The Tenacity of Bondage: An Anthropological History of Slavery and Unfree Labor in Sierra Leone ...

402 Pages·2013·8.71 MB·English

The Tenacity of Bondage:
An Anthropological History of Slavery and Unfree Labor in Sierra Leone
by
Ian David Stewart

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
(Anthropology and History)
in the University of Michigan
2013

Doctoral Committee:

Professor Paul C. Johnson, Co-Chair
Associate Professor Kelly M. Askew, Co-Chair
Professor Albert C. Cain
Professor Elisha P. Renne

© Ian David Stewart 2013
Por Mi Amor, my editor, my partner, my
love. Without you this dream would never
have happened.
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Acknowledgements

This project was born as a series of news articles written in the 1990s. Along the way to
becoming a doctoral dissertation it has, by necessity, been transformed and reconfigured; first
into essays and articles and then into chapters. I am grateful for the support and encouragement
from so many people along the way. It was these people who saw the value and import of my
scholarship, not just in the classroom, but in the larger world where human rights—particularly
the rights of children—are increasingly in peril, and labor conditions in many parts of the world
are slowly moving back toward the exploitive arrangements of slave and master.
To thank and acknowledge everyone who played a part in helping me bring this project to
fruition would require a chapter unto itself. However there are numerous key people I would like
to identify and thank for their belief in me and this project.
In Sierra Leone, I am indebted to the hard work, assistance and patience of my journalist
colleague Clarence Roy-Macaulay, and Corinne Dufka, who, as photojournalist-turned human
rights researcher knows better than most the realities of child soldiery in the Mano River Region.
At the Sierra Leone National Archives I am deeply grateful to my Sierra Leone University
research assistants Mohammed Mansaray from Freetown’s Fourah Bay College and Abu
“Bishop” Koroma from Njala College. Also in Freetown, I am very grateful to Eustice and
Delma for their insights on life in the city during the war and after.
To safeguard the identity of my many informants, I cannot name the many former
combatants who spoke with me in Freetown, Makeni, Hastings, Waterloo and Port Loko. There
honesty and forthcoming frankness was of critical importance to this project. To all of them I
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owe a debt of gratitude. I would like to thank Ismael Beah and Leslie Mboka, who continue to
work for the welfare and development of Sierra Leone. Also in Sierra Leone I would like to
thank Edward Jumah-Abu from Children Associated with War (CAW) and Issa Turay at the
Lakka Center as well as the staff members of the Pastoral Center in Makeni and Caritas Makeni
in Freetown. I am very grateful to the many volunteers and staff employees of the UN mission in
Freetown (UNAMSIL), UNICEF, Médecins Sans Frontiers, War Child Canada and War Child
Netherlands who took the time to help me understand the changing situation in Sierra Leone in
the years after the war. Back in the United States and Canada, I am grateful to the Black Loyalist
Heritage Society in Nova Scotia for their generosity of time and knowledge.
Also, graduate education is far from an inexpensive undertaking. I could not have
continued with my work and research without the financial support of the University of
Michigan; in particular I am indebted to the Rackham Graduate School for numerous fellowships
and grants. My travel and research in Africa and Canada was supported by the University of
Michigan’s International Institute, African Studies Center, the Department of Afro-American and
African Studies (DAAS) and by the Doctoral Program in Anthropology and History.
The very foundation of doctoral level education would collapse without the symbiotic
relationship between student and mentor. At Michigan I am very grateful to my dissertation
committee members and advisors Kelly Askew, Paul Johnson, Elisha Renne and Albert Cain. I
am also thankful to David William Cohen, Julie Skurski, Mamadou Diouf and Ken Kollman for
giving me a chance and for their support and guidance along the way. I am also very grateful for
the institutional knowledge and support of Diana Denney, who patiently dealt with my many
crises. Diana never failed to see me through my travails, despite myself. In my adopted home of
New Mexico, I am grateful for the help of Erika Monihan, Steve Bishop and Caleb Wood
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Richardson from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. They all patiently and
insightfully examined my drafts and shared their insights.
And finally, I am eternally grateful to my family. My heartfelt thanks go to Lucia and
Alma, who tolerated the more than occasional late dinner and the torments of an ever-exhausted
and frazzled papa. Foremost, however, I want to thank my devoted and loving wife, Amor, my
parents David and Penny, my inherited second mom, Mary Jane “Nani” Valdez and my sister
Karen. You have all encouraged my pursuit of this degree, my ongoing efforts to reshape a life
interrupted and the possibilities that lie beyond the classroom. Thank you one and all.

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PREFACE

On Sunday January 10, 1999 a child soldier unloaded the clip of his AK-47 into the
backseat of my SUV in downtown Freetown, Sierra Leone. Myles Tierney, a cameraman for the
Associated Press was killed instantly and photographer David Guttenfelder’s face was lacerated
by flying glass. One of the bullets punched through the center of my forehead, lodging in my
brain at the back of my skull. On the street, the boy who had shot at our car and three of his
armed comrades lay dead, killed in a hail of return gunfire and rocket-propelled grenades.
The following study is my own personal attempt to make sense of the tragedy that befell
these Sierra Leonean boys, who were all about 13 or 14 years old. It is a critical inquiry into
what factors transformed Sierra Leone—which at independence held tremendous economic and
political prospects—into a deeply troubled, splintered and war-ravaged state. In the course of
writing this study I have aimed to make sense of Myles’ death and the deaths of four young boys
on a dusty and sweltering Freetown street.
The shooting that took place on that hot, sunny day back in 1999 marked the end of my
career as a foreign correspondent. But as with so many endings, it resulted in new
opportunities—opportunities to examine Sierra Leone’s war and child soldiery from an Anthro-
historian’s perspective. I have been remarkably fortunate to have recovered as thoroughly as I
have since my shooting.
However, as a result of the somewhat unorthodox way in which I came both to graduate
school and more specifically to this dissertation, I felt that it was important to acknowledge and
recognize my background in order to clarify my interest in this topic as well as to explain the
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disjointed nature of my informant/source base in the ethnographic portions of this work. From
mid-1996 through the beginning of 1999 I was a news correspondent working for The
Associated Press in West Africa. One of my primary responsibilities was the coverage of the
civil war in Sierra Leone, which began years before my first assignment in the region.
As a journalist I had numerous opportunities to interview child soldiers and former child
soldiers1 while the war was still being fought. In the following dissertation, I make use of
interview material gleaned during reporting trips to Freetown, Makeni, Kenema, Port Loko and
elsewhere during lulls in the fighting. I salvaged much of this material and reuse it now with full
acknowledgement of the fact that I did not then possess the interpretive or analytical skills
required of contemporary historical anthropology to delve deeper into the issue of child soldiery.
As a war correspondent, my concern in the 1990s was simply to report on the human atrocity of
mass bloodshed and the widespread campaign of mutilations and amputations that was gripping
the country at the time; journalists work under very constrained deadlines and so my concern
was neither centered on concepts of childhood, nor how the forced recruitment practices of the
Revolutionary United Front (RUF) could be analyzed and construed as a form of contemporary
slavery instigated through a quasi-ceremonial initiation.
Today, as an Anthro-historian I have tried to find answers to Sierra Leone’s crisis in the
1990s by looking more closely at the country’s colonial past, and likewise have analyzed the
present use of children as soldier-slaves within the context of Sierra Leone’s historic ties to
abolitionism and the rising British anti-slavery efforts of the nineteenth century.

– I.D.S.

1 The very term former child soldier in and of itself is problematic as it raises the question as to what the former
refers to child or soldier?
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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Dedication .................................................................................................................... ii
Acknowledgements ...................................................................................................... iii
Preface.......................................................................................................................... vi
List of Figures .............................................................................................................. x
List of Appendices ....................................................................................................... xi
Abbreviations/Acronyms ............................................................................................. xii
Abbreviation Guide for Manuscript Sources ............................................................... xiv

Chapter One: Introduction: Sierra Leone and the Tenacity of Bondage ..................... 1
The Past in the Present ........................................................................................ 11
Structure of the Dissertation ............................................................................... 17
Methodology ....................................................................................................... 26

Part I

Chapter Two: A Historical Anthropology of Slavery and Unfree Labor .................... 31
Slavery: Ancient and Atlantic Worlds ................................................................ 39
Slavery of the “Margins”/Slavery of the Whip ................................................... 47
Slavery as Production/Production of Slavery ..................................................... 59
Rights, Freedoms and Slavery ............................................................................ 64

Chapter Three: The Black Loyalists: Revolution and Slavery in Colonial America ... 69
Dunmore’s Proclamation in the time of Revolution and Slavery ....................... 71
The Black Loyalists ............................................................................................ 82
Out of New York ................................................................................................ 87

Chapter Four: The Province of Freedom – Utopia or Abolitionist Weapon? .............. 96
Plan of a Settlement ............................................................................................ 97
Melancholy Accounts ......................................................................................... 111

Chapter Five: 1790s – Freed Slaves and (Un)free Labor ............................................ 115
Back to Africa – Land of Promise or Peril? ........................................................ 122
African or Other? ................................................................................................ 133
A Specimen Less Favorable................................................................................ 140

PART II

Chapter Six: A Mighty Experiment: (Un)Free Labor after Slavery? .......................... 156
Laboratory for Unfree ‘Free’ Labor .................................................................... 167
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