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"Sierra Leone History."
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Coastal Sierra Leone : materiality and the unseen in maritime West Africa
Against the backdrop of a threadbare post-war state and a global marine ecology in treacherous decline, Jennifer Diggins offers a dynamic account of post-war Sierra Leone, through the examination of a precarious frontier economy and those who depend on it. The book traces how understandings of intimacy, interdependence, and exploitation have been shaped through a history of indentured labour, violence, and gendered migration; and how these relationships are being renegotiated once more in a context of deepening economic uncertainty. At its core, this is about the material substance of human relationships. One can go a long way towards mapping the town's shifting networks of friendship, love, and obligation simply by watching the vast daily traffic in gifts of fish exchanging hands on the wharf. However, these mundane social and economic strategies are often inflected through a cultural dynamic of 'secrecy', and a shared sense of the unseen forces understood to inhabit the material world.
Book
War and the Crisis of Youth in Sierra Leone
The armed conflict in Sierra Leone and the extreme violence of the main rebel faction - the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) - have challenged scholars and members of the international community to come up with explanations. Up to this point, though, conclusions about the nature of the war are mainly drawn from accounts of civilian victims and commentators who had access to only one side of the war. The present study addresses this currently incomplete understanding of the conflict by focusing on the direct experiences and interpretations of protagonists, paying special attention to the hitherto neglected, and often underage, cadres of the RUF. The data presented challenges the widely canvassed notion of the Sierra Leone conflict as a war motivated by 'greed, not grievance'. Rather, it points to a rural crisis expressed in terms of unresolved tensions between landowners and marginalized rural youth, further reinforced and triggered by a collapsing patrimonial state.
eBook
I Did It to Save My Life
Utilizing narratives of seven different people-soldier, rebel, student, trader, evangelist, father, and politician-I Did it To Save My Lifeprovides fresh insight into how ordinary Sierra Leoneans survived the war that devastated their country for a decade. Individuals in the town of Makeni narrate survival through the rubric of love, and by telling their stories and bringing memory into the present, create for themselves a powerful basis on which to reaffirm the rightness of their choices and orient themselves to a livable everyday. The book illuminates a social world based on love, a deep, compassionate relationship based on material exchange and nurturing, that transcends romance and binds people together across space and through time. In situating their wartime lives firmly in this social world, they call into question the government's own narrative that Makeni residents openly collaborated with the rebel RUF during its three-year occupation of the town. Residents argue instead that it was the government's disloyalty to its people, rather than rebel invasion and occupation, which destroyed the town and forced uneasy co-existence between civilians and militants.
eBook
Abolition and empire in Sierra Leone and Liberia
Bronwen Everill offers a new perspective on African global history, applying a comparative approach to freed slave settlers in Sierra Leone and Liberia to understand their role in the anti-slavery colonization movements of Britain and America.
eBook
Human security and Sierra Leone's post-conflict development
Achieving security and development in the post-conflict era is a challenge with which stakeholders have to grapple. While stakeholders are quick to claim success when physical hostilities cease between the belligerents, ensuring sustainable peace has been a daunting task. In some countries in Africa, the post-conflict era is characterized by organizing elections to ensure greater political participation. It is believed that elections will begin a process of openness and trust in the governing system. A supplement to electoral democracy has been power sharing arrangements used to resolve post-election violence, and ensure stability within the state. However, what underlie most conflicts in Africa is the marginalization and lack of an enabling environment to achieve individual life objectives. Policies and strategies to achieve security and enhance development post conflict have, at best, been an extremely slow process and sometimes elusive. In Sierra Leone, for instance, though the official declaration of the end of war and the successful general elections held in 2002, 2007, and 2012 have led to some domestic stability, developmental targets in the post-conflict era have proceeded at a snail’s pace. The country continues to rank at the bottom of most UNDP human development indicators since 2002. Human Security and Sierra Leone’s Post-Conflict Development analyzes the extent to which human security issues have been addressed and subsequently implemented in the post-conflict reconstruction process. While Sierra Leone has made tremendous efforts at implementing reforms in the areas of political sensitization, promotion of civil rights and civil liberties, as well as personal security, the lack on the part of the government to effectively address the unemployment problem has negatively affected security and developmental targets. Thus, the post-conflict management strategies in Sierra Leone fail to secure and promote some aspects of human security, leading to fragile peace and slow progress in achieving sustainable security and development. Human security is an all-encompassing phenomenon and must be addressed to achieve overall wellbeing of the people, especially in post-conflict environments.
eBook
Testimony
IBPA Benjamin Franklin Award™ gold winner, poetry category Sierra Leone's devastating civil war barely caught the attention of Western media, but it raged on for over a decade, bringing misery to millions of people in West Africa from 1991 to 2002. The atrocities committed in this war and the accounts of its survivors were duly recorded by international organizations, but they run the risk of being consigned to dusty historical archives. Derived from public testimonies at a UN-backed war crimes tribunal in Freetown, this remarkable poetry collection aims to breathe new life into the records of Sierra Leone's civil war, delicately extracting heartbreaking human stories from the morass of legal jargon. By rendering selected trial transcripts in poetic form, Shanee Stepakoff finds a novel way to communicate not only the suffering of Sierra Leone's people, but also their courage, dignity, and resilience. Her use of innovative literary techniques helps to ensure that the voices of survivors are not forgotten, but rather heard across the world. This volume also includes an introduction that explores how the genre of \"found poetry\" can serve as a uniquely powerful means through which writers may bear witness to atrocity. This book's unforgettable excavation and shaping of survivor testimonies opens new possibilities for speaking about the unspeakable.
eBook