scholarly journals Straining: Young Men Working through Waithood in Freetown, Sierra Leone

2015 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 29-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brandon Finn ◽  
Sophie Oldfield
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Young Men ◽  
Policy Debate ◽  
African Cities ◽  
Working Through ◽  
Youth Bulge ◽  
The City ◽  
Informal Trading

Young men in precarious situations of persistent un(der)employment in post-civil war Freetown, Sierra Leone are depicted in popular and policy debate as “stuck” economically or “dangerous” and prone to violence. In the present paper, by contrast, we draw on young men's explanations of their work and livelihood struggles as “straining.” We explore the logic of straining, its innovations and demands, and its geography across the city, especially where acts of straining interface with the prohibition and criminalisation of informal trading. We argue that straining innovates and endures because of (not despite) young men's marginalisation and limited autonomy and power. In this context, young men build forms of provisional agency and enact dynamic forms of waithood, in their strategies to earn a living to try to support their families and to negotiate a transition from youth to manhood. Drawing on this research, we argue for a more complex understanding of young men at work in Freetown, in particular, and of the “youth bulge,” in general, in African cities.

Enslaving Globalization: Slavery, Civil War, and Modernity in Sierra Leone

2008 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 54-74
Author(s):  
Matthew J. Christensen
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Sierra Leone

Language Movement and Civil War in West Africa

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ericka A. Albaugh
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Citizen Participation ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Political Process ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Consequences ◽  
Language Spread ◽  
The 1960S

This chapter examines how civil war can influence the spread of language. Specifically, it takes Sierra Leone as a case study to demonstrate how Krio grew from being primarily a language of urban areas in the 1960s to one spoken by most of the population in the 2000s. While some of this was due to “normal” factors such as population movement and growing urbanization, the civil war from 1991 to 2002 certainly catalyzed the process of language spread in the 1990s. Using census documents and surveys, the chapter tests the hypothesis at the national, regional, and individual levels. The spread of a language has political consequences, as it allows for citizen participation in the political process. It is an example of political scientists’ approach to uncovering the mechanisms for and evidence of language movement in Africa.

scholarly journals ‘We are taught to act’: hustling on the move in Kampala and Nairobi

Africa ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 91 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-112
Author(s):  
William Monteith ◽  
George Mirembe
Keyword(s):  
East Africa ◽  
Film Industry ◽  
Language Skills ◽  
Young Men ◽  
Economic Opportunities ◽  
African Cities ◽  
Individual Survival ◽  
Urban Contexts

AbstractThis article explores the question of what happens when highly socialized and contingent forms of provisioning go wrong, and young men are forced to start again in unfamiliar urban contexts. The decline of George Mirembe's moneylending business in Kampala pre-empted his departure from the country and his arrival in Nairobi in search of new socio-economic opportunities. Lacking the documents and language skills necessary to enter formal sectors of the economy, George claimed asylum as a sexual refugee while working as a smuggler and a voice actor in the shadow film industry. His activities illustrate the advantages and limitations of the hustle as a framework for understanding the activities of transnational ‘others’ in African cities. I argue that translational practices of acting and storytelling have become a generalized tactic of survival among migrants in urban East Africa. Such practices are illustrative of a form of ‘uprooted hustle’ – or hustling on the move – that is oriented towards individual survival and exit rather than place-based transformation.

Seeing the Caesar in Germanicus: Reading Tacitus’ Annals with Lucan’s Bellum Civile

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-126
Author(s):  
Megan M. Daly
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Epic Poetry ◽  
Alexander The Great ◽  
Bellum Civile ◽  
The Past ◽  
Similar Images ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City ◽  
Roman Epic ◽  
Northern Frontier

AbstractThe recognition of the similarities between Roman epic poetry and historiography have led to valuable studies such as Joseph’s analysis of the relationship between Lucan’s Bellum Civile and Tacitus’ Histories. Traces of Lucan’s Bellum Civile can also be observed in Tacitus’ Annals 1 and 2, causing the beginning of Tiberius’ reign to look like a civil war in the making. The charismatic Germanicus sits with a supportive army on the northern frontier, much like Caesar, causing fear for Tiberius at Rome. Germanicus denies his chance to become the next Caesar and march on the city, but he exhibits other similarities with Lucan’s Caesar, including an association with Alexander the Great. Although at some points Germanicus seems to be repeating the past and reliving episodes experienced by Caesar in Bellum Civile, he prevents himself from fully realizing a Caesarian fate and becoming Lucan’s bad tyrant. The similar images, events, and themes presented by both authors create messages that reflect experiences from the authors’ own lives during dangerous times.

Parkour, Masculinity, and the City

2013 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey L. Kidder
Keyword(s):  
Built Environment ◽  
Urban Environment ◽  
Young Men ◽  
Gender Identities ◽  
The People ◽  
Ethnographic Data ◽  
Performance Of Gender ◽  
Spatial Appropriation ◽  
The City ◽  
A Performance

Parkour is a new, and increasingly popular, sport in which individuals athletically and artistically negotiate obstacles found in the urban environment. In this article, I position parkour as a performance of masculinity involving spatial appropriation. Through ethnographic data I show how young men involved in the sport use the city (both the built environment and the people within it) as a structural resource for the construction and maintenance of gender identities. The focus of my research highlights the performance of gender as a spatialized process.

“Heading for the Gun”: Skills and Sophistication in an African Guerrilla War

2009 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 236-259 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luise White
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Young Men ◽  
Southern Sudan ◽  
Mau Mau ◽  
Guerrilla War ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Liberation Struggle ◽  
Shooting Ranges

For much of the last seventy-five years African combatants, especially in wars of their own making, have not been seen as masters of the guns they shoot. In Kenya in the 1950s, for example, captured Mau Mau were humiliated: they were taken to shooting ranges where they failed to hit a target with their guns. More recently, rebels in southern Sudan considered guns poor, if effective substitutes for more embodied weapons like spears, while young men in Sierra Leone fought with the weapons at hand such as knives or machetes, because they were too poor to obtain guns. When the armies of Ethiopia and Eritrea fought well and hard with sophisticated weapons, it was said to be the result of Cold War rivalries or national agendas gone berserk. Rhodesia's bush war, Zimbabweans' liberation struggle, suggests something else, a space shaped by technology and clientelism in which guns, most especially guns in guerrilla hands, exemplify very specific European ideas about Africans, that they are skilled and sophisticated.

scholarly journals Flat Out! Dancing the city at a time of austerity

2018 ◽  
Vol 36 (5) ◽  
pp. 797-811 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia Noxolo
Keyword(s):  
Community Arts ◽  
Working Through ◽  
Auto Ethnography ◽  
The City

This paper reflects on and challenges existing paradigms around movement and mobilisation in and with the city. This focus is provoked by a community arts project called ‘Flat Out’, in which the researcher collaborated with the Drum Intercultural Arts Centre and Birmingham Royal Ballet, on a dance project with members of the community in the Lozells and Newtown areas of the city. The paper pushes for more deeply embodied and more highly politicised versions of place ballet and urban vortex, introducing a concept of choreography that comes from dance practice, and working through decolonial and postcolonial theories. A brief auto-ethnography of the author’s Birmingham childhood illustrates that movement repertoires are diverse, historically and spatially conditioned, and, in the case of Birmingham, located within an ongoing ‘decolonial churn’.

Book Reviews

2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 216-225
Author(s):  
Timo Kallinen ◽  
Michael D. Jackson ◽  
Gisela Welz ◽  
Hastings Donnan ◽  
Jeevan Raj Sharma ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Sierra Leone ◽  
University Of Pennsylvania ◽  
Republic Of Macedonia ◽  
Duke University ◽  
In Memoriam ◽  
The Republic

Crude Domination: An Anthropology of Oil Andrea Behrends, Stephen P. Reyna, and Günter Schlee, eds. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2011. 325 pp. Hardcover ISBN 978-0-85745-255-9.The War Machines: Young Men and Violence in Sierra Leone and Liberia Danny Hoffman. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. 295 pp. Paper ISBN 978-0-8223-5077-4.The Make-Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Postwar Polity Yael Navaro-Yashin. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. 270 pp. Paper ISBN 978-0-8223-5204-4.The Risk of War: Everyday Sociality in the Republic of Macedonia Vasiliki P. Neofotistos. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. 216 pp. Hardcover ISBN 978-0-8122-4399-4.Maoists at the Hearth: Everyday Life in Nepal’s Civil War Judith Pettigrew. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. 200 pp. Hardcover ISBN 978-0-8122-4492-2.In Memoriam

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