almost all farming in the tropics, on the outskirts of Bo in Sierra Leone.
A farmer holds up his bush-knife, made from the barrel of an assault rifle, during a break from clearing land for planting.
Women till the soil of a community vegetable plot in the village of Sennehu.
A young woman with her planting hoe, made from a recycled gun barrel, in the womens’ community garden in Sennehu.