Bush Wives and Girl Soldiers

Women's Lives through War and Peace in Sierra Leone

Chris Coulter

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780801457241
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

During the war in Sierra Leone (1991–2002), members of various rebel movements kidnapped thousands of girls and women, some of whom came to take an active part in the armed conflict alongside the rebels. In a stunning look at the life of women in wartime, Chris Coulter draws on interviews with more than a hundred women to bring us inside the rebel camps in Sierra Leone.When these girls and women returned to their home villages after the cessation of hostilities, their families and peers viewed them with skepticism and fear, while humanitarian organizations saw them primarily as victims. Neither view was particularly helpful in helping them resume normal lives after the war. Offering lessons for policymakers, practitioners, and activists, Coulter shows how prevailing notions of gender, both in home communities and among NGO workers, led, for instance, to women who had taken part in armed conflict being bypassed in the demilitarization and demobilization processes carried out by the international community in the wake of the war. Many of these women found it extremely difficult to return to their families, and, without institutional support, some were forced to turn to prostitution to eke out a living.Coulter weaves several themes through the work, including the nature of gender roles in war, livelihood options in war and peace, and how war and postwar experiences affect social and kinship relations.

1

A DECADE OF WAR—CENTURIES OF UNCERTAINTY

Although the war started in 1991, for many of my informants the war did not really begin until November 1994, when the northern town of Kabala in Koinadugu District was attacked by the Revolutionary United Front (RUF).1 The war was something that had been going on in the remote southeastern part of Sierra Leone and had something to do with diamonds, of which there were none in Koinadugu District. Few people seemed to know what the war was about and felt that they had nothing to do with it.2 Was it a revolution against the corrupt state, or perhaps a conflict between disgruntled soldiers, a rural crisis due to unresolved tensions between elites and peasants, or maybe a war over natural resources? In fact, the reasons for this decade of war were many and stretch back in history.

Although this book does not attempt to explain the war in Sierra Leone, there is still a need to contextualize the conflict, which displaced more than half of the population, caused tens of thousands of deaths, resulted in many thousands of amputations and abductions, and gave a face to the phenomenon of the child soldier.

The war that Aminata returned from was part of the long and at times violent history of what we today know as Sierra Leone, which began with slavery in the sixteenth century and continued with the many small internal wars ravaging the country throughout the following centuries, to independence and the subsequent regime of the one-party state in the 1970s, up to this war. Since independence in 1961, Sierra Leone’s political history has been marked by coups, two attempts (one successful) to make the country a one-party state, and severe economic mismanagement. Although the transition from colony to independent state was relatively peaceful, the first decade of independence saw much political strife.

Sierra Leone in recent history has been the recipient of much humanitarian aid and interest. In the late 1990s it was the location of the UN’s largest-ever peacekeeping force, with some 17,800 peacekeeping soldiers at its peak. Operating in Sierra Leone outside the UN mandate were also British soldiers (see Williams 2001; Keen 2005).3 At the height of the humanitarian intervention there were some 250 NGOs operating in the country, of which half were international. To really understand the country’s relationships with these actors, in particular the British, I believe it is important to historically contextualize these events.

Sierra Leone is a small country, 73,326 square kilometers, and home to around 6 million people. The country is situated along the West African coast in a region also referred to as Upper Guinea, with the Republic of Guinea to the north, Liberia to the southeast, and the Atlantic Ocean to the south and west (see map 1). The climate is tropical, with hot, humid summers between May and November, and hot, dry winters between December and April. During the rainy season the coastal areas receive up to 495 centimeters of rain a year, making it one of the wettest places along the coast of western Africa. Except for the Freetown Peninsula, with its long sandy beaches, the coast is lined with a belt of mangrove swamps. The upland areas receive less rainfall and are characterized by wooded savannahs, plateaus, and a range of mountains in the east and northeast reaching a peak at Mount Bintumani of 1,948 meters.

There are seventeen ethnic groups in Sierra Leone that can be divided into categories based on language. First there is the Mande, which consists of the Mende, Vai, Kono, Loko, Kuranko, Susu, Yalunka, and Mandingo. Then there is the Mel group, which consists of the Temne, Bullom/Sherbro, Kissi, Gola, and Krim. The remaining ethnic groups do not form a consistent linguistic group. Among them are the Fula, who have a significant presence all over West Africa; they are also known as the Fulani, or in French speaking countries Peul or Pular. The Limba are not related linguistically to any of the other groups and believe that they are the original settlers of the country. Krio is the common name for all those descended from liberated slaves. Lastly, there are a few Kru, who hail from Liberia, where they are more numerous (see, e.g., Alie 1990, chap. 1). Ethnic groups in Sierra Leone do not form bounded cohesive groups, and migration and intermarriage are and have been a prevalent feature of the region. Most of my informants could speak at least two or three local languages as well as Sierra Leone’s lingua franca, Krio, and those who were educated also spoke English.

Sierra Leone is one of the poorest countries in the world and has ranked lowest in the UNDP’s Human Development Index for more than a decade.4 Approximately 60 percent of the population is Muslim, 10 percent profess to what are called indigenous beliefs, and there is a growing number of Christians in the country, roughly 30 percent. Although a majority of the population consider themselves Muslim, there are great variances between Islamic practices here and in other West African countries, especially countries such as Senegal and Nigeria, which seem to have much stronger indigenous Muslim traditions. For example, intermarriage between religions is not uncommon, the most famous example being former president Tejan Kabbah, who is a Muslim and who had married a Catholic woman who kept her religious affiliation after marriage. Sierra Leone can be characterized as a society where religion is very important, although type of faith or denomination is not always important.

A Brief History of Sierra Leone

Centuries of tumultuous events preceded the political chaos that has marked the last decade and a half of violence in Sierra Leone. What emerges is a history marred on the one hand by exploitation of human and natural resources by colonial powers, and on the other by the misdirected good will of missionaries and, later, development aid, the IMF, and the World Bank. Although now famous for its diamonds and minerals, those kinds of resources were not what initially attracted European traders to Sierra Leone from the fifteenth century onward. With one of the few natural harbors along the Upper Guinea Coast, the Freetown Peninsula was a perfect shipping center for the trade of slaves. Ironically, or perhaps because of it, the English abolitionist movement, chose this place for its project to settle liberated African slaves (see, e.g., Braidwood 1994; Kup 1972). Later, these liberated slaves came to be known collectively as Creoles and later as Krios.5 It was hoped by the abolitionists that this settlement, the Province of Freedom, “would serve as a nucleus for the spread of Christianity and European civilisation in Africa” (Alie 1990, 51). The first group to settle in 1787 consisted of roughly four hundred people, mostly freed African men, women, and children, but the group also included white doctors, artisans, a chaplain, and about seventy white London prostitutes (Fyfe 1962, 17).6 Land for the settlement on the Freetown Peninsula was “bought” for a pittance from the Temne chief Naimbana (Caulker 1981, 399). In 1808 the Freetown Peninsula was transformed into the first British Crown Colony in West Africa.7

However, the first Europeans to come to the region were the Portuguese in 1447, and it was also a Portuguese who gave the peninsula its name, Serra Lyoa, the lion mountain. Initially these traders were interested in the supply of fresh water and wood for ships on their way to India, but with the establishment of plantations in the Americas, slaves became the major trading commodity. During the next century the Portuguese trading monopoly was challenged by the British, the French, and the Dutch. Local rulers welcomed these foreign traders but limited the European trade to the coastal areas, and as a result became important middlemen between Europeans and traders from the interior (see e.g. Dorjahn and Fyfe 1962, on the relationship between traders and local rulers). In the late seventeenth century an Islamic jihad from the north dispersed many peoples over vast areas and signaled the advent of Islam in the country. According to recent historical sources, however, the expansion of Islam in Sierra Leone owed more to peaceful traders and missionaries in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries than to the jihad (see e.g. Alie 1990; Ojukutu-Macauley 1997; D. E. Skinner 1976). By the late nineteenth century, a large part of the Sierra Leonean population had become Muslim. The first recorded Christian missionary to visit Sierra Leone arrived in 1605, but it was not until the early nineteenth century, when the Church Missionary Society sent its first missionaries, that the evangelization of Sierra Leone seriously began. Despite the many missionaries, however, the great expansion of Christianity did not take place until the twentieth century.8

Trade has always been important to all the peoples in Sierra Leone, first in ivory, gold, and slaves with northern neighbors and, after the arrival of the Europeans, increasingly along the coast (Fanthorpe 1998, 15).9 Initially, slaves sold to Europeans were a by-product of local warfare but due to an increase in European demand, in the seventeenth century, “the supply of slaves to Europeans became an end in itself” (Shaw 1997, 862), and in its turn gave rise to new wars and new patterns of migration. The introduction of European weapons also changed the manner of warfare (Siddle 1968, 50). The height of the Atlantic slave trade affecting what we now know as Sierra Leone was during a period from around 1680 to the early nineteenth century. Slave trade in the British Empire was abolished in 1807; however, the slave trade in the British West Indies was not abolished until 1834, and Holsoe among others have noted that for the Vai of southeastern Sierra Leone, just outside British jurisdiction, slave trade actually increased sharply after 1807 (Holsoe 1977, 294–95). From having been just one among many objects of trade, slaves now totally dominated even at the expense of agricultural production until it was terminated around 1850. The Atlantic slave trade was not only part of trade relations between peoples in the interior, middlemen along the coast, and Europeans, and was not only grounds for internecine warfare, but also came to fundamentally influence social and political structures among the peoples of Sierra Leone. These new structures altered relations between owners of the land and strangers, and clients and patrons; changed the institutions of marriage and domestic slavery; and created new patterns of migration and social mobility, the effects of which may still be seen today.10

After the abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire in 1807, the colonial administration in Freetown encouraged Africans in the hinterland to trade in new products targeting the European market, such as ivory, palm oil, kola nuts, and timber (Caulker 1981, 401). What the colonial administrators did not anticipate was the amount of labor demanded for the production of these, and instead of diminishing, the internal slave trade increased as chiefs and big men needed cheap labor. In a 1925 account, Migeod estimated that a third of the population, in what was then called the British Protectorate of Sierra Leone, were “slaves” (1925, 10). The domestic slave trade in the British Protectorate was not abolished until 1928 (Grace 1977, 415), when it was decreed that “any person born in the protectorate in or after that year was a free man” (Alie 1990, 151).

The Sierra Leonean hinterland, as opposed to the Crown Colony, did not come under British rule until 1896, and then only as a protectorate. This decision was taken in part as an action against the French, who had begun to claim large parts of land in the north, but also in response to the effects of the holy wars fought by the famous Samori Toure and his Muslim Sofas (Fyfe 1962, 448). The establishment of the protectorate was followed by a new type of local government, the British colonial system of indirect rule. The protectorate was divided into five districts, each under the administration of a British district commissioner. The districts, which cut across ethnic and linguistic barriers, were further divided into chiefdoms under the rule of paramount chiefs who were elected but could be deposed by the British governor. It has been argued that rather than promoting the interests of their subjects, these chiefs became servants of the colonial administration, for which they were given financial incentives (Alie 1990, 150).11 The system of indirect rule enabled the British to concentrate on running the center, the colony, and letting the hinterland, the protectorate, sort itself out.12 Also established during this time was a new system of courts separating the “natives,” people from the protectorate, from the “nonnatives,” who were people from the colony, mostly Krios.

As in most of Africa, women were politically and economically subordinate. In the colony of Sierra Leone in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, however, Krio women seemed to inhabit what was, for the region, a rather unique position (see, e.g., White 1987). Alie, for example, goes so far as to argue that the independence of Krio women “had no parallel either in European or African cultural life” (Alie 1990, 80). They were renowned traders and travelled all over the country, and in fact all over West Africa. They were often economically independent from their husbands, and some even owned so-called factories. But this was a small group of women, and their influence on rural “native” women in the protectorate was moderate. Women were legal minors and rarely held political positions, with the exception of the Mende, where women could become chiefs (see Day 1994; Hoffer 1972), and the Temne, where women could become subchiefs (Ojukutu-Macauley 1997, 92). There were also other positions some women could attain, such as “mamy queen.” The responsibilities of a mamy queen were often to mediate between parties, settle disputes within households, between men and women, and also between women. The female leaders of the so-called secret societies could also be very influential in political life of their communities.

Unlike the population of the hinterland, the Krios were British subjects. During the nineteenth century they had a privileged position in society. Many were well educated and had jobs in the civil service, and others were successful traders. In the late nineteenth century, however, their influence diminished substantially as the colonial administration increasingly employed white civil servants (see, e.g., Spitzer 1968).13 European and Asian (Lebanese and Indian) businessmen also came to occupy important positions in trade and effectively outmaneuvered the hitherto successful Krio and other African traders of the protectorate (A. Zack-Williams 1995, 39–44), something that was also to have serious effects on the independence of the female traders (Kaniki 1973, 98).

The period just after the First World War was characterized by a rise in the cost of living, mostly the result of poor harvests that led to a scarcity and increase in price of the country’s main staple food, rice.14 This eventually led to strikes and riots in the capital in 1919 (for more on this see Abdullah 1994). The riots of 1919 are also sometimes referred to as “the rice riots” or “the Syrian riots.”15 The world depression took a serious toll on the Sierra Leonean economy, which was particularly vulnerable as it had depended on only a few export items and as the prices of these fell dramatically (A. Zack-Williams 1995, 45). In the 1930s, the socioeconomic changes taking place in the country relating in particular to the expansion of mining, agricultural production, and trade, and facilitated by the construction of the railway and road networks, created both opportunities and problems. Although the postdepression years were promising in terms of the increase in mining and the fact that Freetown’s harbor was now a key port for the British imperial fleet, large-scale migration from rural to urban areas meant that the labor force was larger than the number of job opportunities, and this created increased antagonisms (Spitzer and Denzer 1973, 566). As in much of Africa, political activism aimed at mobilizing urban labor, ameliorating working conditions, increasing the pay of Sierra Leonean workers and civil servants, and ending colonial rule, gained momentum during the 1930s and 1940s (see, e.g., Abdullah 1995). There was a lot of resentment in the country because the economic boom had not been translated into higher wages or increased employment opportunities (Spitzer and Denzer 1973, 569).

The schism between the Freetown educated elite, mostly Krios, and the peoples of the protectorate increased during the preindependence years. For example, the British had invested minimally in providing education in the protectorate.16 At the dawn of independence, the Krios, who constituted 2 percent of the population, had a literacy rate of 80 percent, while the rest of the country had a literacy rate of 6 percent (Gberie 2005, 22). Because educational services during the colonial era were concentrated in the capital, and also grossly inadequate, colonialism “left behind a large illiteracy problem and an education system that was not suited to the needs of the people” (Alie 1990, 221). Further, as in most of Africa at this time, the educational facilities that did exist were heavily biased toward the education of boys. Nonetheless some improvements in the status of women occurred during the 1950s. In the protectorate, rights were given to women who paid tax and were literate or owned property, and also in the colony to “men and women over 21 years, who had resided in the colony for over six months, and who could meet some minimal financial requirements” (Alie 1990, 210).

From the 1930s, diamond mining, particularly in the southeast, had an important effect on the country. The earlier trend of trade monopoly among the trading houses continued, and now m...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. A Decade of War—Centuries of Uncertainty
• 2. Gendered Lives in Rural Sierra Leone
• 3. Abduction and Everyday Rebel Life
• 4. From Rape Victims to Female Fighters
• 5. Reconciliation or Revenge
• 6. Surviving the Postwar Economy
• 7. Coming Home—Domesticating the Bush
• Conclusion
• Notes
• References