Inscriptions on the Wall

Drawing on the image of a “Chinese Store” in the author’s photographic archive, this chapter addresses past traces of Chinese presences in remote reaches of the rural landscape of Sierra Leone—and in commodities widely circulating in the country—in contrast to the more monumental scale of present-day Chinese projects in African states. Here Cold War alliances and competing interests of two Chinas (Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China) superimpose themselves on an archaeology of Chinese presence in West Africa that reaches back to the long term.

Wartime Rumors

The circulation of wartime rumors frames the history and experiences of particular conflicts, as well as widely shared popular anxieties that mark turning points and critical events—transitions that define clear “befores” and “afters” in the memories of those who lived through the civil war. Rumors of collusions between humanitarian agencies and the RUF rebels—particularly the multiple “Red Crosses” with their secretive and sometimes conflicting agendas—informed collective imaginaries during the conflict. The chapter also examines historical instances of suspicions surrounding the secretive diplomatic activities of the International Committee of the Red Cross in other wars and the organization’s practices of neutrality and secrecy that fail to quash those suspicions.

Conclusion

This chapter returns to a theme first advanced in the introduction of the overlap between the West African region affected by the 2014–2016 Ebola crisis and the region affected by the 1991–2002 civil war to argue that the humanitarian intervention followed symmetrical practices of securitization of the national landscape, checkpoints, blockades, and a politics that tended to contain the population in urban households and rural villages. For the global community, the Ebola emergency was the more critical than the war because of the speed with which the disease could circulate beyond original boundaries of transmission. But for Sierra Leonean communities that experienced both realities, the war continues to be remembered as the most horrific and critical experience of emergency in recent decades.

Sitting on the Land

Even in the broader African context, in which the chieftaincy has enjoyed a renaissance, the institution enjoys unusual power in Sierra Leone, where chiefs have strong representation and votes in national politics. Following more sedentary, land-based models of sovereignty in colonial times, the decade-long civil war saw the reemergence of alternative, more mobile models of the chieftaincy harkening back to precolonial times, in the face of massive population displacements. In the aftermath of war, when many chieftaincies were vacant, the possibility of replacing this hybrid hereditary-elected office with more democratic district councils was debated, but chiefs continue to be key members of these institutions, which rely on them for the collection of revenue and the administration of justice, particularly in rural areas. The chapter argues that the resurgence of this institution in sub-Saharan Africa is due to the ways in which chieftaincy stands for a more culturally legitimate form of decentralized governance, in contrast with the corrupt institutions of state governance. In Sierra Leone, the office’s continued identification with the local administration and allocation of land gives it renewed importance in the face of large-scale land deals with (and land grabs by) foreign investors. The expanding practice of conferring honorary chieftaincies to foreign agents of development contributes to the deterritorialization of the institution.

Chronotope 2

Numbers aggregated in the form of estimates of casualties or to convey the scale of a catastrophic event are the companion aspect of exemplary cases. Numericality increasingly informs evidence-based governance, humanitarian, and human rights discourse, advancing claims to objectivity and transparency through aggregations, averages, and statistical samples. This chronotope examines in particular the amputee as the figure of exemplary victimhood of this civil war in mediatic efforts to mobilize an international response, and it argues that taken in the broader context of the war, other causes of fatalities outnumbered this one.

Child Soldiers and the Contested Imaginary of Community after War

This chapter examines the emergence of the figure of the child soldier in African conflicts and of the criminalization of forced conscription of children in combat in international war crimes jurisprudence, particularly at the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL)—one of the first war crimes tribunals to secure convictions on this count. The chapter examines the context of a civil war that often split small-scale communities and of a society that offers individuals multiple communities of belonging, thus complicating choices about the reintegration of demobilized, war-affected youth. Through two cases of war-affected youth, the chapter questions the humanitarian application of “normative post-traumatic” practices of psychological narrativization of trauma, leading to ambiguous and ambivalent returns in communities of origin, where forms of collective forgetting were preferred as strategies for addressing harms and war reparations.

Refugees and Diasporic Publics

The civil war saw a dramatic increase in emigration from Sierra Leone, and the country’s diasporic population has increasingly contributed to the ways in which Sierra Leone reterritorializes itself beyond its boundaries through the practices of this population. The chapter also examines the emergence of transnational public spheres through cyber-publics and other revolutions in the means and media of communication in the formation of national and subnational communities of belonging beyond Sierra Leone.

Chronotope 1

Borrowing an expression from Bakhtin about the crystallization of space-time in language, this reflection focuses on the anticipatory and revelatory quality of collective anxieties about the present, which are frozen in rumors (for instance, about suspected collusions between soldiers and rebels) and become fully realized as actual alliances at a later time. The chapter traces the emergence and eclipse of rumors at specific historical moments in war.

Belatedness

This chapter offers an example of violent and sensory transmissions—and belated encounters with trauma—in the context of masked political and ritual performances by a male secret society. Latency is the temporality of traumatic memories and their erasures. This chapter offers an analysis of the ways in which the violence of an event is fully experienced only in the aftermath of its performance, informing the gap between images and textuality. It weaves material from the photographic and textual archive of T. J. Alldridge and the anthropologist’s experience of a related event a century later to elaborate how the trace of the Real emerges from past erasures.

Forced Marriage and Sexual Enslavement

Forced Marriage, or sexual enslavement, was a second war crime added to the growing archive of international criminal law during the 1990s, with some of the earliest convictions obtained at the Special Court for Sierra Leone. At the SCSL, this crime was associated with the figure of the “bush wife” taken by rebel combatants. The questions of the translatability of forms of women’s consent in customary marriages in peacetime versus wartime settings and of the status of the witness are examined in the context of SCSL transcripts versus in-person interviews with former bush wives.